More Evidence of Widespread Vitamin A Insufficiency

Why, I do declare, that bison is sticking his tongue out at me! Bison roaming the range, as it should be.

More reasons to eat those grass fed organ meats, pastured eggs, and butter. Vitamin a does not come from a vegetable, beta carotene does. Your body actually has to convert the beta carotene to vitamin a, a process that wanes as we age and, apparently, is genetically absent in almost half of women (I would wager it the same in men and children).

NEWCASTLE, England, Nov. 23 (UPI) -- Half of British women lack vitamin A due to a genetic variation, scientists found.

Researchers at Newcastle University in England, led by Dr. Georg Lietz, found 47 percent of volunteer group of 62 women carried a genetic variation that prevented their bodies from effectively converting beta-carotene into vitamin A.

The findings suggest beta carotene may not be an effective substitute for vitamin A for women whose bodies are not able to make the conversion, Lietz said. Beta carotene has been suggested for pregnant women since a 1987 study linked too much vitamin A with certain birth defects.

"Worryingly, younger women are at particular risk," Lietz said in a statement. "The older generations tend to eat more eggs, milk and liver which are naturally rich in vitamin A, whereas the health-conscious youngsters on low-fat diets are relying heavily on the beta-carotene form of the nutrient."

The study findings were published in the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology Journal and were presented at the Hohenheim Nutrition Conference in Stuttgart, Germany.

Deep, yellow fat on pasture raised animals indicative of high vitamin a content and overall health resulting from the animal eating what it's supposed to eat: grass and living where it's supposed to live: outside in the sunshine.

Further reading on Vitamin A. Why you need it. Where to get it.

• Vitamin A Saga
• Some good information on the many roles vitamin a plays in our bodies.
• The Pioneering Reasearch of Dr. Weston A. Price: The Whole, Natural Food Diet
• Looking for sources of the good stuff? There's a lot of vitamin a in pastured beef liver. A lot.

Bone Broth for President

The one thing I just couldn't do without in my kitchen arsenal is bone broth. I've written about it before, but as I was making some the other day, I just couldn't help myself from marveling over the jars lined up on my counter.

Bone broth has everything going for it, it's the Prom Queen of the culinary world! It's cheap. It's delicious. It's full of minerals and vitamins. It's healing. It's health promoting. It's the base of amazing soups and sauces. It stands alone as a beautiful soup. Bone broth is make-me-feel-better-mommy-magic.

A thick, gelatinous beef bone broth. The gelatin is incredibly soothing and healing, especially for the gut.

Minerals are so sadly lacking in our diets due to the erosion of soil quality which means that the food we eat just simply isn't as nutritious as it once was. Bone broth brings those much needed minerals back into our diets. I make a bunch at once and freeze it in glass jars with a little headroom so they don't explode in the freezer. I use the broth to make soups and stews and emergency healing elixirs for sore tummies or runny noses.

Further reading:

• Traditional Bone Broth in Modern Health and Disease by Allison Siebecker, published in the Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients
• Broth is Beautiful by Sally Fallon

War in the Country

CBC's, The Current, did a fantastic expose on the decline of the family farm and Agriculture Canada's support for the growth of factory farming. Whether you have an interest in farming or not is irrelevant. If you eat, you need to hear this. Our ability to feed ourselves is developing into one of the most impending crisis of our century. You can listen to the entire broadcast online or you can download it here.

From CBC:

War in the Country - Part One

There's a war in the country, according to Thomas Pawlick. He's an author and journalist who says the family farm is under siege from corporate agriculture, government policy and indifferent urbanites. At stake is the quality of our food and the foundation of life in rural Canada. We went to visit Thomas Pawlick at his farm in Eastern Ontario to talk about his new book, The War In The Country and dropped in on a couple of farms that represent a new face and new hope for family farming.

War in the Country - Part Two

We continued our conversation with Thomas Pawlick, author of the War in the Country ... a book about the decline of family farms and rural Canada. We spoke with him on his farm in Marlbank, Ontario.

War in the Country - Pellerin

Well, Laurent Pellerin has been listening to our discussion of the family farm and rural Canada. He's a hog farmer near Trois Rivieres, Quebec. He's also the president of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture and in that capacity, he represents the interests of factory farms and small family farmers alike. He joined us from Ottawa.

