Problem with USDA protein recommendations

 

Principles of USDA dietary guidelines 

The 2020-2025 USDA dietary guidelines emphasize the following principles (among other things): 

1. Dietary cholesterol consumption should be as low as possible. 
2. Saturated fat should be limited to less than 10 percent of calories. 
3. At least 30 grams (varies by age) of fiber per day. (points out that more than 90% of women and 97% of men do not meet this minimum recommendation).  
   

The "other things" mentioned above is that dietary patterns must include lots of fruits, vegetables and whole grains.  I have seen the same recommendations from many doctors and organizations I respect.

 

Recommendations for protein sources

When it comes to recommending specific protein food, it recommends the following: 

Lean meats, poultry, and eggs; seafood; beans, peas, and lentils, and nuts, seeds, and soy products. 

Well, lets see how these foods stand up to their own principles. Below is a table showing some nutritional information for some of the above mentioned protein sources. I normalized according to protein content as they are cited as protein food. 

The first 4 are animal based sources, and the last 3 are plant based sources. We can make the following observations. 

Cholesterol

The animal based food are high in cholesterol, whereas plant based sources have zero cholesterol.  Notice the ridiculously high cholesterol content in eggs!!  To get a perspective of how big these numbers are, the RDA for dietary cholesterol used to be 300 mg per day for healthy people, and 200 mg a day for people with risk factors. However, as the dangers of dietary cholesterol are becoming clearer, the guidelines have now changed to "as little as possible" putting dietary cholesterol in the same category as trans fats. If they are follow their own principle on dietary cholesterol, then their specific food recommendations should be restricted to plant based sources. 

Saturated fat

Animal based foods are much higher in saturated fats relative to plants. The only animal based source which is somewhat comparable is chicken breast, but all the rest are at least 10 times higher in saturated fat. The dietary guidelines committee recognizes that only 23% of individuals consume saturated fat within limits due to poor eating habits which include food sources with added saturated fats. While they do recommend strategies to reduce saturated fat intake, it seems they are losing a valuable opportunity while recommending protein sources. 

Fiber

As the guidelines emphasize, there is a national crisis when it comes to fiber. Almost all Americans are deficient in fiber. As the table above shows, animal based sources have zero fiber, whereas plant based sources which are rich in protein (the legume family) also tend to be very high in fiber. In fact, they are probably the richest sources of fiber amongst all food. Once again, if the USDA dietary guidelines committee is really concerned about fiber deficiency, they should restrict their protein recommendations to plant based sources. 

The above three points are summarized in the table below

The conflict of interest

In keeping with the principles of dietary patterns laid out, it seems that the USDA guidelines should stick to plant based protein sources. Then why are they not? My guess is because they have to protect the interests of the meat and egg industries as it is a part of their mandate. As is clear in this discussion, this conflict of interest is creating contradictions in their recommendations. 

What I learnt from discussing about veganism with a muslim

 After a long and rather frustrating conversation, here is what I learnt about his worldview: "If something is explicitly permitted in the Quran, it is by definition not immoral". The problem is, there are immoral things stated in the Quran, and people like him will likely keep their head in the sand about it. 

In the discussion, the following argument was repeated multiple time: 

Me: Do you agree that killing animals and eating them is not necessary for living a healthy life? 

Him: Yes. 

Me: Do you agree that it is immoral to kill animals unnecessarily? 

Him: Yes. 

Me: Then, doesn't it follow that killing animals for eating is immoral? 

Him: No. 

At this point I am perplexed. This is as straight forward a logic as it gets. 

Me: How does that not follow logic? 

Him: Because it is permitted in Quran. Quran explicitly states that we can eat 4 species of animals. 

After 4 or 5 rounds of me walking him through this logic and asking him how he is not contradicting himself, he finally made me change the statement

"It is immoral to kill animals unnecessarily" 

to 

"It is immoral to kill animals unnecessarily unless they belong to those 4 specific species"

After that the argument turned to why it is immoral to kill some species and not these 4. His answer was because the Quran says so. According to him, his entire morality is just based on what the Quran says, not based on any principles or knowledge or thought. 

During the discussion, he also tried to justify eating animals the following ways: 

- If you look at the record, there is not shortage of animals we eat, whereas the rest of the animals are dyeing out. Why do you think that is? Because god has his blessing on these animals and he is providing them for us. 

       - When I pointed out that the only reason they are not in shortage is that we are breeding them, he changed the subject.

Him: There may be [additional] health benefits to eating animals. 

I showed him the Academy of nutrition and dietetics statement about nutritional adequacy of begin a vegan, and asked him

Me:  Do you agree that killing animals and eating them is not necessary for living a healthy life?

