# data[].attributes.headline
Critical Readers in the Misinformation Age - Tyson Seburn

# data[].attributes.subject
Critical Readers in the Misinformation Age - Tyson Seburn

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Critical Readers in the Misinformation Age

Did you know that Chicago was the most dangerous city in the US in 2014? I didn't. I would have thought it was some bigger city but according to this set of FBI statistics of total murders, I was wrong. But actually, was I? It's very easy to look at this graph at face value without digging much further into the narrative it presents. As readers, we absorb this information, particularly when it comes from a perceived authority but do we question it appropriately? I hope so, but I'm not sure that's always the case, especially when it comes to our learners who are being inundated with new information in a new environment in a language other than their L1. If you and they are critical readers, however, you may have questioned the population of these cities and therefore the related ratio, which would provide a more contextualised definition of 'most dangerous'.

Let's take a closer look at the same information presented in this chart, but with more context.

On the right (and "right") are similar murder stats but put into the context of population. A different picture then emerges: Detroit, based on the ratio of murders to population, comes out as the most dangerous city. One would argue this is more true, though no more accurate in terms of numbers than the "wrong" chart.

This example of critical reading is fairly benign. Yes, you might change your travel plans or second-guess long-term life plans if moving to Detroit or New Orleans was a thing for you, but really, for most of us, it's more or less an interesting exercise and we'll move on quickly to something else. Imagine, however, that what I presented to you was something a bit more sinister to our learners: news that demonizes them or their cultures with manipulated narratives or completely unfounded 'facts' on the left. Would they know better than to take it at face value? I hope so, but as someone new to a country or interacting with everyone in L2 or L3 or L4 for the first authentic time, learners may not do so immediately (I mean, does the rest of our society even?).

Earlier in May, I had the pleasure to be invited to Guelph as the plenary speaker at a local ELT conference. For close to an hour, I talked about this need for critical reading skills practice, situating it mainly in the recent flurry of fake news and alternative facts in this post-truth era.
I had four critical questions to address regarding the impact of fake news and the need for critical reading skills:

1. Is this phenomenon (of fake news, etc) a new thing?

2. Why are we susceptible to it?

3. How does it impact learner perceptions and perceptions of them?

4. How can we foster critical reading strategies among our learners? And is it our responsibility as language teachers to do something about it?

Let's try a couple more little exercises. Look at this image from Snow White. Look familiar?

OK, now really look at it. Did you notice anything about it that seems off in some way?
Part of me just wants to leave you hanging. But as an educator, I feel compelled to guide you... Who's that guy? I don't remember a fully grown man sleeping in the dwarves' house. Do you?

At first glance, because of what Shermer (2002, 2017) refers to as 'cognitive simplicity', we often overlook small inaccuracies or do not even notice them because it's easier to believe the information we are presented with. More specifically, when untruth appears to be plausible, even in the face of what we know, our brains often disregard it as it's not threatening. Because this guy doesn't really look out of place, it's easy for us not to care that he's there. One place where this pops up in texts quite commonly: Facebook memes. Take a look at Russ Mayne's post here about lightning rods, edumemes, deepities, etc. Down to even a micro language level, one could argue the same phenomenon occurs when our learners write grammatically incorrect or lexically mismatch phrases despite knowing their wrong: it's just too unimportant to care. But is it? Does inaccurate info never lead to negative impact? PS - did you overlook any error within this paragraph because it's not that important? 😉

While photoshopped imagery seems pretty innocuous, hardcore beliefs about cultures, education, or even language learning itself, can be wrong. Yet despite sometimes overwhelming evidence to the contrary, some individuals in our society refuse to budge. Have you ever wondered how they can continue to maintain a belief even when almost everyone seems to believe the opposite? Check out any grammatical syllabus, or consider any ELT job ads with the words 'native English teachers' included sometime, as examples. There's a certain threat perceived here and the response, one where people push back illogically, is what Nyhan & Reifler (2010) call the 'backfire effect'. The Onion does a great job of illustrating this.

Let's try one more little exercise. Who knows what Dihydrogen Monoxide (DHMO) is? I hadn't, but I do now. Let's do a little learning. This information comes from DHMO.org:

Sounds like a chemical you don't want to come into contact with, right? Well...consider all of the bullet points. What do each have in common? What element that you know of may be in each?
Water. Now test that theory on each bullet point. This is just a quick example of how text, when presented by what appears to be an authority, can shape a narrative that leads an uncritical reader to a completely incorrect conclusion. Imagine a learner reads a text from a negative perspective about their classmate's culture in the newspaper or that they know their neighbours have read some about their culture (imagine them everywhere). Do we need to help them build the linguistic and literacy skills to navigate either situation? Yes.

I believe it is our responsibility, as often one of the first if not the first points of contact for our learners in English, to help build their critical reading skills because not doing so can perpetuate a negative perception of themselves, their roles in English, and their identities as learners in their new countries of study, living, or work. Reading is, after all, a key component of language-integral to any learner whether it is in the form of course texts, newspaper articles, or social media shares.

So back to the four key questions and links to specific areas of the talk to explore:

1. Is this phenomenon (of fake news, etc) a new thing? NO. See

2. Why are we susceptible to it? We've looked at a couple examples in this article, but I walk through it more clearly with more examples starting at

3. How does it impact our learners perceptions and perceptions of them? YES. See .

4. How can we foster critical reading strategies among our learners? And is it our responsibility as language teachers to do something about it? Ah ah ah. Check out the video. 😉 OK, I'll be nice. While throughout the talk the examples I use are models for what could be used with our learners in the classroom, go here: .

If you're interested in this topic, James Taylor has also published a lesson plan. Additionally, for more references to readings and useful resources, please download .

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Critical Readers in the Misinformation Age - EFL Magazine

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Critical Readers in the Misinformation Age Did you know that Chicago was the most dangerous city in the US in 2014? I didn't. I would have thought it was some bigger city but according to this set of FBI statistics of total murders, I was wrong. But actually, was I?

# data[].attributes.headline
30 Sobering Images Of Humanity's Impact On The Environment

# data[].attributes.subject
30 Sobering Images Of Humanity's Impact On The Environment

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
30 Sobering Images That Prove Humans Have Reached The Peak Of Indifference

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Is the idea of progress only an illusion?

# data[].attributes.headline
Don’t look now: why you should be worried about machines reading your emotions | Technology | The Guardian

# data[].attributes.subject
Don’t look now: why you should be worried about machines reading your emotions | Technology | The Guardian

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Don't look now: why you should be worried about machines reading your emotions

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Machines can now allegedly identify anger, fear, disgust and sadness. 'Emotion detection' has grown from a research project to a $20bn industry

# data[].attributes.headline
On the Road to Sweetness: A Clear-Cut Destination? | Yale Scientific Magazine

# data[].attributes.subject
On the Road to Sweetness: A Clear-Cut Destination? | Yale Scientific Magazine

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Imagine putting a piece of candy on your tongue. To taste its full sweetness, you would most likely follow the taste map you have seen in biology and psychology textbooks and place it at the tip of your tongue. After all, the well-known taste map shows that the tip of the tongue is responsible for tasting sweetness, the surrounding area for saltiness, the tongue's edges for the sourness, and the back end of the tongue for bitterness. This map has become so widespread that it is believed wine glasses are shaped to cater to it. Despite how popular this idea may be, current research asserts it is nothing more than a myth.

The idea of a taste map dates back to a study by the German scientist D.P. Hanig during the early 1900s. After tasting a food, volunteers were asked to determine which part of the tongue they tasted it, and this was repeated for each of the four main "taste groups" (sweetness, saltiness, bitterness, and sourness). While Hanig showed that certain areas of the tongue did in fact vary with regards to sensitivity for the four tastes, he was not implying that these areas were insensitive to any of the tastes.

Edwin G. Boring, a Harvard psychologist, contributed to the misinterpretation of the data. He quantified Hanig's original findings by substituting subjective volunteer responses with numerical data, then used these numbers to create the tongue map with which we are familiar today. Boring's map was supposed to document relative sensitivities. However, his unclear notation misled many scientists of the era to believe that the areas he designated on the map could only sense one particular taste, thus propagating the deceptive idea of a taste map.

This taste map concept spread at a surprisingly fast pace. It could have been easily disproved by a few simple taste tests, but people held on to the idea of a map. "People like having discrete classifications. It's a system that is easy to be locked into," explains Dr. Aidan Kiely, a postdoctoral fellow who is currently researching taste and smell mechanisms in the Carlson Lab at Yale University. Another potential reason is that certain animals do in fact have taste maps. Kiely noted that fruit flies have 32 taste hairs and each has receptors that are sensitive to different tastes, but this does not necessarily mean such a trait exists in humans.

The real mechanism by which our taste buds pick up on individual tastes elucidates why the taste map is a myth. Projections called papillae are spread all across the tongue. The papillae contain the majority of the taste buds. These taste buds house a mixture of elongated taste cells that are capable of responding to salty, sweet, bitter, sour or umami tastes. (Umami is a distinct fifth taste that was neglected in the original studies. It is the taste of glutamate and gives meat its savory flavor.) The taste cells have approximately 50 to 150 receptors for each taste, which allow specific molecules to bind and eventually translate the signal into the taste we perceive. A "sweet" cell, for example, will have receptors that can bind to sugar molecules. Therefore, each region of the tongue can sense each of the five primary tastes.

Virginia Collings, a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, offered evidence for this reconstructed layout of the tongue in 1974. She found that even though there was a slight difference in concentrations of certain taste receptors in certain areas of the tongue, the overall effect this had on sensing taste was negligible. Her research also showed that taste receptors are not confined to the tongue. They are also present in areas surrounding the tongue, such as the soft palate of the mouth and on the epiglottis.

"Even though the commercial aspect of taste is greater than that of hearing or smell, it has been greatly understudied," says Kiely. The fact that so little is known about taste definitely contributed to the dominant taste map myth. Fortunately, there has recently been a great deal of research done on taste. Studies done on mice suggest that there may be unique maps of neurons in the mammalian brain (rather than on the tongue) that are found in specific areas for each primary taste. Other studies are trying to determine whether there are receptors for other tastes, such as for fat. Research in this field is quickly progressing and myths such as the taste map are being brought to light.

So next time you put that piece of candy into your mouth, do not worry. You will taste it regardless of where it lands.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
On the Road to Sweetness: A Clear-Cut Destination?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Imagine putting a piece of candy on your tongue. To taste its full sweetness, you would most likely follow the taste map you have seen in biology and psychology textbooks and place it at the tip of your tongue. After all, the well-known taste map shows that the tip of the tongue is responsible for...

# data[].attributes.headline
By 2050, there will be more plastic than fish in the world’s oceans, study says - The Washington Post

# data[].attributes.subject
By 2050, there will be more plastic than fish in the world’s oceans, study says - The Washington Post

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
There is a lot of plastic in the world's oceans.

It coagulates into great floating " garbage patches" that cover large swaths of the Pacific. It washes up on urban beaches and remote islands, tossed about in the waves and transported across incredible distances before arriving, unwanted, back on land. It has wound up in the stomachs of more than half the world's sea turtles and nearly all of its marine birds, studies say. And if it was bagged up and arranged across all of the world's shorelines, we could build a veritable plastic barricade between ourselves and the sea.

But that quantity pales in comparison with the amount that the World Economic Forum expects will be floating into the oceans by the middle of the century.

If we keep producing (and failing to properly dispose of) plastics at predicted rates, plastics in the ocean will outweigh fish pound for pound in 2050, the nonprofit foundation said in a report Tuesday.

According to the report, worldwide use of plastic has increased 20-fold in the past 50 years, and it is expected to double again in the next 20 years. By 2050, we'll be making more than three times as much plastic stuff as we did in 2014.
[Nearly all of the world's seabirds have eaten plastic, study estimates]
Meanwhile, humans do a terrible job of making sure those products are reused or otherwise disposed of: About a third of all plastics produced escape collection systems, only to wind up floating in the sea or the stomach of some unsuspecting bird. That amounts to about 8 million metric tons a year - or, as Jenna Jambeck of the University of Georgia put it to The Washington Post in February, "Five bags filled with plastic for every foot of coastline in the world."