Sunday Morning Breakfast

What I ate:

• Pastured, organic egg
• Pastured, organic bacon
• Organic apple clafoutis
• Homemade, raw goat milk yoghurt

Why it's good:

• Pastured eggs are the only type of egg shown to contain a superior nutrition profile to other eggs (even those organic, 'free-range' ones they charge a premium for in the grocery store). They're high in vitamin A and D, and omega 3 fatty acids - crucial for our health and sadly lacking in our diets. The eggs were cooked in pastured bison fat. Saturated fat is the only fat stable enough to use for cooking. And, of course, saturated fat from healthy animals is integral to our health.

• Pastured bacon brings you all the joy of bacon without the guilt of supporting industrial agribusiness confinement operations. Again, fat with vitamin A, and the overall heightened nutritional profile, from animals that have been raised on grass, in the sunshine.

• The apple clafoutis was a take on a recipe I found on Elana's Pantry. We don't eat grains so this is a nice tart, similar to a pancake without the flour to knock us into a sleepy coma. It's made with eggs, raw goat milk, vanilla, and maple syrup that we purchased from our friend who produces the most wondrous, local, maple syrup. If you try out Elana's recipe, skip the agave in favour of raw honey or maple syrup.
• The goat yoghurt is a tasty way to get some much needed probiotics into our guts. We aim to get some good bacteria in every meal, usually through kefir, different types of yoghurt, or fermented vegetables.
• Most of all, our meal was good, as in 'goooooood', because it tasted delicious and I shared it with my lovely family on a slow, rainy Saturday morning. It was one of those mornings with no agenda - nothing to do, but sit and chat, sipping warm tea while the rain pitter-pattered on our roof.

H1N1 on Ontario Turkey Confinement Operation

The Turkey Farmers of Ontario are being mum on the recent outbreak of the H1N1 virus on an Ontario turkey farm. Well, we can rest assured that the outbreak wasn't on an organic farm, for if it had been, the TFO media machine would have been using it as fodder for their ongoing mission of ensuring no bird under their watch is raised outdoors.

Well, we know where the 'outbreak' did indeed occur. It happened in one of the turkey confinement barns housing 3,500 turkeys. This particular facility is owned by "Hybrid", a breeding company in Kitchener, Ontario.

Hybrid turkey breeding operation in Kitchener Ontario. See any turkeys?

These confinement operations are under very strict controls in order to give the immune-compromised birds an actual shot at living long enough to make it to slaughter. These are birds living indoors, under "high biosecurity conditions", including a "shower in/shower out" policy. They're pumped full of growth stimulants and antibiotics without real consideration for the affect it has on their, or our, health. Never mind the issue of genetic engineering. Hendrix Genetics, Hybrid's parent company, focuses on production and engineering of poultry and swine breeds by mutating DNA sequences.

Where is the common sense in all of this? Does anybody stop to think that a bird, by its very design, is intended to live outdoors? Our industrial models of food production have skewed our most basic understanding of growing and raising our own nourishment. Food is sacred, it is not a commodity.

Little hen perched in a tree.

It's acceptable to rear animals in an unnatural environment, feed them an unnatural diet, and keep them alive *just* long enough to make a little money, but, according to the Turkey Farmers of Ontario, it is NOT o.k. to let them outdoors. None of these confinement operation birds could live a few days outside without keeling over from some sort of little virus or bacteria. That should tell us all something. When I eat turkey, or any meat for that matter, it's from animals with strong, healthy genetics. Birds should thrive outdoors, soak up the sun, and eat all sorts of little buggy things. Let the TFO have their sick birds, but we deserve to have the choice to support a healthier model of farming.

H1N1 in breeder turkeys, urges farmer workers to get flu shot

By Helen Branswell Medical Reporter (CP)

TORONTO — A turkey breeding operation in southern Ontario has been hit by the H1N1 virus, the province's chief human and animal health officials reported Tuesday. It is only the second time turkeys have been reported to have been infected with the pandemic virus.

The outbreak likely poses no immediate threat to human health, and in particular should not have an impact on the safety of the food chain, the officials said, noting influenza cannot be contracted from well-cooked meat.

But experts do worry about the possibility that mutations could occur if flu viruses jump from one species to another and back again. And some also expressed concern that news of the discovery could turn some consumers off turkey, even though in terms of flu transmission people probably pose a bigger risk to livestock right now than the other way around.