Him: Yes

Me: Then how is it not a contradiction with your previous statement "There may be health benefits to eating animals. " 

Him: Because it is permitted in Quran. 

I hope the reader can understand why a discussion filled with arguments like these can be frustrating. What really pains me is that this person is my colleague, an Engineering professor in a University who is supposed to be teaching students how to think systematically. Unfortunately, this is not the only Engineering professor I have had such conversations with. Our discussions about teaching methods and how to improve teaching outcomes also follow similarly frustrating discussions. 

This is one of the many occasions which make me reflect on where I am working, who my colleagues are how important it is to take an active role in designing my career and being in a place where I can respect my colleagues. 

Why Physics teachers must read and teach history

 Teaching physics to students it to take a mind which doesn't know a much about laws of nature other than what they have accumulated through their everyday experience. Fundamentally, this transformation of “state of mind” is similar to the transformation of “state of knowledge” of human civilization about natural laws. However, the process of teaching physics to students stands very different from the story of how we as human discovered these laws.

Take atomic theory for example. It took over 200 years of investigation and developments in fields of chemistry, electricity, optics and study of gases to finally gather evidence for the completely non-obvious fact that matter is made of atoms, and different elements have different atomic structures. The world view changed slowly over time through critical inquiry of many (sometimes accidental) observations. Yet, our students are just provided the end result as if that is how knowledge is obtained: by someone or some textbook telling you.

By telling them ““what we know” without the details about “how we know”, we are giving our students a wrong impression about how knowledge is obtained. Perhaps, this is one of the contributing factor in explaining why it is so easy to spread misinformation.  

Students and motivation

The argument which often surfaces during my discussions with colleagues about teaching practices is as follows: 

If students are motivated they will do well, and if they are not, they won't. Everything else doesn't matter. 

Some thoughts on this:

1. Most students are not self-motivated. There are many reasons for this including, 
• In college because that is what they thought they were supposed to do and didn't know what else to do. 
• Just want a degree so that they can get a job. 
• Course is not important to them and they are taking it just because it is required. 
• Distracted because of personal problems. 
• Working too much because of financial problems. 
• ... This list can get pretty long, so I will stop here. 
2. Incentives matter. Motivation doesn't automatically imply discipline and time management skills. The degree of focus and effort dedicated to coursework depends a lot on the incentive structure. One needs only to ask this hypothetical question: "What if homework assignments are not required?". Would we really think that would not impact their learning? 
3. Motivation does not automatically imply critical thinking skills and deep learning approaches. Most well motivated students who are working hard are quite content with memorization and procedure-replication if that is what they are used to and if those practices get them a good grade. 

Conversation with a student

 This email exchange was after a verbal discussion. The context was that the student made fundamental mistakes in a quiz, realized that is what happened but was upset about losing points. 

Student: 

I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to talk to me after class today. I have a problem with relating my self worth to my grades, so I tend to get overly emotional and anxious when I feel like I am doing poorly. Usually I understand topics like this fairly easily, so feeling lost sometimes has been making me anxious and stressed. I appreciate your reassurance that my grade will be fine in the end as long as I keep applying myself. I also really appreciate you still talking to me and not writing me off when I was getting emotional. Thank you very much for your patience and understanding. I will continue to do my best in class.

My response: 

I am glad you came to me and expressed your thoughts. You care about your learning, so I think it is healthy to get emotional. I don't show it much, but I get very emotional (sometimes angry and frustrated) about teaching too.  In the end we must remember that is because we care, which is a good thing. 

I understand what you are saying about feeling anxious when you are lost. Here are my thoughts: from my observations, you are not usually lost. In fact, you are following the material better than most students in the class. What does happen sometimes is that you make mistakes or make incorrect assumptions or fail to recognize that you are looking at a slightly different context than what you saw before. This is perfectly normal when you are learning new material. 

The fact that you are not used to this implies to me that your previous courses did not set the expectations high enough, and that is obviously not your fault. The exam questions usually don't test your ability to apply your knowledge in a new context, and as such, I think most of my students have a low expectation of what it means to earn an A in a course. My opinion about an A grade is that "you mastered the material", which implies your ability to solve new problems or problems in a new context using your existing knowledge. 

In my experience, students who listen to my advice (like you are doing) and work through this initial "making mistakes" phase, eventually earn an A in my courses.

Systemic approach to improve quality of food consumption

 A collaboration between physicians, grocery stores, insurance companies and data analytics companies to combat diseases caused by food, diseases which can be controlled or reversed by dietary interventions. 

