Walkabout Wednesday: lies and statistics, tuition is necessary (right?), and some people need to eat more meat.

I didn't spend alot of time on the internet this week; I spent most of my time putting my promotion file together.

My Health

Remember lies, damned lies, and statistics? Christopher Clark has a nice post comparing different sorts of food sources of B vitamins that gives a nice example. Apparently a common attack on a Paleo way of eating is that it eliminates important sources of B group vitamins. Chris' chart shows that grains and legumes are the richest sources of B vitamins, as long as you compare 100 g of uncooked grain with 100 g of meat. However, once you cook it, the grains and legumes drop way down on a weight basis, below meat and particularly organ meat. Next time I cook lentils I'm going to weigh them.*

Your Education

Tuition. It's going up, and that's a necessary evil. Right? I mean, why else would it go up? How about studying in english for free in one of 7 foreign countries? 

Our Environment

Could the Ebola outbreak in West Africa be caused by deforestation?

Once blanketed with forests, West Africa has been skinned alive over the last decade. Guinea’s rainforests have been reduced by 80%, while Liberia has sold logging rights to over half its forests. Within the next few years Sierra Leone is on track to be completely deforested.

The argument goes, remove the habitat, push the fruit bats that are the reservoir for Ebola into contact with humans. Maybe, but I'd have thought that removing the habitat would reduce the populations of fruit bats. I suppose if they can use human-modified environments their populations might not decrease with habitat loss.

One big difference between an affluent and a poor country is the amount of meat eaten. I often see arguments that feeding the worlds population means eating less meat (see step 4 here, or here, for example). But Robert Paarlberg argues the poorest countries actually need to eat more meat to be healthy. This is something I've wondered about alot as I wrestle with what to eat, and why. On the other hand, Eric Gimenez is pretty blunt that the assumption of insufficient food is simply wrong: "Hunger is not the result of scarcity. ... The cause of hunger is poverty."

*I did. It isn't hard to eat 300 g of cooked lentils, it is about a cup and a half. That'll make you very full, for a long time.