Please support the blog via Swish (Sweden) or MobilePay (Finland).
In a recent article in Finland's Swedish speaking newspaper Hufvudstadsbladet, Sara Björklund alleged that Finns continue to reduce their consumption of red meat. Information is said to come from the research institute Luke:
Björklund's reporting continues: Another trend that has been seen for several years is an increase in the consumption of grains. According to Erja Mikkola, employed at Luke, the increase is due to the popularity of oat products.
In 2019, a similar proposition was made by researchers at Luke. They published a report where they claimed that if all Finns adopted a vegan diet, then the release of greenhouse gases would decrease by an astonishing 40%. The report was not peer-reviewed, and despite the fact that English is the lingua franca of the academy, the authors chose to use uralic-Finnish, the most remote of Finland's two official languages, and to send the report straight to the prime minister's office.
The same year, another researcher at the department of agriculture at the Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry, Dr. Tuomisto, claimed that livestock contribute more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere compared to transportation (Tuomisto, 2019):
In November 2020, Eva Roos, a nutrition researcher at Folkhälsan/University of Helsingfors, sent an alarm about an obesity epidemic among Finnish children.
Why?
In 2017, Dr. Roos herself was part of providing the answer in a study with lead author Vepsäläinen. It highlights the following:
“High availability of fruits and vegetables in the home did not seem to protect the children from the effect of the sugar-enriched foods” (p. 1237).In December 2020, the administrative management of the Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry chose to market Tuomisto's study on its Twitter account:
In early 2021, Dr Roos was appointed full professor in nutrition at Uppsala university.
In 2022:
- Dr Roos surprisingly resigned from her position as a full professor at Uppsala university!?
- nutrition researchers at the University of Helsingfors, Dr Erkkola et al. from the Department of Food and Nutrition, also at the Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry, published a study that addressed consumption of animal source food. The papers headline reads: A slow road from meat dominance to more sustainable diets: An analysis of purchase preferences among Finnish loyalty-card holders.
Now note that Drs. Erkkola and Tuomisto are both employed by the Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry. Also note that Luke, the research institute, resides in the same building complex.
Are Björklund's [Luke staff]'s, Tuomistos, and Erkkola's et al's statements and claims really true (consistent with science)?
To sort that out I use my own model - Rational Entrepreneurial Thinking (Österberg, 2021). It starts with epistemic vigilance - you are simply a little suspicious about various claims (Sperber et al. 2010), followed by the foundation for instrumental and epistemic rational thinking - numeracy (Brooks och Pui, 2010), and disjunctive reasoning - take many different sources into account (Stanovich, 2009).
Common knowledge about food and nutrition is that ~3.5 million years ago, our ancestors added animal source food - bone marrow to their diet (Mann, 2018; McPherron et al. 2010; Thompson et al. 2019).
200 000 years after our genus had emerged (2.8 Mya; Kimbel och Villmoare, 2016; Villmoare, 2018; Villmoare et al. 2015) they ate meat (Pobiner, 2016).
It's also common knowledge that this nutrient dense diet:
- started a process of reducing their guts and expanding their brains - from the occipital lobe and forward (Aiello and Wheeler, 1995; Pringle, 2016).
- is crucial for physical and mental health (Dehghan et al. 2018; Dobersek et al. 2020, 2021; Ede, 2019; Itkonen et al. 2020; Johnson et al. 2019; Ylilauri et al. 2019).
- production of animal source food in the western world didn't have any significant impact on the climate (White and Hall, 2017).
- that was followed by another study showing that the production of dairy has an even smaller impact (Liebe, Hall och White, 2020).
- “High availability of fruits and vegetables in the home did not seem to protect the children from the effect of the sugar-enriched foods” (p. 1237) (Vepsäläinen et al. (2017) highlighted result.