The report came a day before the start of the glitzy annual meeting arranged by the World Economic Forum to discuss the global economy. This year's meeting in Davos, Switzerland, is centered on what the WEF terms "the fourth industrial revolution" - the boom in high-tech areas like robotics and biotechnology - and its effect on the widening gulf between the wealthy and the world's poor.

But the plastic situation - fairly low-tech and more than a century old at this point - is a reminder that we still haven't quite gotten the better of some of the problems left over from the first few "industrial revolutions."
['Microbeads' soon will be banned from toothpaste and soaps]
According to the report, more than 70 percent of the plastic we produce is either put in a landfill or lost to the world's waterways and other infrastructure. Plastic production accounts for 6 percent of global oil consumption (a number that will hit 20 percent in 2050) and 1 percent of the global carbon budget (the maximum amount of emissions the world can produce to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius). In 2050, the report says, we'll be spending 15 percent of our carbon budget on soda bottles, plastic grocery bags and the like.

Once it gets washed into waterways, the damage caused by plastics' presence costs about $13 billion annually in losses for the tourism, shipping and fishing industries. It disrupts marine ecosystems and threatens food security for people who depend on subsistence fishing.

Besides which, all that plastic in the water isn't too great for the animals trying to live there.

The data in the report comes from interviews with more than 180 experts and analysis of some 200 studies on "the plastic economy."

The report was published on the same day that a study came out in the journal Nature Communications asserting that the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization is drastically underestimating the overfishing of the oceans. The study, from researchers Daniel Pauly and Dirk Zeller of the University of British Columbia's Sea Around Us project, found that global catches between 1950 and 2010 were probably 50 percent higher than previously thought - meaning that damage to the world's fish stocks was also much worse.

Overall, it was not a good news day for anyone with fins.

But both reports gave some signs for optimism. Pauly and Zeller told The Washington Post that the underestimation of how much humans were fishing means the U.N. also underestimated how much fish the oceans can provide.

"If we rebuild stocks, we can rebuild to more than we thought before," Pauly said. "Basically, the oceans are more productive than we thought before."

And the World Economic Forum report, though not quite so sunny, suggests that there are ways to offset all this plastic we're making and discarding. Countries can implement incentives to collect waste and recycle it, use more efficient or reusable packaging and improve infrastructure so that less trash slips through the system and into the seas.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
By 2050, there will be more plastic than fish in the world's oceans, study says

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There is a lot of plastic in the world's oceans. It coagulates into great floating " garbage patches" that cover large swaths of the Pacific. It washes up on urban beaches and remote islands, tossed about in the waves and transported across incredible distances before arriving, unwanted, back on land.

# data[].attributes.headline
Infographic: How to Reduce Your Plastic Pollution - Plastic Oceans Foundation

# data[].attributes.subject
Infographic: How to Reduce Your Plastic Pollution - Plastic Oceans Foundation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Infographic: How to Reduce Your Plastic Pollution - Plastic Oceans Foundation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Infographic: How to Reduce Your Plastic Pollution

# data[].attributes.headline
Marla Spivak: Why bees are disappearing | TED Talk | TED.com

# data[].attributes.subject
Marla Spivak: Why bees are disappearing | TED Talk | TED.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Honeybees have thrived for 50 million years, each colony 40 to 50,000 individuals coordinated in amazing harmony. So why, seven years ago, did colonies start dying en masse? Marla Spivak reveals four reasons which are interacting with tragic consequences. This is not simply a problem because bees pollinate a third of the world's crops.

# data[].attributes.headline
Why Keep Bees? Learn why to keep bees in your backyard

# data[].attributes.subject
Why Keep Bees? Learn why to keep bees in your backyard

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Learn why (or why not) to keep bees in your backyard, garden, or rooftop and how it can benefit your life and community.

# data[].attributes.headline
Bee Extinction Facts: Why The Extinction of Bees Would End Humanity?

# data[].attributes.subject
Bee Extinction Facts: Why The Extinction of Bees Would End Humanity?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Bees are disappearing at an alarming rate due to the excessive use of pesticides in crops and certain blood-sucking parasites that only reproduce in bee colonies. It's true that the extinction of bees would mean the end of humanity. If bees didn't exist, humans wouldn't either.

For many of us, bees are annoying. We think that their only purpose is to keep buzzing around and dropping their formic acid-laden stings on random people (this impression will certainly change when we stop getting spoonfuls of sweet honey in our morning cereal).

The truth is, bees are crucial elements of our environment, and almost never get the credit that they deserve.
If bees didn't exist, humans wouldn't either.
Out of the 100 crop species that provide us with 90% of our food, 35% are pollinated by bees, birds and bats ( source). It's that simple.

Bees are the primary initiators of reproduction among plants, as they transfer pollen from the male stamens to the female pistils.

Since 2006, the population of bees has declined considerably ( source). Pesticides, disease, parasites, and poor weather due to global warming have played a major role in this worrying decline.

Are bees endangered?

Bee population has been on a decline in recent years. Some species were added to the endangered list in 2017 (seven species of Hawaiian yellow-faced bees) and 2018 (The rusty-patched bumblebee, Bombus affinis) so as to protect and revive their numbers. There have been a number of reasons for this decline. Let's take a look at few of them.
Recommended Video for you:
Why are bees endangered?

Bees are going extinct mainly because of two reasons: pesticides and parasites.
Pesticides
Since the end of World War 2, the use of pesticides in agriculture has increased exponentially.

This intense use of pesticides, known as a relatively new class of insecticides that affect the central nervous system of insects, resulting in paralysis and death), has had a major role in the bees' decline ( neonicotinoids ( source). When bees are exposed to neonicotinoids, they go into a shock and forget their way home (sort of like the insect version of Alzheimer's).
Parasites
Along with pesticides, parasites known as Varrao mites (also called Varrao destructors) are also responsible for their death ( source). The Varrao can only reproduce in a bee colony. They are blood-sucking parasites that affect adult and young bees equally. The disease inflicted by these mites can result in bees losing legs or wings, essentially killing them.

Colony Collapse Disorder

Beekeepers started reporting a sudden reduction in the number of bees. The adult bees disappeared suddenly and mostly together. The hives were left with just the queen and immature bees. Even the food was present in high quantities. In some cases, few adult bees were found attending to the queen. Reasons mentioned above are two of the many factors that play a role in this disorder.

Effects of bee extinction

Extinction of bees will affect plants, animals, availability of fuels, topography, clothing and of course, human life.
Effects on plants
Some plants are pollinated by wind, but that rate is very slow. Insects are the primary pollinators on the planet. Beetles and butterflies also pollinate, but bees are the most efficient insects for this purpose. Without bees, we wouldn't be able to savor delicious apples, cherries, and many other fruits and veggies (blueberries, avocado, broccoli, most leafy greens, cucumbers, pumpkins, and many more). Almond trees would be among the first casualties.

If bees went extinct, there would be a massive decline in the production of crops. Although crops like rice and wheat don't require insect pollination, can people survive by eating rice and bread all their life?
Effects on animals
Herbivores, who depend on certain plant species, will be affected first. They would go extinct if plants ceased to exist. For example, many cattle used for milk and meat depend on alfalfa and lupins, both of which depend on insect pollination. If the cow's food supply declines, then meat and milk production will decrease. This will seriously affect the human diet.

Due to the declining population of herbivores, tertiary carnivores will begin to suffer immediately. The only beneficiaries from this scenario would be scavengers (eagles, vultures, ravens etc.)
Fuel
Canola, which is grown to use as both a fuel and cooking oil, depends highly on pollination. It is also used to produce biofuel. If we were to run out of biofuel, we'd have to rely on fossil fuels completely, thus putting further pressure on the environment.
Clothing
Cotton is very reliant on pollination. The disappearance of bees will lead to a huge setback in cotton production, as it will significantly reduce our choices in clothes (good luck enduring the humidity of the tropical regions while wearing nylon attire).
Topograhy
Since most plants would be unable to grow, grasslands would become barren and large-scale desertification will take place. Landslides would wipe out villages in one sweep. Ultimately, Earth will become one large plastic-laden desert.

Effects of bee extinction on human life

Less production of food crops will ultimately lead to worldwide famine. Hunger and poverty will be very common. Freshwater will start drying up as well as, as there will be less trees for water retention to occur. With less water and diminishing food, humans will die of thirst and starvation. Fertility would also suffer a setback, followed by a drop in the rate of reproduction. Ultimately, we wouldn't be able to sustain and would be forced into extinction within a few hundred years.

Unless scientists build robotic bees to do the jobs that honeybees once did, we're ultimately doomed. And although this isn't the most serious repercussion, we would never again taste that sweet, savory honey that we forcibly steal from honeybees every day.

The tragic irony of this is that by killing bees, we're only hurting ourselves. Our survival depends on the health of the planet and its species, and unless we begin to face this fact, we will continue to contribute to our own demise. Unless we take drastic measures to save the bees, the planet's survival is in doubt.

Suggested Reading

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Bees are disappearing at an alarming rate due to the excessive use of pesticides in crops and certain blood-sucking parasites that only reproduce in bee colonies. It's true that the extinction of bees would mean the end of humanity. If bees didn't exist, humans wouldn't either. For many of us, bees are annoying.

# data[].attributes.headline
Sorry Vegans, Broccoli Doesn't Have More Protein Than Steak | Christopher James Clark

# data[].attributes.subject
Sorry Vegans, Broccoli Doesn't Have More Protein Than Steak | Christopher James Clark

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
For the past several years, a meme has been circulating (pictured below) claiming that broccoli has more protein than steak. I was under the impression that this poorly reason piece of vegan propaganda had already gone to the meme graveyard, but I've seen it resurfacing lately. As such, I thought it would be a good idea to create a new meme, which accurately differentiates between broccoli and steak.

One of the problems with the vegan meme is that it makes claims about protein per 100 calories while showing images of broccoli and beef that are roughly the same size. In actuality, 100 calories of broccoli weighs much than 100 calories of steak. If equal portions of steak and broccoli are compared, obviously steak has much more protein. Moreover, despite the meme's claims, steak also contains more protein than broccoli on a calorie by calorie basis.

So off to the supermarket I went to purchase both foods. I went home and carefully weighed and photographed each to show what 100 calories actually looks like.

Broccoli

The problems with the vegan meme are not just limited to its misleading visuals. The meme also puts forth inaccurate data. According to the meme, 100 calories of broccoli has 11.1 grams of protein. According to the USDA's National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference, however, raw broccoli has only 8.2 grams of protein per 100 calories, and those 100 calories carry a total weight of 294 grams.

Cooked broccoli, by the way, has even less protein - 6.8 grams of protein per 100 calories and 238 grams of total weight.

Steak

In order to say how much protein steak has, we need to make some clarifications because different cuts have different ratios of protein and fat. Logically, a cut that has more fat will have lower amounts of protein. To make an accurate assessment, we should choose the types of steaks that people actually eat.

If you browse through the USDA's database, you'll see literally hundreds of entries for beef. For the sake of simplicity, we'll look at the following three different cuts, both raw and cooked.

Cut 1: Beef, tenderloin, steak, separable lean only, trimmed to 1/8″ fat, all grades, raw

Cut 2: Beef, tenderloin, steak, separable lean only, trimmed to 1/8″ fat, all grades, cooked, broiled

Cut 3: Beef, plate steak, boneless, inside skirt, separable lean only, trimmed to 0″ fat, all grades, raw

Cut 4: Beef, plate steak, boneless, inside skirt, separable lean only, trimmed to 0″ fat, all grades, cooked, grilled

Cut 5: Beef, flank, steak, separable lean and fat, trimmed to 0″ fat, all grades, raw

Cut 6: Beef, flank, steak, separable lean and fat, trimmed to 0″ fat, all grades, cooked, broiled

Calories: 100

Total Protein: 13.7 grams

In short, the amount of protein in steak depends on the cut, the amount of fat that is trimmed away, and whether or not it's cooked. Regardless, broccoli always has far less protein than steak, whether you are comparing portions of equal weight or portions of equal calories.