For knowledgeable and well-meaning physicians, the motivation and benefits are obvious. 

Grocery stores can have a "weekly grocery" program where the items are curated by physicians with some limited flexibility. This may also increase their predictability on demand, and it is likely they will have steady customers even after the program ends. 

Insurance companies can either subsidize the cost or even pay for it for a certain duration. What is a better motivator than "free food"? Considering that they don't have to pay for expensive medication when the medical conditions reverse, they may end up saving a lot of money. 

Data analytics companies can play a role in tracking nutrients, using nudge tactics, and prediction to provide estimates of "correct" times for interventions or doing more tests. (they could possibly do a lot more). 

Will this work? 

Are we really more moral than slave owners?

 I recall saying to this to my friends a few times, "What would be a current day analogy to the practice of human slavery in the past? It would be how we treat animals." 

Certainly, people back then did not think it was moral to do so, but used various excuses to rationalize it and/or suppress those thoughts and go on about their lives. Otherwise decent people who enslaved other people would probably have said "everyone else is doing it", and people who benefited from low cost of goods at the expense of those enslaved would probably have said, "I have to live, and I am not the one enslaving". 

I am guilty of such rationalizing all these years knowing full well how animals I am eating were treated all their life before they were slaughtered, often in-humanely. They are tortured horribly all their life before being converted into nuggets and packages which we buy at the counter, or order from our tables. Pigs and Cows are so emotionally mature that they are social, show love to their off-springs, and even to humans if the effort is made. Yet, I am guilty of suppressing those thoughts. When I am trying to understand people living in bubbles, this rather shameful chapter of my life should serve as a helping tool. 

I am writing this now while attempting to transition to plant based food only, but my guilt is not the main reason I am attempting this transition. Rather, it is for my health. I hope I learn my lesson from this and try to do the right things in the Future (for the right reasons). 

America is has been moving towards the left

1. Gay marriage: Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) defined marriage as between a man and a women, and allowed states to discriminate against same sex couples. It was deemed unconstitutional by the supreme court in 2015. Gay people were banned from being in the military. Bill Clinton managed to throw a think veil on the law by enacting the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy. That policy was repealed in 2010, and a federal court ruled ban of gay people from a military unconstitutional in 2011. 
2. Climate change: The percentage of Americans who say dealing with global climate change should be a priority for the president and the congress increased from 30% in 2008 to 52% in 2020. 
3. Abortion: in 2019, about 61% of Americans say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. The percentage of people with this view grew from 63% in 2007 to 82% in 2019 among democrats, while it remained about the same among republicans. 
4. Evolution: A growing percentage of high school teachers teach Evolution as a broad consensus among scientists. The proportion grew from 51% in 2007 to 67% in 2019.  
5. Immigration: The percentage of Americans who say legal immigration should be increased went up from 10% in 2001 to 32% in 2018 and the percentage who say it should be decreased went down from 53% in 2001 to 24% in 2018.   74% of Americans support giving a legal status to undocumented people brought to the United States as children. About 10% of eligible voters in 2020 were naturalized citizens. 
6. Health care: About 60% of Americans consistently held the viewpoint that it is the government's responsibility to ensure health care for all and support for a single payer system has grown from 59% in 2019 to 63% in 2020. 

In all of the above cases, republicans are in the minority. 

Social security is an investment, not just a safety net

 No, I don't mean it in the way that individual tax payer is investing/saving a part of their salary so that they he/she can get it back later. 

The money in the social security trust fund is invested in treasury bonds. What this means is the money people pay into the social security fund is "loaned" to the government which is then free to use the money in any way it pleases, as long as it pays the interest. In this way, we are investing in the country when we make social security payments. 

???? does this make sense? 

Trump administrations' systematic attack on immigration

 

H1B

• June 22, 2020: Trump issued an executive order freezing all new H1B (along with many other) visas. 
• The rationale was that this would protect Americans from Covid infections. The government provided this rationale while downplaying the impacts of Covid domestically. This order is still in effect. 
• October 28, 2020: USCIS increased the salary requirements for H1B workers citing this will protect US jobs. 
• December 4, 2020: A US district court vacated this order. If allowed to be enforced, this would have effectively reduced the number of  H1B visas. 

Green cards

• April 22, 2020: Trump issued a executive order freezing issuance of all green cards (with few exceptions) for people outside the United States.  
• The rationale was that this would protect Americans from Covid infections. The government provided this rationale while downplaying the impacts of Covid domestically. This order is still in effect. 

F1 

• July 6, 2020: Government announces F1 visas will not be granted to students taking only online courses. Students who are already in the US and taking only online courses must leave the country. 
• Several states filed a law suite immediately after issuing this rule, and the government reversed its decision. 