For a more comprehensive orientation about the history of human diet: Österberg (2019) Perception versus facts: What is the future for sustainable food? The case for prospective thinking (UH)
Because I knew this and because Dr. Tuomisto's claim lacked any reference and because her claim deviated from the scientific picture, I raised the issue for discussion with colleagues at the Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry in January 2021. And because Dr. Tuomisto used FAO's Dr. Mottet as a reference for her claim, I also discussed the issue with Dr. Mottet.
Dr. Mottet rejected Tuomisto's way of using her and FAO's data. The year before Dr Tuomisto published her article, Dr Mottet had straightened out the issue together with Henning Steinfeld: Cars or livestock: which contribute more to climate change?
2019. In addition, data was available from Finland's Center for Statistics. This was shown by SLC's chairman Mats Nylund in the article Disinformation about food.
It reads: according to the Central for Statistics, 74 % of all climate related emissions in Finland originate from the energy sector and the burning of fossil fuels. Only 12% of the emissions originate from agriculture. Of the emissions from agriculture in Finland, it is estimated that 56 percent comes from arable land and 44 percent from livestock production. In plain language, This means that only 5 percent of Finland's climate emissions originate from livestock production.
Add the Biogenic Carbon Cycle (BCC) to the model. BCC is a process where methane from ruminants transform to carbon dioxide (CO2) through a chemical process called hydroxyl oxidation. This takes 10-12 years. The same amount of CO2 is consumed by plants at farms via a process we all learned about in elementary school - photosynthesis.
When I brought up the error in Dr. Tuomisto's article with colleagues, the work climate deteriorated so to speak. It was not popular to question colleagues or the prevailing zeitgeist at the faculty. Especially if they spoke uralic-Finnish.
And when I published it on Twitter and included the Faculty and Dr. Tuomisto, I was met by silence. It's a phenomenon called stonewalling which is a marker for relational aggressiveness (psychological violence; Hyde, 2005). In April 2022, Helsingfors police department said that Finnish women's relational aggressiveness is a huge issue.
When I now search for Dr. Tuomisto's article, a correction shows up. It's Dr. Tuomisto herself, who, after I pointed out the inaccuracies, sent a correction to the journal. There she presses the following:
“Comparing the greenhouse gas emissions of livestock with the transportation sector was formally misleading”.Here is the correction:
Adding to that, Dr. Erkkola et al. own main results show the following:
The abstract states the following:
“Red meat dominated the purchase preferences and showed the highest persistence over time”.2019. NutriRecs concluding, after applying GRADE, that animal source food it safe to eat (Han et al. 2019; Johnston et al. 2019; Zeraatkat et al. 2019).
A response came from a Mikael Fogelholm, professor in nutrition at the University of Helsingfors:
Several questions emerge:
Why didn't Dr. Tuomisto reach out to me to say thank you?
Why didn't Dr Erkkola put forward the main result of their study in the headline?
What did Dr Fogelholm write on Twitter?
Why didn't Björklund include the above in her reporting?
Isn't fact checking important for journalists?
Why do people conform to non-scientific propositions?
The answers to such questions are socio-culture, mental fallacies, and work climate.
Socio-culture. One important premise is the fact that Finland has two official languages, and therefore two dominant cultures: the nation-forming Swedish-speaking culture based on enlightenment thinking, and the Uralic-Finnish culture (1810, 1863) based on national romanticism and tribalism.
Learn more about the difference between Romanticism and Enlightenment thinking.
From the late Nordic Iron, Tiundaland was the power center of Svitjod with capital Eastern Aros (later Uppsala). There lived mighty war lords like Egil Tunnadolg/Angantyr.
They started to make clinker-built long ships. And they built fleets of more than hundred ships. For the ships they needed sails, which at that time was made of wool. For that they needed millions of sheep. This eventually led to the viking era (~750 ~1050) (Price, 2020).
According to the Russian Nestor chronicle, Ruric (830 - 879) of Svijtod was called upon to rule Novgorod, the predecessor of Russia. Ruric also founded the kingdom of Kiev. If they traveled to Novgorod, they obviously made one or two pit stops in Finland for food and to rest.