The only scenario whereby broccoli might have more protein, is if you compare it to a piece of steak that is mostly fat and just a little bit of meat.

Conclusion

Broccoli does have some protein, but it's not a high-protein food as is steak. Broccoli has many other benefits, however, which is why I eat it regularly. So next time you see that failed vegan meme, you can respond with the new meme, which sets the story straight. Sorry vegans, try again.

Get Your Copy of the Award-Winning Book Behind the Blog

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Sorry Vegans, Broccoli Doesn't Have More Protein Than Steak | Christopher James Clark

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For the past several years, a meme has been circulating (pictured below) claiming that broccoli has more protein than steak. I was under the impression that this poorly reason piece of vegan propaganda had already gone to the meme graveyard, but I've seen it resurfacing lately.

# data[].attributes.body
Scientist Brian Wansink Turned Shoddy Data Into Viral Studies About How We Eat

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In the summer of 2013, Özge Siğirci, a young scientist in Turkey, had not yet arrived at Cornell University for her new research stint. But she already had an assignment from her future boss, Brian Wansink: Find something interesting about all-you-can-eat buffets.

As the head of Cornell's prestigious food psychology research unit, the Food and Brand Lab, Wansink was a social science star. His dozens of studies about why and how we eat received mainstream attention everywhere from O, the Oprah Magazine to the Today show to the New York Times. At the heart of his work was an accessible, inspiring message: Weight loss is possible for anyone willing to make a few small changes to their environment, without need for strict diets or intense exercise.

When Siğirci started working with him, she was assigned to analyze a dataset from an experiment that had been carried out at an Italian restaurant. Some customers paid $8 for the buffet, others half price. Afterward, they all filled out a questionnaire about who they were and how they felt about what they'd eaten.

Somewhere in those survey results, the professor was convinced, there had to be a meaningful relationship between the discount and the diners. But he wasn't satisfied by Siğirci's initial review of the data.

"I don't think I've ever done an interesting study where the data 'came out' the first time I looked at it," he told her over email.

More than three years later, Wansink would publicly praise Siğirci for being "the grad student who never said 'no.'" The unpaid visiting scholar from Turkey was dogged, Wansink wrote on his blog in November 2016. Initially given a "failed study" with "null results," Siğirci analyzed the data over and over until she began "discovering solutions that held up," he wrote. Her tenacity ultimately turned the buffet experiment into four published studies about pizza eating, all cowritten with Wansink and widely covered in the press.

But that's not how science is supposed to work. Ideally, statisticians say, researchers should set out to prove a specific hypothesis before a study begins. Wansink, in contrast, was retroactively creating hypotheses to fit data patterns that emerged after an experiment was over.

Wansink couldn't have known that his blog post would ignite a firestorm of criticism that now threatens the future of his three-decade career. Over the last 14 months, critics the world over have pored through more than 50 of his old studies and compiled " the Wansink Dossier," a list of errors and inconsistencies that suggests he aggressively manipulated data. Cornell, after initially clearing him of misconduct, has opened an investigation. And he's had five papers retracted and 14 corrected, the latest just this month.

Now, interviews with a former lab member and a trove of previously undisclosed emails show that, year after year, Wansink and his collaborators at the Cornell Food and Brand Lab have turned shoddy data into headline-friendly eating lessons that they could feed to the masses.

In correspondence between 2008 and 2016, the renowned Cornell scientist and his team discussed and even joked about exhaustively mining datasets for impressive-looking results. They strategized how to publish subpar studies, sometimes targeting journals with low standards. And they often framed their findings in the hopes of stirring up media coverage to, as Wansink once put it, "go virally big time."

The correspondence shows, for example, how Wansink coached Siğirci to knead the pizza data.

First, he wrote, she should break up the diners into all kinds of groups: "males, females, lunch goers, dinner goers, people sitting alone, people eating with groups of 2, people eating in groups of 2+, people who order alcohol, people who order soft drinks, people who sit close to buffet, people who sit far away, and so on..."

Then she should dig for statistical relationships between those groups and the rest of the data: "# pieces of pizza, # trips, fill level of plate, did they get dessert, did they order a drink, and so on..."

"This is really important to try and find as many things here as possible before you come," Wansink wrote to Siğirci. Doing so would not only help her impress the lab, he said, but "it would be the highest likelihood of you getting something publishable out of your visit."

He concluded on an encouraging note: "Work hard, squeeze some blood out of this rock, and we'll see you soon."

Siğirci was game. "I will try to dig out the data in the way you described."

All four of the pizza papers were eventually retracted or corrected. But the newly uncovered emails - obtained through records requests to New Mexico State University, which employs Wansink's longtime collaborator Collin Payne - reveal two published studies that were based on shoddy data and have so far received no public scrutiny.

Still, Wansink defends his work.

"I stand by and am immensely proud of the work done here at the Lab," he told BuzzFeed News by email, in response to a detailed list of allegations made in this story. "The Food and Brand Lab does not use 'low-quality data', nor does it seek to publish 'subpar studies'."

He pointed out that an independent lab confirmed the basic findings of the pizza papers. "That is, even where there has been unintentional error, the conclusions and impacts of the studies have not changed," he wrote.

Siğirci and Payne did not respond to requests to comment for this story.

"I am sorry to say that it is difficult to read these emails and avoid a conclusion of research misconduct."

Wansink's practices are part of a troubling pattern of strategic data-crunching across the entire field of social science. Even so, several independent statisticians and psychology researchers are appalled at the extent of Wansink's data manipulation.

"I am sorry to say that it is difficult to read these emails and avoid a conclusion of research misconduct," Brian Nosek, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, told BuzzFeed News. As executive director of the Center for Open Science, Nosek is one of his field's most outspoken reformers and spearheaded a massive project to try to reproduce prominent discoveries.

Based on the emails, Nosek said, "this is not science, it is storytelling."

The so-called replication crisis has punctured some of the world's most famous psychology research, from Amy Cuddy's work suggesting that " power poses" cause hormonal changes associated with feeling powerful, to Diederik Stapel's fabricated claims that messy environments lead to discrimination. In an influential 2015 report, Nosek's team attempted to repeat 100 psychology experiments, and reproduced less than one-half of the original findings.

One reason for the discrepancy is " p-hacking," the taboo practice of slicing and dicing a dataset for an impressive-looking pattern. It can take various forms, from tweaking variables to show a desired result, to pretending that a finding proves an original hypothesis - in other words, uncovering an answer to a question that was only asked after the fact.

In psychology research, a result is usually considered statistically significant when a calculation called a p-value is less than or equal to 0.05. But excessive data massaging can wind up with a p-value lower than 0.05 just by random chance, making a hypothesis seem valid when it's actually a fluke.

Wansink said his lab's data is "heavily scrutinized," and that's "what exploratory research is all about."

But for years, Wansink's inbox has been filled with chatter that, according to independent statisticians, is blatant p-hacking.

"Pattern doesn't look good," Payne of New Mexico State wrote to Wansink and David Just, another Cornell professor, in April 2009, after what Payne called a "marathon" data-crunching session for an experiment about eating and TV-watching.

"I also ran - i am not kidding - 400 strategic mediation analyses to no avail..." Payne wrote. In other words, testing 400 variables to find one that might explain the relationship between the experiment and the outcomes. "The last thing to try - but I shutter to think of it - is trying to mess around with the mood variables. Ideas...suggestions?"

Two days later, Payne was back with promising news: By focusing on the relationship between two variables in particular, he wrote, "we get exactly what we need." (The study does not appear to have been published.)

"That's p-hacking on steroids."

"That's p-hacking on steroids," said Kristin Sainani, an associate professor of health research and policy at Stanford University. "They're running every possible combination of variables, essentially, to see if anything will come up significant."

In a conversation about another study in August 2015, Wansink mentioned a series of experiments that "were chasing interactions that were hard to find." He apparently hoped that they would all arrive at the same conclusion, which is "bad science," said Susan Wei, an assistant professor of biostatistics at the University of Minnesota.

"It does very much seem like this Brian Wansink investigator is a consistent and repeated offender of statistics," Wei added. "He's so brazen about it, I can't tell if he's just bad at statistical thinking, or he knows that what he's doing is scientifically unsound but he goes ahead anyway."

In 2012, Wansink, Payne, and Just published one of their most famous studies, which revealed an easy way of nudging kids into healthy eating choices. By decorating apples with stickers of Elmo from Sesame Street, they claimed, elementary school students could be swayed to pick the fruit over cookies at lunchtime.

But back in September 2008, when Payne was looking over the data soon after it had been collected, he found no strong apples-and-Elmo link - at least not yet.

"I have attached some initial results of the kid study to this message for your report," Payne wrote to his collaborators. "Do not despair. It looks like stickers on fruit may work (with a bit more wizardry)."

Wansink also acknowledged the paper was weak as he was preparing to submit it to journals. The p-value was 0.06, just shy of the gold standard cutoff of 0.05. It was a "sticking point," as he put it in a Jan. 7, 2012, email.

"It seems to me it should be lower," he wrote, attaching a draft. "Do you want to take a look at it and see what you think. If you can get the data, and it needs some tweeking, it would be good to get that one value below .05."

Later in 2012, the study appeared in the prestigious JAMA Pediatrics, the 0.06 p-value intact. But in September 2017, it was retracted and replaced with a version that listed a p-value of 0.02. And a month later, it was retracted yet again for an entirely different reason: Wansink admitted that the experiment had not been done on 8- to 11-year-olds, as he'd originally claimed, but on preschoolers.

Scientists are under a lot of pressure to attain the 0.05 p-value, said Wei of the University of Minnesota, even though it's an arbitrary cutoff. "It's an unfortunate state of being in the research community, in the publishing world."

Still, the Food and Brand Lab appears to approach science far more flagrantly than most other scientists who face the same pressures, Nosek said.

"It's a cartoon of how someone in the most extreme form might p-hack data," he said of the emails as a whole. "There was the explicit goal of 'Let's just get something out of the data, use the data as a device to find something, anything, that's interesting.'"

Back in March of last year, shortly after his pizza papers were called into question, Wansink was interviewed by the Chronicle of Higher Education. He told the outlet that before all the hubbub over his studies, he'd never heard of the term "p-hacking" or the replication crisis. "Science is messy in a lot of ways," he said.

The emails reviewed by BuzzFeed News point to potential problems with two of Wansink's studies that haven't received any public criticism.

In July 2009, Wansink wrote to collaborators about a study in progress. Mall shoppers had been asked to read a pamphlet that described one of two kinds of walks - one that focused on listening to music and the other on exercising. At the end, researchers offered them salty and sweet snacks as a thank you, and recorded how much participants served themselves.

"What's neat about this is that it shows that just thinking about walking makes people eat more," Wansink wrote. "But we should be able to get much more from this." He added, "I think it would be good to mine it for significance and a good story."

Meanwhile, one of his coauthors, former Cornell visiting scholar Carolina Werle, was trying - in vain - to find a link between how much time the participants spent in the mall and other variables she'd tested. "There is no interaction with the experimental conditions," she wrote, adding that "nothing works in terms of interaction."

Werle did not respond to a request to comment for this story. The study wound up in the journal Appetite two years later, claiming that just the act of imagining physical activity prompts people to take more snacks.

In 2013, Werle and Wansink were discussing a different study about whether describing a walk as fun, such as by framing it as a scenic stroll rather than a form of exercise, influenced how much the walkers would want to eat afterward.

The scientists emailed back and forth about two facts that the subsequent paper did not disclose: that the "exercise" group was much smaller than the "fun" group, and that there was some missing data.

In another message, he mentioned that "there's been a lot of data torturing with this cool data set."

"Why are you hiding that? That seems like pretty pertinent information," Sainani of Stanford said.

Wansink himself acknowledged that the data was weak. At one point, he told Werle that he didn't think the study was good enough to submit to a prestigious journal. In another message, he mentioned that "there's been a lot of data torturing with this cool data set." The journal Marketing Letters eventually published the paper in May 2014.

