Real Food (14 page)

We have seen that saturated fats fight infections. All poultry fats, particularly chicken fat, also contain palmitoleic acid,
an antimicrobial monounsaturated fat. That's why chicken soup— not skinless chicken breasts— is known as the Jewish penicillin:
those pale yellow droplets in chicken broth boost your immunity.

So the next time someone eating a poached skinless chicken breast tells you that your choice of beef, bacon, or roast chicken
with the skin will send you to an early grave, this is your reply. First, explain that beef contains stearic acid, which lowers
LDL, and that pork and poultry fat are mostly monounsaturated, just like olive oil. Second, say that
natural
saturated fats— as opposed to
industrial
saturated fats, or trans fats— are good for you anyway. In the heat of a dinner party debate, you will probably remember only
one good thing about saturated fats. Make it this one: they are powerful immune boosters. Once upon a time, I used only olive
oil. When I added butter and other saturated fats to my diet, I stopped getting sick. And yes, the chefs and food critics
are right: my cooking was much tastier, too.

I Try the Winston Churchill Diet

Hannah Bantry,

In the pantry,

Gnawing at a mutton bone;

How she gnawed it,

How she clawed it,

When she found herself alone.

— Mother Goose

A MAN OF APPETITES, with the constitution of an ox, Winston Churchill lived to ninety smoking cigars, drinking champagne,
and relishing bone marrow. The English have long considered unctuous bone marrow on toast a delicacy as well as a tonic for
the malnourished. In London today, the signature dish at St. John— the celebrated restaurant near Smithfield, the wholesale
meat market that clatters with butcher hooks in the small hours— is Roast Bone Marrow and Parsley Salad. Chef Fergus Henderson,
dedicated to elemental, frugal, and traditional English food, made "nose to tail" eating fashionable.

Marrow may be the oldest and simplest dish ever. Stone Age hunters devoured it even before they went for the raw meat. In
Latvia, successful hunters still celebrate by eating the raw bone marrow on bread with salt, pepper, and onion before they
divvy up the kill. Organ meats— also called offal or variety meats— have a similar poor-relation reputation, coming in second
to more glamorous cuts of pure muscle, such as a T-bone. Yet this distinction between classy steak and down-market liver and
bones— not to mention beyond-the-pale parts, like brain and thymus glands— is recent. Dishes built on bones and variety meats
fill old American and European cookbooks, and our taste for these foods goes back long before that.

"Since prehistoric times, man and other primates have killed for the valuable fats present in brain, tongue, and marrow,"
writes the food historian Nichola Fletcher.
²¹
"Red meat, although prized, was once secondary." Native Americans sometimes returned from buffalo hunts with nothing but
tongue. Loren Cordain, the expert on Stone Age nutrition, writes, "There is absolutely no doubt that hunter-gatherers favored
the fattiest part of the animals they hunted and killed."

One reason our ancestors preferred organ meats and bone marrow is the sheer desire for fat. Fat is tasty for a host of reasons:
because fat kept us alive during long winters, because without fat a woman cannot get pregnant, because fats are essential
for digestion. But the particular fats in the oddball cuts are perhaps even more important. They are not, as many people believe,
mostly saturated. "Brain is extremely high in polyunsaturated fats including . . . omega-3 fatty acids," writes Cordain. "The
dominant fats in tongue and marrow are the cholesterol-lowering monounsaturated fats."

Eating bone marrow had a profound effect: it separated us from our ape cousins and helped make us uniquely human. The human
brain grew very large relatively quickly on a diet of long-chain polyunsaturated fats found in bone marrow (and fish, as I
describe in chapter 4). Polyunsaturated fats, so vital to brain and visual development, are considered the main factor in
our astonishing leap ahead, brain-wise, over other primates. They were still eating mostly fruit, leaves, and insects, while
early humans went for fat.

It's too bad that bone marrow is underappreciated. I like to roast beef or lamb shanks and scatter the hot meat on a watercress
salad before tossing the bones in the stock pot. Tearing thin shreds of meat off the bone like Hannah Bantry is the fun part;
it feels so primitive. Perhaps you don't fancy the role of the clawing, gnawing Hannah— who, let's admit, is cast as slightly
uncivilized. Another way to get at the nutrients in marrow is by making broth from bones. A staple of most cuisines, stock
adds flavor to starches, richness to soups, and depth to sauces. Fresh stock, which lasts several days in the fridge and freezes
well, is also convenient; a bowl of hot consomme with bread makes a quick meal. "Stock is everything in cooking," said Escoffier.
"Without it, nothing can be done."