Because Finland was so close, its likely that many others followed suit. From the viking era until 1383 southeast Finland was integrated to Tiundaland/Svitjod, and from 1384, when Sweden was first mentioned, the kingdom around the Gulf of Bothia and the Baltic sea, entered a socio-cultural journey - from paganism to a modern society, marked by renaissance, science revolution, and enlightenment thinking.
1550, in the midst of the renaissance, the Swedish king Gustav Vasa ( 1496 - 1560) founded Helsingfors.
In the inland of Finland lived tribes who had migrated from northern Siberia and who spoke a uralic language which no longer exist (Lamnidis et al. 2018). During the 1500s, a Swedish priest by the name Mikael [Agrikola] Olofsson (1510 – 1557) originally from Pärnåbygd situated 82 km est of Helsingfors, aimed to convert these nomads from paganism (bear cult) to Christianity. For that very purpose he made the first translation of the bible to this remote language.
1640, in the midst of the science revolution, Swedish Queen Christina (1626-1689) and governor general Per Brahe d.y. (1602-1680), founded the first university in the eastern part of the kingdom - Royal Academy in Åbo (Regia Academia Aboensis). It became the third university in the Swedish kingdom after Uppsala university (1477) and the Academia Gustaviana (1632), later university of Tartu (Dorpat).
1772, the Swedish kingdom got a new, common constitution, which partly is still used in Finland and Sweden.
The implication of the renaissance -enlightenment movement was that honor culture, myths and folk poetry, and tribal thinking was replaced by humanism, science, and reason (Pinker, 2018). Another important thing to take into account was language. The trading language around the Gulf of Bothnia and the Baltic sea was and is Swedish.
In parallel to this progress, Fennophiles (Fennoman movement) where lurking in the shadows. One of the most prominent was Henrik Gabriel Porthan (1739 - 1804), a professor of philosophy, rector at Royal Academy of Åbo, and the father of Finnish history. Dr. Porthan's view of history was marked by mythology and folk poetry, that is a national-romantic or etno-nationalist.
In 1810, after the debacle of Sveaborg, when Russia overtook control of the Eastern part of Sweden, Porthan's Fennoman movement got air under its wings. Members of this movement conformed to the [false] claim that uralic-Finns constituted a dominant indigenous population in Finland before the Svitjods/Swedes arrived.
1812. Åbo was replaced by Helsingfors as the residence city of Finland, now a principality of Russia.
1827. In connection with the change of residence city the Royal Academy of Åbo also moved. The name was changed to Imperial Academy (Kejserliga akademin).
In 1831, Finnish Literature Society was founded, and four years later, in 1835, Elias Lönnroth (1802-1884) published Kalevala, a compilation of myths that had been traded by different tribes by oral tradition. Even though written in Swedish, Kalevala became the starting point for Uralic-Finn's written culture.
In his third Gifford lecture of 2019, Mark Pagel, a professor of biological anthropology, uses Finland as a second example of tribalism. He shows a map that corresponds with the treaty of Nöteborg (1323), and claims that people from Finland's two populations don't intermarry with one another. Based on the fact that trading had taken place across the Gulf of Bothnia and the Baltic sea since the viking era, a more likely description is that the uralic-Finns avoided the swedish-speaking Finns and Swedes.
One implication of this tribal thinking is that the University of Helsingfors use uralic-Finnish in their public communication, and at faculty meetings. They also demand researchers who arrive in Finland to learn uralic-Finnish.
Another implication is illustrated by the famous phrase ‘What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas’; whatever is communicated or discussed within the Uralic-Finnish tribal culture remains as it was.
Mentala fallacies. Another important aspect concerns mental fallacies. And there are >200 of them. These are generally described as simulation biases (Kahneman and Tversky, 1977) or dysrationalia - the inability to think and behave rationally despite adequate intelligence (Stanovich, 1993).