Journals should scrutinize these two papers due to questions raised by the emails, said Nick Brown, an independent graduate student at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands who has spent more than a year dissecting Wansink's work.

The paper that told walkers to think of their exercise as fun, for example, reports p-values of 0.04 and less than 0.05. But by Brown's calculation, they appear to have been cut in half using an unjustified statistical method. (Wei said the group's method may have been acceptable.) And one of Werle's emails to Wansink indicated that one of the experiments had 47 people, but the paper reports 46.

Brown remains befuddled by the breadth of errors that he and other critics have unearthed in the Food and Brand Lab's research, from data impossibilities to sample sizes that don't add up.

"They're doing the p-hacking and they're getting other stuff wrong, badly wrong," he said. "The level of incompetence that would be required for that is just staggering."

These papers are only a fraction of the 250-plus that Wansink has produced since the early 1990s. One of the driving factors behind his prolific output, his emails suggest, is a hard truth that all academic scientists face: The more papers you publish, the more likely you are to be rewarded in promotions, funding, and fame.

In August 2012, Wansink relayed some sad news to more than a dozen colleagues: One of his former grad students had just been denied tenure.

"Whenever I called her, it always seemed like she was working on a ton of stuff," he wrote. Yet he was surprised to see that she'd only published one article in a minor journal in seven years.

This unnamed scholar was working on lots of research that never saw the light of the day, Wansink wrote: "Too much inventory; not enough shipments." Ideally, he mused, a science lab would function like a tech company. Tim Cook, for instance, was renowned for getting products out of Apple's warehouses faster and pumping up profits. "As Steve Jobs said, 'Geniuses ship,'" Wansink wrote.

So, he proposed, the lab should adopt a system of strict deadlines for submitting and resubmitting research until it landed somewhere. "A lot of these papers are laying around on each of our desktops and they're like inventory that isn't working for us," he told the team. "We've got so much huge momentum going. This could make our productivity legendary."

Kirsikka Kaipainen knows firsthand how the Food and Brand Lab manages to churn out so many papers. She did research there in 2012 as a graduate student visiting from Finland.

Wansink was "warm and generous and energetic, somebody who would take you in with open arms," she recalled.

Soon after she arrived, Wansink handed her a dataset from an online weight-loss program run by the lab. At a brainstorming session, he led the charge in proposing a half dozen or so papers that could come out of the data, Kaipainen said.

But when Kaipainen drilled down, there wasn't enough information to support the conclusions he wanted. "I felt I was a failure," she said. "I realized over time it wasn't my wrongdoing - it was just that there was nothing there to be found."

Kaipainen eventually steered the paper to a place she was comfortable with, a straightforward review of how the program worked. Wansink was fine with it, she said, since it wound up in a notable journal. But even though his name is on it, he had little to do with writing it - and his few contributions made her uneasy, she said.

"That's when I started feeling like, this is not the kind of research I want to do."

"Like he hadn't really looked at the results critically and he was trying to make the paper say something that wasn't true," she said. "That's when I started feeling like, this is not the kind of research I want to do." (In 2014, Wansink would cite this paper in a Kickstarter campaign that raised $10,000 for a weight-loss service that never launched.)

As months went by, Kaipainen began to notice that her experience fit into a disturbing pattern in the lab as a whole: Collect data first, form hypotheses later. She isn't the only former lab member who felt troubled by how the place was run. Other students have told the Cornell Daily Sun that Wansink and his team often chased down findings that were intuitive-sounding yet overly broad and unreliable.

Kaipainen was also troubled by lab members' frequent remarks that a finding "would make a good story or a good article" or "be interesting for media." At one point, the lab brainstormed questions for an outside party's market research survey. "That was weird also," she recalled, "to come up with some questions not based on any theory, just 'What would be cool to ask?', 'What cool headlines could we get if we got some associations?'"

Even when writing manuscript drafts, Wansink was thinking about how to sell his inspirational results to the public.

"We want this to go virally big time," he wrote to Payne, Just, and another Cornell colleague on March 27, 2012, explaining why he wanted to make the chart labels for the Elmo and apples study sound "more generalizable." Another time, he discussed playing up "the quotable point" of the study.

The study about mall shoppers thinking about exercising, he once wrote, "would make quite a media splash." Another time, he proposed: "Let's think of renaming the paper to something more shameless. Maybe something like 'Thinking about exercise makes me hungry.'" ( Its published title was "Just thinking about exercise makes me serve more food: physical activity and calorie compensation.")

Wansink told BuzzFeed News that attracting media coverage is a core part of the Food and Brand Lab's mission "to be accessible and impactful."

"The reality is that, by and large, the public does not have access to academic articles," he said. "Framing our work in a way that can be accessed and used by the public is something all social scientists should consider."

These days, Kaipainen leads an online mental health startup. She said she stands by the four papers she wrote with Wansink. And she believes her old boss has good intentions at his core. "He wants to help people eat better. I kind of admire him for it," she said. "But ends don't justify the means."

To Nosek, the relentless pursuit of fawning press is just one element of a backward rewards system in science. When a university is deciding who to hire, or a funding institution is selecting a grantee, it's easy to pick those who are publishing a lot, he said.

"And scientists," Nosek added, "have to do those dysfunctional behaviors - do everything you can to seek an exciting, sexy story, even if it means reducing the credibility of the research."

Scientists often rely on peer reviewers - anonymous experts - to weed out errors in papers before they go to press. But journals didn't, or couldn't, catch every inaccuracy from the Food and Brand Lab.

For example, reviewers were generally positive about what ended up being a controversial 2012 study in Preventive Medicine. It reported that schoolchildren ate more vegetables at lunch when they had catchy names like "X-Ray Vision Carrots."

"This is a well-written manuscript that addressed critical questions pertinent to vegetable consumption among school-aged children," one reviewer wrote. Another praised the experiments because they "use real-world data and show changes in actual behavior."

Last fall, Wansink admitted that the lunchtime observation part of the carrots study had actually been done on preschoolers, not the reported 8- to 11-year-olds (just like the Elmo and apples article). The paper was corrected on Feb. 1, shocking critics who had called for a full retraction. In their defense, the researchers noted that a sub-experiment mentioned in the study did involve elementary schoolchildren. "These mistakes and omissions do not change the general conclusion of the paper," they wrote.

The scientists who reviewed the Elmo study in JAMA Pediatrics didn't seem to raise any red flags either, based on Wansink's responses to them. But the journal correspondence does point to a bizarre new discrepancy.

Originally, Wansink made it clear that the researchers had let children pick both apples and cookies if they wanted. "We emphasized why we set up a system that allowed children to a cookie or apple, or both, or neither," he explained to the journal editor in a March 2012 draft letter. But five years later, when the team retracted the study the first time, the researchers publicly contradicted this statement, writing that "children were offered to take either an apple or a cookie (not both)."

Sometimes, the team's acceptance into top journals surprised even them. In July 2009, Payne and Just, the Cornell professor, were celebrating a paper that had landed in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine.

"Usually for a top 10 journal I am trying to reinvent statistics."

"Is it me or was this way too easy for a journal ranked 10th out of 101 journals in its category?" Payne wrote. "Usually for a top 10 journal I am trying to reinvent statistics." (Just did not respond to a request for comment.)

When their work was rejected, the members of the Food and Brand Lab would often try increasingly lower-quality journals until they succeeded. This practice is in part responsible for the sheer volume of scientific findings that cannot be replicated.

Even so, Wansink and his colleagues were sometimes frank about their desire to put flawed data in publications with low standards.

In March 2009, Wansink asked Payne to look over a manuscript about how people shop in foreign countries where they're unfamiliar with the brands or language. Wansink had written it with Koert van Ittersum, a professor at the University of Groningen, who did not respond to a request for comment.

"There's a paper that Koert and I have had shelfed for about 5 years that needs to see the journal light of day," Wansink said over email. It was based on experiments that were "insightful, but not very rigorous."

He continued, "There's a bunch of 2nd-tier journals (or lower) we could send it to," and added, "...we'd kind of like to aim at a pretty quick acceptance."

Time was crucial. "At this point," Wansink wrote, "we don't want to redo any studies, just deal with the ones we have and find an editor that says, 'Interesting, and good enough.'" So far, none have.

To Brown, the grad student who may know Wansink's work better than Wansink himself, the lab is like a food-processing company.

"What they're doing is making a very small amount of science go a very long way when you spread it thinly and you cut it with water and modified starch," he said. "The product, which is the paper, is designed and marketed before it's even been built."

He suspects that more of Wansink's papers will be corrected or even retracted. (Cornell confirmed to BuzzFeed News that its investigation into Wansink's research is ongoing, but declined to share any details.)

Brown is less sure, however, whether this saga will lead to any meaningful changes beyond Wansink's oeuvre. As illuminating as the emails are - he likens them to security footage of a bank robbery - he also thinks that the behavior is "probably quite typical of what goes on in a lot of labs."

"Science by volume, science by output, by yardage, that has to stop," Brown said. "The problem is that it's an awful lot of people's paychecks and an awful lot of people's business models."●

Stephanie Lee is a senior technology reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in San Francisco.

Contact Stephanie M. Lee at stephanie.lee@buzzfeed.com.

Got a confidential tip? Submit it here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Sliced And Diced: The Inside Story Of How An Ivy League Food Scientist Turned Shoddy Data Into Viral Studies

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the summer of 2013, Özge Siğirci, a young scientist in Turkey, had not yet arrived at Cornell University for her new research stint. But she already had an assignment from her future boss, Brian Wansink: Find something interesting about all-you-can-eat buffets.

# data[].attributes.body
https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/article/nutrition-articles/why-the-food-pyramid-is-wrong/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
Ben Greenfield Fitness - Diet, Fat Loss and Performance Advice

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Since 1974, when the first food pyramid was appeared in Sweden, triangular or pyramid-shaped nutrition guides have been used by 25 other countries and organizations. I found a great graphic over at Huffington Post that depicts some of the more popular food pyramids from around the world, and although America now uses the MyPlate design many countries around the world still use a food pyramid to dole out nutrition advice.

Interestingly, a consistent pattern in food pyramids around the globe, from China's Food Pagoda to Greece's Food Pyramid, is the appearance of cereals, grains, bread, pasta and other starchy carbohydrates as the base of the diet - and fats near the top of the pyramid, as a "use sparingly" category.

But this type of pyramid can lead to health problems. After all, dietary fat from healthy sources has been shown in studies to actually help to increase weight loss, reduce heart disease risk, lower blood sugars, lower cholesterols and maintain proper brain function (especially in kids).

And if you listened to my interview with Dr. William Davis, "The Shocking Truth About Wheat", or my interview with Paul Jaminet about the Perfect Health Diet you learned that consumption of carbohydrates can cause serious issues with everything from weight gain to fuzzy thinking to heart disease.

But the issues don't stop with the predominantly "high carb, low fat" recommendations of most food pyramids. Frequent consumption of featured and recommended foods such as commercialized modern whole milk and hamburger has been linked to heart disease...

...dairy is extremely overemphasized - although calcium is important, many vegetable and meat sources contain plenty of calcium with a lower number of calories....

...there is no differentiation between "good proteins" and "bad proteins", "good carbs" and "bad carbs" or "good fats" and "bad fats"...

...and the minimum serving of fruits is 2-4, which is a great way to send your blood sugar levels on a roller coaster ride all day long if you're not careful.

Furthermore, when it comes to the American food pyramid, we've barely scratched the surface of how food and agricultural institutions can exert lobbying and political power on the USDA to feature and prioritize subsidized industries such as dairy, corn and wheat as heavily featured or highlighted recommendations (a great book to read more about these shenanigans is " Food Politics ").
So what should a good food pyramid actually look like?
Although I have yet to be convinced that a food pyramid is the best, most functional way to dynamically depict dietary recommendations, I've decided to act on hundreds of requests from readers and listeners and create a "Ben Greenfield Endorsed" food pyramid.