It's also affordable. If you would like to eat well on not very much money, buy soup bones. Broth made from the lesser cuts—
necks, knuckles, wings, feet— is rich in minerals including calcium, magnesium, and phosphorus, all in a form that's easily
absorbed. Joints are particularly rich in gelatin, called a "protein sparer" because it helps the body use the smaller amounts
of incomplete and low-quality protein found in plants. That's why stock is a staple of protein-poor cuisines. Wartime ads
for Bovril bouillon cubes in Britain featured a cow made of vegetables because a bit of Bovril ( essentially, reduced beef
stock) could stretch even vegetables into the nutritional near-equivalent of meat. Stock is also famously good for convalescents.
A South American proverb says, "Good broth will resurrect the dead."

I Am Skeptical That Red Meat Causes Cancer

CANCER is ON THE RISE, and, like heart disease, it has many causes. Damage to DNA increases with age, for example, so our
long lives may be one reason for higher cancer rates. Is our diet killing us? My guess probably won't surprise you: I doubt
that foods we've eaten for millions of years cause cancer. Indeed, cancer is rare in groups where wild meat is eaten liberally.
I tend to suspect industrial foods and chemicals.

The suggestion that animal foods cause cancer took root in 1965, when Dr. Ernst Wynder of the American Health Foundation said
that animal fat and colon cancer were linked in the United States and elsewhere. "Unfortunately," said the lipids expert Mary
Enig, the consumption data Wynder cited for the United States were "mostly processed vegetable fat," not animal fat.
^22.
If Enig is right, Wynder's conclusions were unfounded. Enig says that other data undermining the link between animal fat
and cancer were neglected or ignored over the years. In 1973, for example, National Institutes of Health researchers looked
at diet and cancer in Japanese Hawaiians. "They actually found that the highest risk relationship came from macaroni, green
peas, green beans, and soy," writes Enig. Yet the authors concluded colon cancer was linked to beef.

Because cancer is on the rise and red meat is a regular part of diets in most of the industrial world, many researchers have
examined a possible link between eating red meat and cancer. Lately, it looks rather weak. In the 1990s, three studies with
rats found no relationship between red meat and cancer, but two called for more study on fat itself, as opposed to lean meat.
The first study concluded that lean beef did not cause colon cancer.
²³
In the second, researchers who fed cancerous rats lard, olive oil, beef, chicken with the skin, or bacon found that beef
did not promote tumors.
²⁴
A third group reported that their data "do not support the belief that red meat consumption increases the risk for colon
carcinogenesis."
²⁵
They, too, fed rats with cancer various fats (corn oil versus beef fat) and various proteins (lean beef versus milk protein).
Rats who ate beef had significantly fewer colon tumors.

Recent human studies don't seem to support the link either. In the 1998
Australian Journal of Nutrition and Dietetics,
researchers reviewed many published studies, asking "Does Red Meat Cause Cancer?" They concluded that "any true effect of
meat is likely to be small, or even an artifact of a decreased consumption of fruit, vegetables, and cereals among high meat
consumers."
²⁶
Other researchers reviewed five studies including eighty-three hundred deaths among seventy-six thousand people. The subjects
included a large number of vegetarians. There were no differences between the vegetarians and omnivores in death rates from
stomach, colon, lung, breast, or prostate cancer.
²⁷
In 2003, a team led by Dr. Walter Willett, the prestigious epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health, followed
more than eighty-eight thousand women for eighteen years and found no evidence that eating meat was associated with breast
cancer.
²⁸

Other studies, however,
have
shown a link between meat and cancer. Some researchers suspect that cured meat, not meat itself, is responsible. One of the
world's largest studies on diet and health is the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC). For
cancers of the colon, rectum, stomach, and upper digestive tract, EPIC found fish was beneficial, red meat harmless, and preserved
meat harmful.
²⁹
Two studies in Argentina, where people eat a lot of red meat, linked cured meat and colon cancer. Others reported that preserved
meats (cold cuts) were linked to cancer, while lean meat was beneficial.
³⁰
Yet another study found that total meat intake was unrelated to colon cancer and large amounts of cold cuts increased the
risk.
³¹