DACA 

• September 5, 2017: DOJ announced that it rescinding the DACA program. 
• After lengthy court battles, supreme court reversed this rescission. Acting DHS secretary Chad Wolf refused to follow the courts order. That resulted in another law suit, and a federal judge ruled that Mr. Wolf did not have the authority to refuse the court's order because he was not appointed to that position properly. The constitutionality of the program is still being litigated in courts. 
• DACA is an executive program. The legal battles and uncertainty of millions of people living in the US can be avoided if Congress passes the DREAMS act. 

Asylum

There is so much here, I am just posting links. 

• Suspension of Syrian refugees resettlement program. 
• Family separation 
• Cruel treatment of children
• Asylum seekers forced to wait in Mexico
• Improperly banning certain people from seeking Asylum
• Sending asylum seekers to other countries (Aslylum cooperative agreements). 
• Charging fees for asylum seekers

Travel ban 

• September 24, 2017: Trump administration issued an executive order which banned entry to all non-citizens from several muslim-majority countries. 
• This order was the third in a series of failed attempts to ban people from muslim countries to enter the US. The government was able to move this through the courts finally after adding a few non muslim-majority countries. 

Why are college exams so bad?

 Many college level exams are poorly constructed. Doing good in these exams in no way represents that students actually learnt what they needed to from the course. This is mostly because many of these exams are "hack-able", where students have learnt many strategies on how to do well without having learnt much in the course. 

Three reasons for such a poor state of college exams: 

1. Conflict of interest: For most public Universities, graduation and academic progression rates are key factors which determine how much funding they receive from the government, and to attract new students. The University administrators in turn transfer these incentives to the faculty members who are rewarded for passing more students. This inherently creates a conflict of interest as in almost all cases, the faculty teaching the course also prepares the exams and grades them. This conflict of interest in exacerbated by the fact that students provide good ratings in their course evaluations to easy graders. 
2. GPA used as a screening factor: Many companies use student's GPA as an initial screening factor during interviews. This incentivises students to emphasize grades over learning, and to reward faculty members who give good grades. 
3. Lack of will: For most faculty members, their success in career depends almost entirely on their research accomplishments, and their teaching skills play a very insignificant role in promotions and market value. Creating good exams takes a lot of time and effort, and when you do, you get push-back from students who are used to a particular type of testing. And as noted in the first point, the incentives from the administration are also most often not geared towards adequate testing (it takes a lot of effort for the administration to verify this too). 

There are solutions to all of these. The COI can be easily resolved by having someone other the course instructor prepare and grade the exams. Western Governors  University for example has implemented such practice. If more industries adopt a wholesome screening approach instead of just relying on the GPA, students may be less inclined to overemphasize their grades. I think machine learning has a role to play here in making this process more efficient. For the third point, I think we should start seeing bifurcated faculty roles in Universities where some faculty members have a heavier teaching load (and evaluated accordingly) and others have a heavier research load. We also need innovative tools which help students make informed choices about Universities in terms of teaching quality, likelihood of success and return on investment. If these tools are easily available,  I think students will start holding Universities accountable for their teaching practices. 

Faculty aristocracy

These are some of the attitudes I observe amongst faculty (including me, sometimes) which should change: 

1. It is beneath me to hold their hands and guide them. Students should learn to take responsibility.  
2. I am a genius and I have all this knowledge. If the students don't want to learn from me, it is their problem.

Why MOOCs didn't disrupt the Universities?

I think MOOCs do serve a purpose, and there is a market out there for it. But if anyone thought they would disrupt the education industry are only betraying their own lack of understanding about what education means.

My 4 years of experience as a teacher thought me that education is as much about managing student behavior as it is about transferring knowledge. Students learn by what they think and what they do, and only by what they think and what they do, and not by "knowledge transfer" or "osmosis". The job of a good educator is then to create  structure and incentives to foster thinking and doing.

At the beginning of my teaching career, I was of the opinion that if only more teachers actually cared about teaching, the overall education quality would improve. But now, I am convinced that caring comes more close to being a necessary condition than being sufficient.

Even though I think there is a significant room for improvement, Universities in general offer structure, community,  in-person interactions, and other social aspects which MOOCs don't come anywhere close to offering.

That being said, I think Universities are due for a disruption. The landscape of education is changing. With increased automation, meaningful well-paying jobs are becoming much more sophisticated and demand for higher education is increasing rapidly. Universities are extremely inefficient, and as such, are not equipped to address this growing demand at a reasonable cost. Universities are due for a disruption. 

Faith: Why is it seen as a virtue by many?