I call my new design the "Superhuman Food Pyramid", and this new food pyramid address all the issues above, ties in my personal nutritional philosophies that I've expressed many times in blog posts and podcasts, and also gives you a spectrum of choices from "Eat" to "Moderate" to "Avoid" for each food group, so that you don't have to deal, for example, with "Fats" lumped into just one category, or "Proteins" just lumped into another category.

To make it easier to practically apply my Superhuman Food Pyramid to your diet, I've also included several pages listing each food category and the Eat, Moderate, and Avoid foods within that category, so you can simply print, grab and go to the grocery store or farmer's market with your Superhuman Food list.

You instantly get my Superhuman Food Pyramid for free when you click the button below and share on Twitter or Facebook. [Note: Your timeline/feed must be public for our system to verify your post or tweet].
If you have questions, comments or feedback, just leave it below.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Since 1974, when the first food pyramid was appeared in Sweden, triangular or pyramid-shaped nutrition guides have been used by 25 other countries and organizations. I found a great graphic over at Huffington Post that depicts some of the more popular food pyramids from around the world, and although America now uses the MyPlate design many countries around the world still use a food pyramid to dole out nutrition advice.

# data[].attributes.headline
Eat to Live by Joel Fuhrman - The Weston A. Price Foundation

# data[].attributes.subject
Eat to Live by Joel Fuhrman - The Weston A. Price Foundation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A Thumbs Down Book Review

Eat to Live
By Joel Fuhrman, MD
New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2003
Reviewed by Chris Masterjohn

Dr. Joel Fuhrman's Eat to Live presents a diet centered on a concept with which followers of Weston Price's research are well familiar: nutrient density. His emphasis on maximizing nutrition is a refreshing change from the many weight loss manuals calling for the restriction of this or that macronutrient and the cutting of carbs or calories without regard for the life-promoting vitamins and minerals that Price considered to be the fundamental determinants of health. Unfortunately, Fuhrman's profound bias against animal products leads the reader to believe that good nutrition comes only from vegetables. While many people will undoubtedly improve their health as they adopt Fuhrman's regimen of unrefined, whole foods, a large number will inevitably reach a point at which they must begin including more nutrient-dense animal products in their diet. Others will never tolerate this plant-based way of eating to begin with.

The Health Equation

According to Fuhrman, health and well being can be reduced to a simple mathematical formula: health equals nutrients divided by calories. Accordingly, he has created a nutrient-density-per-calorie chart of foods wherein the top spots are occupied by green leafy vegetables, with other non-starchy vegetables following closely behind. Legumes and whole grains, which Fuhrman recommends soaking overnight to increase nutrient value and digestibility, starchy vegetables, fresh fruits, raw nuts and raw seeds also figure prominently in the chart. Animal products come in second to last, followed only by the category of "refined grains, oils and sweets."

Since the book is written primarily for those trying to lose weight, Fuhrman directs the reader to eat primarily from foods at the top of this chart. For those who need to maintain their weight, he recommends eating more starchy vegetables and oil-rich whole foods such as avocados, nuts and seeds. He advises everyone, however, to eat two pounds per day of leafy vegetables, half raw and half cooked, and to restrict animal products to only ten percent of calories.

Fuhrman's calculations of nutrient density suffer from three fatal flaws: first, he excludes from these calculations many nutrients known to be essential to the body while doubling the score of other putative nutrients whose physiological functions are uncertain; second, he fails to account for variations in the bioavailability of nutrients between foods; third, he groups all nutrients present in a food into a single score as if they were interchangeable, rather than acknowledging that different types of foods provide different types of nutrients.

His definition of nutrient density as nutrients per calorie can be valuable for someone whose first priority is to restrict calories, but it can be inappropriate for others. Rather than instructing the reader about how to judiciously use the ten percent of calories allotted to animal products to select the most nutrient-dense of these foods, Fuhrman dismisses their nutritional contribution as insignificant. Although the premise of Eat to Live -nutrient density-is solid, his assumptions in the application of this principle seriously diminish the value that this book will have to many readers and may even lead some down a path that will ultimately damage their health.

Not All Nutrients Count

Fuhrman lists five nutrient deficiencies his patients-especially the vegans-sometimes develop when following his regimen: vitamin D, vitamin B, taurine, DHA and iodine. This should come as no surprise to his readers since vitamin B is the only one of these nutrients included in his nutrient-density ranking system. Vitamin D, DHA, taurine and iodine are not.

According to the explanation of this ranking system posted on Fuhrman's web site, ¹ he also excludes a number of other important nutrients. The B vitamins biotin and pantothenic acid, preformed vitamin A, and vitamins K1 and K2 are among those absent. Major minerals such as sodium, chloride, potassium, sulfur, and phosphorus are excluded. Essential trace minerals such as copper, manganese, boron, molybdenum, and chromium are nowhere to be found in Fuhrman's list. Essential fatty acids like EPA, DHA and arachidonic acid are likewise absent. Finally, none of the eight essential amino acids is included in his ranking system.

Fuhrman excludes a whole host of essential nutrients from his list while including a number of non-essential nutrients. Some non-essential nutrients are actually required by the body but are not considered essential because we can synthesize them ourselves. Other non-essential nutrients are not required by the body but may nevertheless be beneficial because they can absorb free radicals-dangerous compounds with unpaired electrons that can wreak havoc on the cell-and thereby act as antioxidants. The selectivity with which Fuhrman includes non-essential nutrients heavily favors plant foods over animal foods and likewise favors compounds that play no essential role in the body and may even be harmful under certain circumstances over compounds that do play essential roles.

Fuhrman includes in his system carotenes and other pigments, the thyroid-suppressing agents found in the cabbage family called glucosinolates, and fiber. He also includes the oxygen radical absorbance capacity (ORAC) score. This is a measure of how well chemicals act as antioxidants in an isolated setting in a laboratory, not a measure of their effect within the body. Although we know very little about the importance of the chemicals that contribute to the ORAC score, Fuhrman actually doubles their contribution to his nutrient-density ranking.

These plant chemicals, whether they act as antioxidants in test tubes or in cells, are not essential nutrients. Each cell within the body synthesizes the master antioxidant glutathione, which neutralizes free radicals and also regenerates vitamins E and C. ² The synthesis of glutathione requires either dietary cysteine, an amino acid that is only bioavailable from raw proteins, or vitamin B ₆. ³ Glutathione, in conjunction with several vitamins and enzymes, protects the cell from free radicals. These enzymes require selenium, iron, manganese, copper and zinc to function. Plant chemicals that contribute to the ORAC score may augment this defense system, but they are not an essential part of it and do not fulfill any role within it that the basic components synthesized within the cell and the other essential vitamins cannot fulfill.

Many of the "antioxidants" in fruits and vegetables are actually potent inhibitors of enzyme activity. Some of them may reduce the levels of certain enzymes that some researchers believe promote cancer. ⁴ Many of them, however, especially those found in onions, kale, broccoli, apples, cherries, berries, tea and red wine, are potent inhibitors of a process that takes place in the liver called sulfonation. ⁵ Sulfonation is necessary for the detoxification of drugs and environmental pollutants and the normal activity of steroid hormones and thyroid hormone. Because sulfonation can also make some chemicals more toxic, researchers have proposed that the inhibition of this process could be beneficial. Perhaps because the absorption of these compounds from many foods is negligible, or perhaps because they have so many conflicting effects on our metabolic processes, they are not associated with either an increase or a decrease in the risk of cancer. ⁶

Prudence dictates excluding these "nutrients" from any ranking system until further research can elucidate the true effects they actually have within our bodies; but rather than excluding them, however, Fuhrman counts each of them as two nutrients instead of one.

While Fuhrman doubles the score of plant chemicals that play no essential role in the body, he completely excludes many nutrients found in animal foods that do play essential roles. Creatine is vital for muscle function; taurine is essential to digestion and the functioning of the brain and retina; carnitine and coenzyme Q ₁₀ are required for energy metabolism; ⁷ carnosine functions as an antioxidant, protects DNA and proteins from being destroyed by sugars that run amuck, and plays important roles in the nervous system. ⁸ None of these nutrients-not even taurine, which Fuhrman himself says is sometimes deficient in his vegan patients-is included.

It should come as no surprise, then, that his chart shows green leafy vegetables to be superior to meat, eggs and shellfish. Were organ meats such as liver even included on this chart, they would probably fare just as poorly-not because they aren't nutrient-dense, but because Fuhrman's chart of nutrient density completely ignores more than two dozen of the nutrients that they contain.

How Much Is Really There?

Nutrients are often much more bioavailable from animal foods than they are from plant foods, a fact that Fuhrman's ranking system does not take into account. The absorption of zinc, for example, is inhibited by phytate and a number of other plant chemicals, while it is stimulated by animal proteins. Absorption of zinc can be five times higher from animal foods than from high-phytate plant foods. ⁹ Calcium is very bioavailable from some plant foods such as kale, broccoli and bok choy, ¹⁰ but very little is absorbed from foods high in oxalate such as spinach.11 The absorption of fat-soluble vitamins and their precursors such as vitamin K and carotenes can be less than five percent in the absence of fat and still less than twenty percent with added fat. 12,13 Pigments such as lutein are twice as available from egg yolks as they are from green vegetables such as spinach. ¹⁴ As much as 80 percent of vitamin B6 in plant foods may be bound up with other substances that make it unavailable for absorption and use; ¹⁵ even the portion that is available must be converted into its active form in the liver in a reaction that taxes the supply of vitamin B2. ² Fuhrman's nutrient density chart would look very different if he adjusted a food's score according to the bioavailability of the nutrients within it.

Not All Nutrients Are the Same

Even if it were true, as Fuhrman's chart suggests, that kale is 40 times more nutritious than whole milk and that bananas are more nutritious than beef, it would not change the fact that one would develop severe nutrient deficiencies by eating nothing but kale and bananas. These foods contribute no vitamin B ₁₂, vitamin D or preformed vitamin A, and little iodine, for example.

Fuhrman notes that his patients may sometimes consume too little iodine because they follow his recommendation to limit their intake of salt, to which iodine is usually added. Yet one half of a serving of kelp, two servings of dairy foods, or six eggs would all be capable of fulfilling the officially recommended daily requirement for iodine. ¹⁶ One serving of clams per month would fulfill the requirement for vitamin B ₁₂, ¹⁷ and a half-teaspoon of high-vitamin cod liver oil per day would fulfill the requirements for vitamins A and D. ¹⁸

It is therefore unfortunate that Fuhrman devotes no space within his book to instruct the reader on how to judiciously use the ten percent of calories allotted to animal foods. Not all of Price's primitives ate diets rich in animal products. Some groups ate diets largely centered on plant foods; these groups, however, selected extremely nutrient-dense animal foods to satisfy their nutritional requirements, such as whole insects and frogs, crustaceans, and the heads and organs of fish. They valued these foods not simply because they contain a high concentration of total nutrients, but because the specific nutrients they provide are difficult to obtain from other foods.

Defining Density

Animal products not only provide micronutrients, but also provide proteins and fats, which make them dense in calories. Since Fuhrman's ranking system defines density as nutrients per calorie, this pushes animal products even further down on the list. This system of ranking certainly has some value. Some nutrients are used up when we digest food, for example, so we want to consume more nutrients than we require for this process. The digestive requirement is not related to calories, however; starches and proteins contain many more bonds that must be broken down by enzymes compared to fats and sugars, and fermentation can dramatically change the digestibility of a substance without altering its caloric value. Some people may need to restrict total calories or calories of a certain type-those from carbohydrates, for example-and for these people a per-calorie nutrient density ranking may be very valuable.

Others, however, may find that they can only eat so much bulk. Bok choy, for instance, has four times more calcium per calorie than whole milk. Yet three and one half cups of whole milk per day will fulfill the recommended daily calcium requirement compared to six cups of bok choy. Many people may not be able to (or even want to) eat such a large volume of fibrous vegetables day in and day out.