If cured meat is to blame, the actual culprit may be nitrite, which improves the flavor of cured meat, preserves its pink
color, and prevents bacterial growth. Nitrite in various forms has been used to preserve meat since the Middle Ages. Scientists
say that nitrites are harmless at the levels we eat them, but at high temperatures nitrites are converted to nitrosamines,
which may cause cancer. Nitrosamines are "powerful DNA-damaging chemicals," writes Harold McGee in
On Food and Cooking.
"Yet at present there's no clear evidence that the nitrites in cured meats increase the risk of developing cancer." The use
of nitrite has fallen drastically since the 1970s, and fairly small amounts are used now.

McGee is a scientific man, an accomplished cook— and a moderate on meat. "To the extent that meat displaces . . . vegetables
and fruits that help fight heart disease and cancer, it increases our vulnerability to both," he says. In addition to nitrosamines,
two other carcinogens are formed when meat is cooked at high temperatures.
^32
.
McGee suggests that we eat vegetables liberally and and cook meat gently.

To that good advice, I would add: never burn the fat (if it's smoking, it's burning) and cook meat rare. Even better— if you
have a taste for it— make steak tartare and eat it raw. After all, our ancestors ate everything, even fish and red meat, uncooked
for about three million years before they first used fire, only 250,000 to 350,000 years ago. For raw meat dishes, Sally Fallon
recommends using frozen beef as a precaution against parasites. For steak tartare, I only use grass-fed beef from a farm I
trust. I also buy nitrite-free bacon and salami.

If not meat, what dietary factors might account for the rise in cancer? For me, the simplest approach is to ask what's
new
in the diet, and fats are key. Industrial food contain too many omega-6 fats and too few omega-3 fats, an imbalance that promotes
cancer, according to omega-3 experts, including Dr. Andrew Stoll and Dr. Artemis Simopoulos.
³³
Wild game, grass-fed meat, and grass-fed butter— until recently, the only kind— contain omega-3 fats and CLA, the powerful
anticancer fat.

Another major factor in cancer is lack of antioxidants, including vitamins C and E and the hundreds of compounds in fruits
and vegetables. The interactions of foods are mightily complex. Here's a curious one, again from McGee: fruit, vegetables,
and acidophilus bacteria in yogurt appear to diminish the effect of the carcinogenic compounds formed when meat is burned.
Anyone— vegetarian or omnivore— who eats a lot of fruits and vegetables is doing the right thing.

One other hypothesis about cancer and fat deserves more study— especially because some research exonerates
lean
meat. Modern life is rife with carcinogens, from plastics to pesticides. Stone Age humans certainly had their worries, but
persistent environmental toxins weren't among them. Some believe that cancer comes not from animal fat itself but from the
"bioaccumulation" of carcinogens in the fat. As toxins travel up the food chain, they become more concentrated, and they lodge
in fat. A feedlot steer contains a great deal of grain, most of it grown with chemicals, which means you ingest more chemicals
from a steak than from a slice of bread. Any toxins in the beef fat, in turn, accumulate in
your
fat, which might explain the rise in fat-related cancers. As ever, the sensible thing is to avoid foods laden with chemicals.

Buying and Cooking Real Meat

ONCE YOU GET THE hang of it, buying and cooking grass-fed and pastured meat and poultry is easy. Here are the essential facts
about the labels
grass-fed, pastured,
and
organic,
and some kitchen tips.

Grass-fed
applies to ruminants: cattle, sheep, goats, and game. It means animals were raised on grass and hay, but how much varies widely;
the term is not legally defined. Ideally, fresh pasture makes up the bulk of the diet, and when there's no grass, animals
eat hay. Some farmers add a dollop of sorghum silage, which many would regard as a grass-based diet, or corn silage. However,
silage is fermented— sort of like sauerkraut for cows— and fermented foods, like grain, give cattle an acid stomach. Purists
never feed silage, grain, corn, or soybeans to ruminants.