I often wondered why faith, "the act of believing in something without any evidence", is seen as a virtue by so many people.  Now, I think this is because they confuse faith for conviction. I call this "The Rocky effect".

One of the biggest reason why the character Rocky is so endearing is his utter conviction of continuing to fight even when the facts, (and indeed the evidence), were clear that he is not going to win that fight, and that continuing is only going to injure him further. So, at this point, he is being very irrational, and ignoring all the evidence, yet this act is seen as a sign of strength in character.

I agree with the above assessment of strength. Then why do I think faith is not a virtue, but the propensity to act irrationally in the above situation a virtue?

The key difference is belief. I don't think Rocky actually believed he was going to win in that losing fight. He continues to fight despite his belief (and possibly fear) that he is going to lose.

The strength in the character is the courage of fighting in the face of an obvious defeat. It is the conviction to fight without showing any regard to the end goal, it is the joy in the journey and not just the destination.

The only instance according to my observations, when faith is viewed as a virtue is in the matter of belief in a "God", however many ways that word is defined. And in these cases, I believe it is because this faith is being confused for conviction.

Rhetoric of "being tough"

There are some current political views that United States is not "being tough enough" on terrorism and illegal activities, and this usually is directed towards non-white criminals.  I don't think the facts actually reflect this, so why then the perception?

I think at the core, the reason for this is that being accepting of others (love thy neighbors) is still viewed as a positive sentiment in these circles. That is why they don't want to focus on the "they are being accepting of others", and instead want to focus on "they are being weak". 

Automation and future of our society

Several people are expressing concerns recently that automation displace more jobs, that the new opportunities will not catch up the pace of lost jobs, and that the income inequality will grow.

I agree will all these points, and if we don't do anything about it, there could be a lot of turmoil in the future.

On the bright side, I think our civilization is in a position where we can afford to adopt policies which will make the income inequality irrelevant. 

Engineering publishing, what needs to be changed

I keep hearing a lot about publishing negative results in clinical trials, and there has been a lot of push towards it. I think its also time for the same to happen in engineering journals.

There are perhaps two broad categories of engineering research, one where the approach is to take an unsolved problem and find/develop the appropriate tools to solve it, and the other where the researchers find the right problem to apply the tool they have been developing. Both have their uses, and quite frankly, from my experience, it has been very frustrating how these two situations have been treated in the publishing world. 

For the first kind of problems, I have seen many very good papers rejected because the claim from the reviewers was that there were no new techniques developed in the paper. Of course, the reviewer has completely failed to see the point of the paper in this situation. 

The second situation, I think, can run into even bigger problems. Consider a researcher working on developing computational methods for some abstract mathematical field, and wants to find an appropriate problem to showcase the usefulness of such computational methods. In this situation, it is very likely that the methods doesn't outperform other existing methods, or that it turns out (due to many practical reasons) that the method is actually not applicable for problems where the underlying mathematical theory seems to imply it should work. In both these cases, the resulting work is very unlikely to get published.  As a result, researchers feel often forced to exaggerate the usefulness of their computational methods, or perform and unfair comparison with existing methods. If the researchers are not willing to do this, then the research of the second kind is not viable in the long run. 

There is a simple fix to this: publish negative results. 

neuroscience computing terms

We know a lot more about computing terms for computers than for the brain. It is likely that the following aspects about the brain are being investigated  currently, in which case I would like to know their technical terms and learn about the research into these aspects.

1. Sometimes, while I am driving to some place, I forget to thing about a route beforehand. On the way, I realize I have to plan my route and "load the program" to plan it. I can distinctly observe a "processing time" to plan out this route, and sometimes this processing time causes me to miss an exit, an exit which was in the planned route.


2. Sometimes, while I set out to drive to a location and start thinking about something else, I arrive at a different (often traveled) location without realizing it. The closest analogy I can think of is a "non-interactive background process ". I cannot say (or can I?) that this is a subconscious act, because I distinctly remember making the decisions to make the turns, "processing" the speeds and the degrees of rotations on the steering wheels. So, was I semi-conscious?

Are the above aspects recognized and studied as neurological phenomenon?

Patter matching and rationalization.

What we gain from experience, or "muscle memory" is mostly like pattern matching. People who don't go through proper training eventually gain some skills through experience. Formal training however, also indulges the rational part of the brain, which leads to better organization of the knowledge. As a result, we can acquire the same skills much faster.

1. We need to indulge the rational part of the brain to better organize our knowledge, and acquire the skills faster.
2. We need to indulge the "pattern recognition" part of the brain, in order to build muscle memory in order to react faster in real time.