Vegetables Are Not For Everyone

Fuhrman's dietary regime contains an enormous amount of fruits and vegetables far beyond the quantity most people consume. Although the inclusion of such a large quantity of unrefined and nutritious whole food is likely to dramatically improve many people's health, it could actually hurt the health of others. Fruits and vegetables contain chemicals called salicylates which are similar to aspirin. In some people, salicylates exert a drug-like effect that mimics an allergic reaction by causing the omega-6 fatty acid, arachidonic acid, to be converted into inflammatory chemicals called leukotrienes. These chemicals in turn cause the dilation of blood vessels, the constriction of bronchial passages and the production of mucus. Salicylate intolerance can result in asthma, hives, nasal polyps, chronic swelling and gastrointestinal symptoms. Two to four percent of outpatients attending allergy clinics, two percent of those with Crohn's disease, seven percent of those with ulcerative colitis, and fifteen to twenty percent of those who attend ear, nose and throat clinics are salicylate intolerant. These people could never survive on Fuhrman's salicylate-laden diet. ¹⁹

Clinical Success

The most compelling argument Fuhrman makes for his dietary plan is his claim of clinical success. Thousands of patients have made themselves examples of this success, he writes, and out of hundreds who have come to him with preexisting heart disease, only one has had to undergo repeat surgery after adopting his regime, and none has died of a heart attack.

There must undoubtedly be a large degree of truth to this claim. Fuhrman's diet completely excludes refined foods, including vegetable oils, and emphasizes foods rich in certain important nutrients, especially vitamin C and other water-soluble vitamins found in plant foods. Because Fuhrman prohibits added fats and oils, his patients will synthesize the fats they need from carbohydrates and other building blocks; the primary fatty acid the body synthesizes in this way is the saturated fatty acid called palmitate. The oil-rich whole foods he allows provide many antioxidants to protect against damage that free radicals can cause to the small amount of polyunsaturated fat within them. The saturated fats produced within the bodies of his patients are themselves very stable and are therefore also protective.

Lipoproteins, which circulate in the blood and carry cholesterol, fat-soluble vitamins and many other substances, are not living cells and therefore cannot synthesize glutathione and the enzymes that constitute the primary antioxidant defense system of the cell. To the extent that heart disease may be accelerated by oxidative damage to the lipoproteins that circulate in the blood, we should expect Fuhrman's diet to exert a considerable amount of protection. Patients who are wise enough to make judicious use of their ten percent of calories allotted to animal foods by consuming very nutrient-dense options like shellfish and liver, or who simply respect the guidance of their bodies enough to cheat on the diet when they feel they need to, may be able to reap the benefits of this approach for a long period of time.

Nevertheless, Fuhrman's clinical experience is likely to exhibit substantial selection bias. Those who become weak without animal products or who develop eczema and hives when they eat too many fruits and vegetables are unlikely to go knocking on his office door and agree to a plan that includes nothing but the foods that make them feel the worst. The people with the highest needs for animal-based nutrients or the lowest tolerance for the foreign chemicals unique to plants are the people who would have the least clinical success on Fuhrman's plan; these same people are unlikely to try it to begin with.

It will be interesting to see whether Fuhrman can produce a clinical trial showing positive results with his diet in a randomized sample of the population. In 1995, his similarly minded colleague, Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn Jr., published the results of a five-year intervention with a low-fat vegetarian diet combined with the individualized use of cholesterol-lowering drugs to bring cholesterol down to 150 mg/dL. ²⁰ Twenty-two percent of those who began the intervention dropped out of the study within the first two years; thirty-five percent of those who completed it did not submit to the follow-up analysis of their cardiovascular health; of the twenty-two patients who began the trial, only eleven remained in the final analysis. Of these eleven, occlusion of the blood vessels became better in five, stayed the same in one, and became worse in four. Since Esselstyn considered it unethical to allow patients under his supervision to eat a standard diet, there was no control group.

While many people would undoubtedly benefit from the restriction of polyunsaturated oils from the diet and the increased consumption of antioxidants from whole plant foods, many need vitamins B ₆ and B ₁₂, zinc, taurine, fat-soluble vitamins and other nutrients that are found much more abundantly or in much more available forms in animal foods. Naturally, these competing needs will produce the conflicting results that Esselstyn observed in his uncontrolled trial, including the ill health that may have driven some people to drop out of the study.

The solution is to drop the ideological opposition to animal products and recognize that both animal and plant products-when in their unrefined state, produced under natural conditions, grown in well-tended soil, and prepared and consumed according to the traditions on which our ancestors thrived for millennia-can make important nutritional contributions to the diet. Some people may do well on a diet centered on plant products if they also carefully take advantage of certain nutrient-dense animal products; but for many others this approach will not work. Restricting polyunsaturated oils and supporting the body's own antioxidant defense systems with the vitamins and minerals it needs would by itself likely provide many of the benefits that Fuhrman observes in his practice while simultaneously allowing us to take advantage of the rich nutrition contained in traditional animal products as well.
REFERENCES

1. Fuhrman J. Nutrient Density. http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article17.aspx. Published 2004. Accessed February 13, 2007.

2. Gropper SS, Smith JL, Groff JL. Advanced Nutrition and Human Metabolism. Fourth Edition. Wadsworth Publishing. 2004.

3. Griffith, Owen W. Biologic and pharmacologic regulation of mammalian glutathione synthesis. Free Radic Biol Med. 1999; 27(9-10): 922-935.

4. Wenzel U, Kuntz S, Brendel MD, Daniel H. Dietary Flavone Is a Potent Apoptosis Inducer in Human Colon Carcinoma Cells. Cancer Res. 2000; 60: 3823-3831.

5. Wang L-Q, James MO. Inhibition of Sulfotransferases by Xenobiotics. Curr Drug Metab. 2006; 7: 83-104.

6. Lin J, Zhang SM, Wu K, Willett WC, Fuchs CS, Giovanucci E. Flavonoid Intake and Colorectal Cancer Risk in Men and Women. Am J Epidemiol. 2006; 164(7): 644-651.

7. Bender DA. Nutritional Biochemistry of the Vitamins. Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2003.

8. Hipkiss AR. Would carnosine or a carnivorous diet help suppress aging and associated pathologies? Ann NY Acad Sci. 2006; 1067: 369-74.

9. Sandstrom B. Bioavailability of zinc. Eur J Clin Nutr. 1997; 51(Suppl 1): S17-S19.

10. Heaney RP, Weaver CM, Hinders SM, Martin B, Packard PT. Absorbability of Calcium from Brassica Vegetables: Broccoli, Bok Choy, and Kale. J Food Sci. 1993; 58(6): 1378-1380.

11. Heaney RP, Weaver CM, Recker RR. Calcium absorbability from spinach. Am J Clin Nutr. 1988; 47(4): 707-9.

12. West CE, Eilander A, van Lieschout M. Consequences of revised estimates of carotenoid bioefficacy for dietary control of vitamin A deficiency in developing countries. J Nutr. 2002; 132(9 Suppl): 2920S-2926S.

13. Gijsbers BLMG, Jie K-SG, Vermeer C. Effect of food composition on vitamin K absorption in human volunteers. Br J Nutr. 1996; 76: 223-229.

14. Chung HY, Rasmussen HM, Johson EJ. Lutein Bioavailability Is Higher from Lutein-Enriched Eggs than from Supplements and Spinach in Men. J Nutr 2004; 134: 1887-1893.

15. Reynolds RD. Bioavailability of vitamin B-6 from plant foods. Am J Clin Nutr. 1988; 48: 863-7.

16. George Matelijan Foundation. The World's Healthiest Foods. http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=nutrient&dbid=69. Accessed February 13, 2007.

17. United States Department of Agriculture. USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference, Release 17. http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/Data/SR17/wtrank/wt_rank.html. Accessed February 13, 2007.

18. Green Pastures. High-Vitamin Cod Liver Oil - Nutrition Information. http://www.greenpasture.org/products/cod_liver_oil. Accessed February 14, 2007.

19. Raithel M, Baenkler HW, Naegel A, Buchwald F, Schultis HW, Backhaus B, Kimpel S, Koch H, Mach K, Hahn EG, Konturek PC. Significance of salicylate intolerance in diseases of the lower gastrointestinal tract. J Physiol Pharmacol. 2005; 56(Supple5): 89-102.

20. Esselstyn CB Jr., Ellis SG, Medendorp SV, Crowe TD. A strategy to arrest and reverse coronary artery disease: a 5-year longitudinal study of a single physician's practice. J Fam Pract. 1995; 41(6): 560-8.

This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly magazine of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Spring 2007.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Eat to Live by Joel Fuhrman - The Weston A. Price Foundation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Eat to Live By Joel Fuhrman, MD New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2003 Reviewed by Chris Masterjohn Dr. Joel Fuhrman's Eat to Live presents a diet centered on a concept with which followers of Weston Price's research are well familiar: nutrient density.

# data[].attributes.headline
Tristram Stuart: The global food waste scandal | TED Talk | TED.com

# data[].attributes.subject
Tristram Stuart: The global food waste scandal | TED Talk | TED.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Western countries throw out nearly half of their food, not because it’s inedible -- but because it doesn’t look appealing. Tristram Stuart delves into the shocking data of wasted food, calling for a more responsible use of global resources.

# data[].attributes.headline
Why eating insects won't end world hunger - The Globe and Mail

# data[].attributes.subject
Why eating insects won't end world hunger - The Globe and Mail

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Plenty has been said about insects as an alternative source of protein with environmental benefits. And for good reason. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations predicts that by 2050 the world population will be 9.1 billion, which they say will require us to increase food production by 70 per cent. And as early as 2013, the FAO started promoting insects as an "unexplored nutrition source that can help address global food insecurity."

So naturally, entrepreneurs have begun lining up to sell insects to Canadians as an environmentally friendly cure-all, from Coast Cricket Protein (whose website claims, "Crickets leave a much lower impact on the planet than other protein sources") in British Columbia, Crickstart ("supersustainable") and Entomo Farms ("the planet's most sustainable super-food") in Ontario, to Midgard Insect Farm ("the next big thing in pet food") in Nova Scotia.

Yet, food security and business strategists say the hype butts up against real concerns over sustainable food sources - that we might just be trading one destructive food system for another.

Joshua Evans, a Canadian PhD candidate at Oxford University and co-author of On Eating Insects (Phaidon, 2017), argues that the "solution narrative" - the marketing of insects as a panacea for health, resource and climate challenges - is misleading.

"We have gotten into a bad habit of talking about specific organisms as 'sustainable' or 'unsustainable,' " Evans says, "But sustainability is not a property of organisms. It is a property of systems. If we think insects will suddenly change the catastrophic effects of monoculture and mass production, we will be sorely disappointed."

Based on his research, he believes that once production of edible insects is scaled up, the impact of feed, energy, processing and transportation will make bugs no more sustainable than conventional protein sources.

Evans argues that we placed the same expectations on soy in the mid-20th century, only to see that crop turned into a patentable product, "causing massive deforestation of the Amazon to plant vast monocultures whose yield is then shipped elsewhere so that we can continue to produce very cheap beef. Swap out soy for insects, and you have a version of the story that currently unfolds."

For field research in 2013/2014, Evans and chef Ben Reade travelled the world, eating honey ants, palm weevil larvae, termite queens ("like God's handmade sausage"), bush coconuts, larvae-ripened Sardinian cheese and Japanese wasps, learning about traditional harvesting methods from locals, their experience documented by filmmaker Andreas Johnsen in Bugs (2016).

While studying the ecological, economical and cultural aspect of eating insects, the pair is keen on the taste factor. But part way through the project, they grow wary that their research is merely setting up international food conglomerates to swoop in, monetize and dominate the market.

There are some signals that global food corporations are eyeing that possibility. At a food conference in 2016, General Mills technology director Erika Smith expressed the company's openness to the idea of insects. A trend report from food and agriculture conglomerate Cargill predicts the market for "third-generation alternative proteins" (which includes insects) will grow in the coming years. And last year, PepsiCo (which makes Doritos, Quaker Oats and Cheetos) posted a request for proposal, seeking new protein sources for use in snacks and beverages. The RFP says they are open to insect protein, and that they've already experimented with cricket and mealworm powder.

