Day 82 – Lion Burgers? Wow. But The Cheese Is Good For You…

“Gooooooooooaaaaaaaaaal!”

~ Football announcers worldwide. And a few animal rights activists too.

188.4 lbs

As my weight drops, the readership numbers (modestly) rise, and the days of starvation left tick down, it’s easy for me to forget there are other things going on in the world. Unlike me, most of you aren’t sitting around with hunger pains so you’re aware there’s the the World Cup football competition going on in South Africa as I write this.

No wait – this does dovetail with nutrition, I promise.

You can haz cheeseburger. Made wif cow, pleez.

Arizona, in the news lately for their new immigration laws, has another controversy. One of its restaurants decided to offer lion burgers in honour of the World Cup. If you happen to pass through Mesa, the Il Vinaio restaurant downtown will gladly grill you up Mufasa meat with spicy homemade chips and a roast corn on the cob for the bargain price of $21.

That collective gasp you’re hearing is not cholesterol induced heart pains – it’s animal rights activists going apoplectic. The restaurant received bomb threats from animal rights activists after announcing the new addition to the menu.

“We thought that since the World Cup was in Africa …that the lion burger might be interesting for some of our more adventurous customers,” reasoned Cameron Selogie, Il Vinaio owner and friend of endangered species.

No, that last bit wasn’t sarcasm. The lion meat that Cameron is using for his burger promotion was raised at a free-range farm in Illinois, regulated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Does that soothe the animal rights bombers? “Most of them, when we tell them the facts, that this is farm raised and it doesn’t hurt the endangered animals, seem pretty reasonable,” Cameron said.

I also stumbled across a slightly more mundane but, for some, equally controversial news item about fat from dairy.

If you’ve read other posts of mine you’ll know that I completely disagree that “fat” is the wholesale dietary enemy it’s been portrayed as in the food pyramid. There are good fats, like omega 3 fatty acids, and bad fats, like saturated and trans fats – just as there are good carbs and bad carbs. New research from Sweden states that fat from dairy falls in the “good fats” category as well, doing good things for your heart like lowering blood pressure or reducing cholesterol levels.

Eva Warensjo, a Doctor at Uppsala University, and her team published their findings in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. They studied 444 heart attack patients and 556 healthy ‘control’ patients, measuring blood levels of two biomarkers of milk fat – pentadecanoic acid and heptadecanoic acid – which indicate how much dairy fat a person has been eating. People with the highest levels, suggesting they ate or drank the most dairy fat, were actually at a lower risk of heart attack; 26% lower for women, 9% lower for men.

A normal-weight 60-year-old man with no risk factors for heart disease (like smoking, diabetes, or eating pure blocks of lard on weekdays) has a 6% risk of dying over the next 10 years. Therefore, Eva’s study suggests, if this guy ate lots of dairy food he’d reduce his risk by about half a percent overall. The benefit would be more noticible for a woman or someone at higher risk of a heart attack.

Dairy already contains some good stuff we know about, like vitamin D, potassium, been shown to increase people’s levels of “good” HDL cholesterol. Of course it has calcium too, although calcium is often mentioned as something that “builds strong bones” when other things are needed for it to work like that.

“The exact mechanism behind these associations cannot be deduced from the present study, but the range of bioactive components present in the food matrix of milk products as well as associated lifestyle factors may all have contributed to the observed associations,” Eva and her colleagues concluded.

This isn’t a license to live off of cheese. And I should also point out the study was partly funded by the National Dairy Council/Dairy Management Inc., which is a trade group for the US dairy industry and that Eva has been a paid speaker for the Swedish Dairy Association and the International Dairy Federation. That’s not evidence of bias, but worth keeping in mind.

I like milk. I don’t drink it as often now as I did when I was a kid, but my grandmother made sure I drank a lot of it back then and the only broken bones I’ve suffered have been from extremely stupid things I’ve done. I still eat and drink a lot of dairy products, and will continue to. How about you?