"From my perspective as a veterinarian, I see the danger being to the economic well-being of the animal industry that's involved, and in food security - having food," said Dr. David Halvorson, an avian influenza expert at the University of Minnesota.
The finding was announced by Dr. Arlene King, Ontario's chief medical officer of health, and Dr. Deb Stark, the province's chief veterinarian, both of whom refused to identify the affected turkey operation.

But their efforts to shield the company turned out to be futile. An industry group, the Turkey Farmers of Canada, posted a news release on their website announcing the outbreak had been discovered on a farm near Kitchener owned by Hybrid Turkeys.
Later, the company confirmed the report. Dr. Helen Wojcinski, a veterinarian and Hybrid's manager of science and technology, said turkeys in one barn on one farm experienced a drop in egg production - the telltale symptom of influenza infection in turkeys.

The barn, which contained 3,500 turkeys, is under quarantine. Wojcinski said it is expected the outbreak should run its course in about two weeks, at which point a decision will be made about what to do with the turkeys.
The birds are not free-range, meaning they live indoors under high biosecurity conditions. Wojcinski said the most likely source of the infection was a person with access to the barn.

King said local health officials are interviewing 19 people who had contact with the operation, trying to determine who might have brought the infection in to the birds - and if anyone contracted it from them. So far one person has been identified as having had influenza-like illness, she said, though it's not yet known if the person actually had the pandemic virus. Nor is it clear whether the person's illness predated the outbreak among the turkeys or followed it.

King said the incident serves as a "clarion call" to poultry and other livestock workers that they should get vaccinated with both seasonal and pandemic flu shots in order to lower the risk of flu transmission to the animals with which they have contact.
"We want to limit the amount of circulation (of H1N1) in the human population for obvious reasons and we want to try to avoid or minimize the possibility of transmission between people and animals and back again," King said.

The finding was confirmed by the National Centre for Foreign Animal Diseases in Winnipeg, which compared amino acid sequences from three of the virus's genes to those of the pandemic virus, said Dr. Jim Clark, national manager of disease control for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency's terrestrial animal health division.

Clark said the lab is currently trying to grow virus from samples taken from the turkeys to do a full comparison, but CFIA feels confident the virus that caused the outbreak is the pandemic H1N1.

The finding will be of keen interest internationally. While swine producers in a number of countries have reported finding the new H1N1 virus in pigs, the only other report of infected turkeys came from Chile, in August. Some experts have privately questioned whether that finding was real or the result of contamination of specimens.
Announcement of the outbreak comes just days after the publication of a study that suggested turkeys are not susceptible to the pandemic virus. The work, done by researchers in Italy, was published late last week in the online journal Eurosurveillance.

Well-known influenza researcher Dr. Ilaria Capua and colleagues at the OIE collaborating centre for infectious diseases at the human-animal interface in Venice tried to infect turkeys with the new H1N1 virus. The OIE is the acronym used by the Paris-based World Organization for Animal Health.
Turkeys are generally very susceptible to influenza viruses and one would expect to see illness among birds if they became infected with a flu virus, Capua said in an interview Tuesday.

But while her team exposed turkeys to massive doses of H1N1 virus, they saw no evidence of infection in the birds. Nor did they find any evidence of virus in the lungs, blood or tissues of the turkeys. Capua said teams of researchers in Britain, Germany and the U.S. have also tried to experimentally infect turkeys, also without success.
She said a lot of questions need to be answered about the new discovery in Ontario, including whether the full genetic sequence of the virus matches the pandemic virus.
"Before we say that this virus can spill into turkeys or into birds, I would really make sure that it's the right virus. And that there's no possible concern about any human error or contamination and that all the internal genes have been sequenced," said Capua.

But unpublished work from Canada suggests turkeys can catch this virus. Clark said scientists at the National Centre for Foreign Animal Diseases were able to infect turkeys with the pandemic virus.

"Since we know that the genetic makeup of the virus does have some avian components to it, it's not surprising to us that we have a poultry flock - a turkey flock - that is infected," he noted.

Halvorson, who said Minnesota has seen swine influenza outbreaks in turkey operations frequently over the last 20 years, said the new pandemic virus is posing real challenges for livestock producers.
While the female turkeys used for breeding purposes have shown themselves to be "exquisitely" sensitive to influenza viruses of both swine and avian origin, there's never before been evidence of the birds being infected with human flu viruses.

"We've never, ever found that or suspected it of happening. So this is kind of new, you know," he said. "For both the turkey industry and the swine industry, it's quite new. How do you protect your animals from a human infection?"