But even if they find some bugs that taste good in Fritos, cost and logistics of mass production pose a barrier. Smith, the General Mills technology director, says more research needs to be done on food safety, and the cost needs to come down.

"The problem is that they have to make a pretty big upfront investment to make insects cheap enough to be really competitive with grain flour," says Paul Rozin, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania whose research focuses on our attitudes toward food.

"It's a risk. They have to invest in large-scale production of insects and they have to breed insects to make them better-tasting and more efficient to produce."

North American farmed insects present a different set of problems.

"Right now we're a premium product," says Dan Novak, founder of Crickstart, whose crickets are grown and harvested by Entomo Farms in Norwood, Ont., and processed in Montreal. The organic crickets are fed oats, flax, alfalfa sprouts, soy, corn and peas. But Novak says the major cost factor for the company's lemon lime, chili chocolate and cinnamon cardamom bars, which retail for $3.50, is labour and lack of scale. "Other agricultural industries are heavily automated and apply massive economies of scale. We're still far from that, but as people purchase these products, production volumes increase and new entrants come into the industry, prices will be driven down over the coming years."

Novak likens crickets to the Tesla electric car, believing that the price will come down as production scales up. "Any movement like this requires early adopters, passionate about the long-term potential, to kickstart the industry."

However, two recent studies have come to the opposite conclusion. According to "Crickets Are Not a Free Lunch: Protein Capture from Scalable Organic Side-Streams via High-Density Populations of Acheta domesticus" (Plos One, 2015), as cricket production is scaled up, the feed conversion ratio (amount of food to reach harvestable size) gets higher and therefore less efficient. The paper finds that crickets could only supplement global protein supply if we develop feed that is better and cheaper than what we use for livestock. "Entomophagy and Power" (Journal of Insects as Food and Feed, 2016) additionally argues that unlike meat, which is often sold raw, insects require processing to be made palatable for a mass audience (grinding, dehydrating, freeze-drying), all of which use significant energy.

They also require pairing with other ingredients. The Crickstart bars are more hemp, pumpkin-seed butter and sunflower-seed butter than they are cricket.

But edible-insect entrepreneurs have at least one clear advantage over traditional livestock farmers. Even with a million crickets raised in a shoebox, not even PETA is likely to shed a tear for the conditions in which insects are kept.

Most of us don't have empathy for them. But for that same reason, this potential food source is viewed as creeping, crawling, hard-shelled, tiny aliens. So it's hard to entice consumers to pop an insect into their mouths. In North America, our puritanical brains have been programmed to rebel at the thought, but insects are eaten all over the world. ("We're not so sure that scorpions and seaweed will replace steak and a salad any time soon," reads a blog post about the future of food on Nestlé's website. "Although we're happy to be proved wrong!")

Rozin, who has no doubt that people will come to accept entomophagy if it's sold hard enough, says that the disgust many people feel toward insects is entirely psychological and not based on actual taste.

Even if hurdles such as cost and ick-factor can be overcome, the bottom line, some experts say, is that the problem with insects as a solution for world hunger is - that they're not. People go hungry because of poverty, not a lack of supply.

The three causes of malnutrition, says Harold Alderman, senior research fellow with the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, are inadequate access to food, insufficient health services/sanitation and limited understanding or the time to practise proper child care.

"As long as there are income differences there will be consumption differences when it comes to food," Alderman says. "Income assistance is a more direct and immediate means for preventing undernutrition than increasing production."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
food and agriculture organization of the united nations

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
edible insects no panacea for world hunger

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why eating insects won't end world hunger

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Plenty has been said about insects as an alternative source of protein with environmental benefits. And for good reason. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations predicts that by 2050 the world population will be 9.1 billion, which they say will require us to increase food production by 70 per cent.

# data[].attributes.body
Damian Williams' links re fact checking

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
Damian Williams | Author | Trainer | Speaker

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Damian Williams | Author | Trainer | Speaker

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Damian Williams: author, teacher trainer and speaker. Information on my work and how to contact me.

# data[].attributes.headline
How to integrate critical thinking at lower levels | National Geographic Learning: In Focus

# data[].attributes.subject
How to integrate critical thinking at lower levels | National Geographic Learning: In Focus

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Critical thinking is often associated with teaching students at higher language levels. Perhaps it's because the kinds of problem-solving tasks which are associated with critical thinking require a level of English at Intermediate or above. Maybe it's also that the kind of language used to describe critical thinking skills includes high level terminology including analysis, evaluation, reflection, reasoned, rationale, bias and so on. Whatever the reason(s), there's a tendency when we teach students with lower levels of English to only use activities and tasks which draw on lower order thinking (remembering, understanding, applying) instead of using higher order thinking tasks (analyzing, evaluating, creating). There's also the danger that low-level speakers of English can be treated as if they have low-level intelligence when this is clearly this is not the case.

The challenge therefore is to include activities and tasks which encourage lower and higher order thinking but which are achievable with language at an elementary or pre-intermediate level, an even at beginner level in some situations. Here are some suggestions of ways to start integrating critical thinking at lower levels. They are taken from my webinar on the topic which you can watch in full at the end of this post.
1. Make the most of the language that your students already have
Many critical thinking tasks often require students to ask questions, expression opinions and give reasons. Even students with a low-level of English can achieve this by using the following words and phrases which are normally introduced at beginner-elementary (A1-A2) level:

Question words: what, where, who, why, when, which, how

Expressing opinion: I think/believe/know that...I agree/disagree that...What do you think?

Giving reasons and options: because, so, or

Comparing and contrasting: it's better than/best, more/most important, but, however

Adding and exemplifying: and, also, for example

2. Get students to say 'why'
Encouraging students to give reasons for their answers or opinions at lower levels is a useful step towards developing critical thinking. To do this, we often follow-up on a students' viewpoint by asking them to answer the question, 'Why do you think that?' or when we have classroom group discussions, saying to the group to give reasons for their ideas.

Here's a simple way (below) to extend a vocabulary exercise using this same principle. In the first task, (taken from Life Elementary second edition) students categorize opinion words and phrases in the table. The second step is a personalization task in which students choose an opinion adjective to complete the four sentences that follow but also to add the reason for their answer after the word because. It's a simple but effective way to increase the challenge and make the vocabulary more memorable.
3. Have students create exercises
We often teach new vocabulary using lower order exercises such as fill-the-gaps. This is fine for helping students to remember and understand but it doesn't make use of higher order thinking. Once students have become familiar with the format of many basic language exercise, one solution is to have students create their own exercise and test their partner. Here's an example of this from a lesson on the topic of household furniture. Having completed exercise 1, the students create their own version using other vocabulary. It's effective practice of both language and higher order thinking.
4. Go beyond the basic comprehension question.
When using reading and listening texts in the classroom, we often set comprehension questions with yes/no answers or true/false solutions. These types of questions are useful but it's also important to go beyond them. Use texts which demand a personal response from the students, or set tasks where the students have to read or listen again more deeply. For example, in the reading task below, students read about the same topic (a city in Colombia) but written in two different ways.

Read two different paragraphs about the same topic. In each paragraph, who is the reader? (students? tourists? locals? etc.)

Cali in southwest Colombia is a city with a lot of new business. It has a good airport for visitors, with comfortable hotels. There is good public transport, but the taxis are the fastest way to get around. Most good restaurants are in the centre of Cali and serve a mix of traditional and international food.

2.People in Cali work hard and play even harder! The city is famous for its music and nightclubs. It's the home of Salsa in Colombia and you can take courses with some of the best dancers in the world. August and September are good months to visit because of the Festival of Pacific music and the World Festival of Salsa.

Instead of using comprehension questions, the task makes students analyse the two texts for the type of vocabulary and topics that the writer uses. It gives them a sense how we write for specific readers which will inform their own writing skills.
5. Grade the critical thinking task as well as the language
In the same way that we assume it's appropriate to grade the language for lower levels, you can also take the same critical thinking skill and adjust it according to the level. The examples below are based on exercises from Life Elementary and Life Pre-Intermediate. They both develop students' awareness of how to distinguish fact from opinion in a reading text. However, example 2 from the pre-intermediate level increases the level of difficulty by adding a third category where students have to notice how a writer reports other people's opinions as well as his/her own.
Example 1 Example 2
For more ideas on how to integrate critical thinking at lower levels and for more detail on the ideas mentioned in this post, watch a recording of the webinar by John Hughes on this topic.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How to integrate critical thinking at lower levels

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Critical thinking is often associated with teaching students at higher language levels. Perhaps it's because the kinds of problem-solving tasks which are associated with critical thinking require a level of English at Intermediate or above. Maybe it's also that the kind of language used to describe critical thinking skills includes high level terminology including analysis, evaluation, reflection, reasoned, rationale, bias and so on.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Curriculum of the Future: From the 'New Sociology of Education' to a Critical Theory of Learning by Michael F. D. Young | NOOK Book (eBook) | Barnes & Noble®

# data[].attributes.subject
The Curriculum of the Future: From the 'New Sociology of Education' to a Critical Theory of Learning by Michael F. D. Young | NOOK Book (eBook) | Barnes & Noble®

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Curriculum of the Future: From the 'New Sociology of Education' to a Critical Theory of Learning

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The NOOK Book (eBook) of the The Curriculum of the Future: From the 'New Sociology of Education' to a Critical Theory of Learning by Michael F. D. Young at

# data[].attributes.headline
Cultural Cognition Is Why People Don't Trust The Scientific Consensus

# data[].attributes.subject
Cultural Cognition Is Why People Don't Trust The Scientific Consensus

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
If people formed their beliefs on controversial matters just by expert opinion and evidence, the participants' answers should have been split down the middle, regardless of worldview. As we're sure you've guessed, that's not what happened.

On the issue of global warming, "hierarchical individualists" were more likely to believe that experts were divided, while "egalitarian communitarians" believed that most experts agreed.

On the idea that concealed handgun laws decrease crime, it was reversed: more communitarians believed experts disagreed with the statement, and more individualists believed they agreed.

When it came to judging the trustworthiness of expert opinion, it was even worse: each group's answer depended heavily on the content of the book excerpt. If the Ph.D. professor said global warming was a big risk to the planet, individualists said he wasn't trustworthy and communitarians said he was. If the same professor said there wasn't clear evidence for global warming's risks, the answers flipped.

If you've ever wondered why people have such wildly different opinions when it comes to something as seemingly cut and dry as science, this is why. Your worldview and cultural identity don't just color your beliefs about subjective things, but objective reality as well. The most important thing to remember is that it's not just "them" who do this-it's you, too. Don't believe us? Take Psychology Today's cultural cognition quiz to see just how much your identity affects your views.
Is there something you're curious about? Send us a note or email us at editors (at) curiosity.com. And follow Curiosity on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Cultural Cognition Is Why People Don't Trust The ...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
From evolution to climate change, there are plenty of scientific topics that have the public embroiled in controversy - even though almost all of the scientific community lands on one side. How is that possible? If the experts agree on something, why doesn't the public listen?

# data[].attributes.headline
A global survey of critical thinking in the ELT classroom | National Geographic Learning: In Focus

# data[].attributes.subject
A global survey of critical thinking in the ELT classroom | National Geographic Learning: In Focus

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
As many teachers who use ELT titles from National Geographic Learning will be aware, critical thinking is a key feature of the materials and informs our approach to English Language teaching. Now, authors Paul Dummett and John Hughes are carrying out research into how critical thinking is applied and integrated into ELT education in different parts of the world and they would like to invite you to take part in a survey. The aim is to explore teacher perceptions of critical thinking and how it is applied globally.

To take part in the survey, please click on this link and follow the instructions. We estimate it will take no more than 5 minutes and would really appreciate your input.

Thanks in advance for taking part in our survey. We hope to present key findings from the survey on the In Focus blog later in the year.

For more information on critical thinking, make sure to register for John Hughes' upcoming webinar Critical thinking with lower level language students on March 5 th!

For more information on critical thinking, make sure to check out the recording of John Hughes' webinar Critical thinking in English Language Teaching.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A global survey of critical thinking in the ELT classroom

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As many teachers who use ELT titles from National Geographic Learning will be aware, critical thinking is a key feature of the materials and informs our approach to English Language teaching.

# data[].attributes.headline
If We Eliminate Out-Group Hate, We May Also Undermine In-Group Love

# data[].attributes.subject
If We Eliminate Out-Group Hate, We May Also Undermine In-Group Love

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The world seems to be getting more empathetic. Americans donate to charity at record rates. People feel the pain of suffering in geographically distant countries brought to our attention by advances in communications and transportation. Violence, seen on historical timescales, is decreasing.

The great modern humanitarian project of expanding the scope of our empathy to include the entire human race seems to be working. Our in-group (those we choose to include in our inner circle and to spend our energies on) is growing, and our out-group (everybody else) shrinking. But there's a wrinkle in this perfect picture: Our instinctive tendency to categorize the world into "us" and "them" is difficult to overcome. It is in our nature to favor helping in-group members like friends, family, or fellow citizens, and to neglect or even punish out-group members. Even as some moral circles expand, others remain stubbornly fixed, or even contract: Just think of Democrats and Republicans, Sunnis and Shiites, Duke and North Carolina basketball fans.

Lance King/Getty Images

The endpoint of the liberal humanitarian project, which is universal empathy, would mean no boundary between in-group and out-group. In aiming for this goal, we must fight our instincts. That is possible, to a degree. Research confirms that people can strengthen their moral muscles and blur the divide between in-group and out-group. Practicing meditation, for example, can increase empathy, improving people's ability to decode emotions from people's facial expressions ¹ and making them more likely to offer a chair ² to someone with crutches. Simply increasing people's beliefs in the malleability of empathy increases the empathy they express toward ideologically and racially dissimilar others. ³ And when all else fails, people respond to financial gain. My co-authors and I have shown that introducing monetary incentives for accurate perspective-taking increased Democrats' and Republicans' ability to understand each other and to believe that political resolutions were possible. ⁴

But these exercises can take us only so far. In fact, there is a terrible irony in the assumption that we can ever transcend our parochial tendencies entirely. Social scientists have found that in-group love and out-group hate originate from the same neurobiological basis, are mutually reinforcing, and co-evolved-because loyalty to the in-group provided a survival advantage by helping our ancestors to combat a threatening out-group. That means that, in principle, if we eliminate out-group hate completely, we may also undermine in-group love. Empathy is a zero-sum game.

Just as even the most determined athlete cannot overcome the limits of the human body, we cannot escape the limits of our moral capabilities.

Also in Psychology

By Susie Neilson

It starts without warning-or rather, the warnings are there, but your ability to detect them exists only in hindsight. First you're sitting in the car with your son, then he tells you: "I cannot find my old self again." You...READ MORE

Absolute universalism, in which we feel compassion for every individual on Earth, is psychologically impossible. Ignoring this fact carries a heavy cost: We become paralyzed by the unachievable demands we place on ourselves. We can see this in our public discourse today. Discussions of empathy fluctuate between worrying that people don't empathize enough and fretting that they empathize too much with the wrong people. These criticisms both come from the sense that we have an infinite capacity to empathize, and that it is our fault if we fail to use it.

In 2006, then-Senator Barack Obama spoke at Northwestern University's commencement bemoaning the country's "empathy deficit" and urging people "to see the world through those who are different from us." Several studies supported Obama's concern: People in the 21st century exhibit less empathy ⁵ and more narcissism ⁶ than in decades past. A torrent of think-pieces have lamented and diagnosed this empathy decline.

And then the pendulum swung back. People do care, newspaper editorialists and social-media commenters granted. But they care inconsistently: grieving for victims of Brussels' recent attacks and ignoring Yemen's recent bombing victims; expressing outrage over ISIS rather than the much deadlier Boko Haram; mourning the death of Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe while overlooking countless human murder victims. There are far worthier tragedies, they wrote, than the ones that attract the most public empathy.

Almost any attempt to draw attention to some terrible event in the world elicits these complaints, as though misallocated empathy was more consequential than the terrible event itself. If we recognized that we have a limited quantity of empathy to begin with, it would help to cure some of the acrimony and self-flagellation of these discussions. The truth is that, just as even the most determined athlete cannot overcome the limits of the human body, so too we cannot escape the limits of our moral capabilities. We must begin with a realistic assessment of what those limits are, and then construct a scientific way of choosing which values matter most to us.

We can and do override our moral instincts using our more logical and deliberative mode of thinking, so the in-group vs. out-group opposition is not absolute. But we have limited cognitive resources, which rapidly become depleted. For example, keeping a nine-digit insurance policy number in mind without writing it down requires working memory, and can impair our ability to recall other information, like the phone number of the insurance agent. Similar constraints cause what is known as decision fatigue: Deliberating over an initial series of decisions can inhibit thoughtfulness in later decisions, as observed in judges deciding whether to grant prisoners parole earlier and later in the day. ⁷ Similarly, full compassion requires inhibitory control (regulating our own emotions to distinguish them from another person's emotions), self-reflection, externally focused attention, and recognition of another person's suffering. These faculties, too, can tire.

A data-based approach to identifying and ranking universal values calls on us to make use of the limits on morality that are inherent to all of us as human beings.

Morality can't be everywhere at once-we humans have trouble extending equal compassion to foreign earthquake victims and hurricane victims in our own country. Our capacity to feel and act prosocially toward another person is finite. And one moral principle can constrain another. Even political liberals who prize universalism recoil when it distracts from a targeted focus on socially disadvantaged groups. Empathy draws our attention toward particular targets, and whether that target represents the underprivileged, blood relatives, refugees from a distant country, or players on a sports team, those targets obscure our attention from other equally (or more) deserving ones.

That means we need to abandon an idealized cultural sensitivity that gives all moral values equal importance. We must instead focus our limited moral resources on a few values, and make tough choices about which ones are more important than others. Collectively, we must decide that these actions affect human happiness more than those actions, and therefore the first set must be deemed more moral than the second set.

Once we abandon the idea of universal empathy, it becomes clear that we need to build a quantitative moral calculus to help us choose when to extend our empathy. Empathy, by its very nature, seems unquantifiable, but behavioral scientists have developed techniques to turn people's vague instincts into hard numbers. Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School has suggested that moral concepts like fairness and dignity can be assessed using a procedure he calls breakeven analysis. Do people feel that the benefits of a given course of action justify the costs? If so, the action is worth taking. For example, we may judge that invasive phone-hacking is moral if the cost of invasion of privacy is countered with the benefit of preventing one terrorist attack at some minimum frequency, say, every five and a half years.

Furthermore, survey data from people across the globe can reveal what people consider the most important factors in their happiness and suffering. Advances in survey methods that examine happiness associated with specific daily events ⁸ or that use smartphone technology to assess happiness ⁹ at a moment-to-moment basis have improved on basic self-report methods. Implicit measures that capture how quickly people associate words related to the self ("me") with words related to happiness ("elated") have begun to capture aspects of happiness separable from explicit reports of happiness. And neuroimaging methods have identified neural signatures of both hedonic well-being (related to pleasure) and eudaimonic well-being (related to meaning in life).

Basing our moral criteria on maximizing happiness is not simply a philosophical choice, but rather a scientifically motivated one: Empirical data confirm that happiness improves physical health, enhancing immune function and reducing stress, both of which contribute to longevity. Shouldn't our moral choice be the one that maximizes our collective well-being? These data sets can give us moral "prostheses," letting us evaluate different values side-by-side-and helping us to discard those lesser values that obstruct more meaningful ones. The only wrong choice when it comes to morals is "all of the above."

UN.org

These approaches can help us create a universal moral code-something that can serve as a moral guide in all cases, even if we are not able to actually apply it to all people all the time. Indeed, numerous scientifically rigorous descriptive theories of universal values already exist: Shalom Schwartz's theory of basic values and Jonathan Haidt and colleagues' Moral Foundations Theory, among others. We've tried to create a universal code before: In 1946, the United Nations established an 18-member committee of varying nationalities to formulate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Two additional U.N. committees reviewed the draft before the General Assembly voted to adopt it in 1948. Still, it relied on the opinions of elites rather than of a broader populace. Today, we could take a more data-driven approach.

As a case study, take Apple's recent battle with the FBI over unlocking an iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters. The FBI requested that Apple circumvent the iPhone's encryption that protects the user's personal data (before ultimately doing so itself). The case pitted personal security (protection from government surveillance) against national security (determining whether the San Bernardino attack involved coordination with ISIS). The balance is a difficult one to strike, and it was largely argued in an adversarial way that magnified differences of opinion.

We could be more systematic. We could use a standardized score to examine how violations of personal security and national security affect happiness. This could allow us to state that certain values are more universal than others, and are therefore more central to human well-being. Such an effort could tell us, perhaps, that on average the anxiety people feel regarding the possibility of the government reading their text messages is greater than the distress caused by experiencing or anticipating a terrorist attack. If so, Apple would emerge as more "morally right" than the FBI (or vice versa).

A data-based approach to identifying and ranking universal values is ambitious to be sure. But, crucially, it calls on us to make use of the limits on morality that are inherent to all of us as human beings, rather than lamenting them. These constraints challenge us to focus our attention, and drive us to see that not all values are equally valid. Instead of indefinitely fighting over tradeoffs between in-group- and out-group-oriented moralities, we might find that picking among universally held values is more palatable, efficient, and uniting-providing a moral function in and of itself. In place of the usual, default concentric circles of in-groups that guide us today (family, friends, neighbors, citizens) we would have the tools to carefully engineer to whom we should extend our empathy, and when.

Think of the great progress physicists made when they acknowledged the limitations of the physical world-nothing can move faster than light, or be perfectly localized in the subatomic realm. Similarly, we will make our greatest moral progress when we accept and work within the limitations of human moral cognition, and forego an unrealistic concern for respecting difference and moral diversity at any cost.
Adam Waytz is a social psychologist and professor at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. He studies humanization, dehumanization, and the moral implications of these processes. References
1. Mascaro, J.S., Rilling, J.K., Tenzin Negi, L., & Raison, C.L. Compassion meditation enhances empathic accuracy and related neural activity. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 8, 48-55 (2013).

2. Condon, P., Desbordes, G., Miller, W.B., & DeSteno, D. Meditation Increases Compassionate Responses to Suffering. Psychological Science 24, 2125-2127 (2013).

3. Schumann, K., Zaki, J., & Dweck, C.S. Addressing the empathy deficit: Beliefs about the malleability of empathy predict effortful responses when empathy is challenging. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 107, 475-493 (2014).

4. Waytz, A., Young, L.L., & Ginges, J. Motive attribution asymmetry for love vs. hate drives intractable conflict. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, 15687-15692 (2014).

5. Konrath, S.H., O'Brien, E.H., & Hsing, C. Changes in dispositional empathy in American college students over time: A meta-analysis. Personality and Social Psychology Review 15, 180-198 (2011).

6. Twenge, J.M. & Campbell, W.K. The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement Atria Books, New York, NY (2010).

7. Danziger, S., Levav, J., & Avnaim-Pesso, L. Extraneous factors in judicial decisions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, 6889-6892 (2010).

8. Kahneman, D., Krueger, A.B., Schkade, D., Schwartz, N., & Stone, A.A. A survey method for characterizing daily life experience: The day reconstruction method. Science 306, 1776-1780 (2004).

9. Killingsworth, M.A. & Gilbert, D.T. A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science 330, 932 (2010).
This article was originally published in our "Boundaries" issue in April, 2016.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
journal of personality and social psychology

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
personality and social psychology review

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
proceedings of the national academy of sciences

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
No, You Can't Feel Sorry for Everyone - Issue 51: Limits - Nautilus

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The world seems to be getting more empathetic. Americans donate to charity at record rates. People feel the pain of suffering in geographically distant countries brought to our attention by advances in communications and transportation. Violence, seen on historical timescales, is decreasing.