For academics, there's a special mental fallacy - the Continued influence bias:
“Misinformation continues to influence memory and reasoning about an event, despite the misinformation having been corrected” (Cacciatore, 2021).Finland was part of the Seven countries study. And because Finland has two socio-cultures, they sampled data from two cohorts: Åbo, and north Karelia. But we don't know so much about the result from Åbo - only about the North Karelia Project.
Why?
The backstory is that in 1950, Swedish biochemist/physician Haqvin Malmros (1895 - 1995) published a paper - The Relation of Nutrition to Health: A Statistical Study of the Effect of the War-time on Arteriosclerosis, Cardiosclerosis, Tuberculosis and Diabetes. Dr Malmros conclusion was to put the blame on saturated fats and cholesterol. Malmros was spotted by a colleague named Ancel Keys (1904 - 2004). Dr Key's launched a project similar to Dr Malmros', but on a global scale. Initially it included twenty-two countries, but because they could not find any correlations, they started to reduce countries, ending up with seven countries. Hence, The Seven Countries Study. Finland, but not Sweden, was one of the remaining seven countries.
Again, because Finland has two socio-cultures, the original longstanding Swedish-speaking, and the uralic-Finnish (1810, 1863), samples were taken from swedish-finnish Åbo, and uralic-Finnish North Karelia.
And what did the result show?
The benchmark was Crete in the Greek archipelago, where 3 out of 10 000 people died of cardiovascular disease (CVD). In tribal uralic-finnish-speaking North Karelia, 995 people out of 10 000 died of CVD. That's a factor of 331 compared to Crete.
But how many people died of CVD in Åbo?
~300 people out of 10 000 in Åbo died of CVD (Teicholz, 2014). That's a third compared to people in North Karelia.
Why did so many people die of CVD?
Well, like Malmros, Finnish nutrition people blamed saturated fats and cholesterol. And as late as March 2022, Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) bragged about North Karelia:
“From the outset, the goal was to lower cholesterol and blood pressure through dietary changes, including a reduction in the use of butter and salt”.But in 1972, in parallel of the first publications of the North Karelia Project, John Yudkin (1910 - 1995), summarized his research, concluding its about sugar. The title of the book reads: Sugar: Pure, white, and Deadly.
And since at least 2006, research based on randomized controlled trials (RCT) have been compiled, demonstrating the lack of association between saturated fats and CVD (Howard et al. 2006; Nutrition Coalition).
So, what's the impact of this low fat frenzy that took place in Finland?
Here's a unique opportunity to compare Finland and Sweden. That's because after ~700 years together, Finns and Swedes share not only biology, but also socio-culture.
Remember, Sweden was excluded from what became the Seven countries study.
According to Statistics Finland, the prevalence of Alzheimer's started to increase after the low fat guidelines were implemented. And international ranking shows that Finland is the world leader in Alzheimer's.
But what about Sweden?
Sweden holds place No. 10 on the same ranking (Österberg, 2022).
How is it possible to sustain a false narrative about food and nutrition?
Besides the mental fallacies mentioned above, In February 2022, Helsingin Sanomat published an article about the work climate at the Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry. A researcher had contacted them to report that freedom of expression had been suppressed at the faculty. The researcher chose to remain anonymous (Parikka, 2022).
Common knowledge about work climate says it's an intervening variable between a leader/manager and the organization; leader's/manager's who went thru proper training, will act to facilitate the organization's work climate (Amabile, 1996; Ekvall, 1996: Ekvall and Ryhammar, 1998; Hyde, 2005; Locke, 1976).
Key aspects are:
- assign goals to the organization (Locke and Latham, 2002; Österberg, 2004, 2012).
- apply decentralisation of decision making to attain that goal (Lord and Maher, 1991; Österberg, 2004, 2012).
But the commonality in Finland is to apply delegation, which is discriminated from decentralization.
Its likely to assume that that the decision to promote uralic-Finnish at the University of Helsingfors, has facilitated Dr Porthan's Fennophilia.
In conclusion. Despite claims from Finnish researchers and mainstream media, Finns continue to eat healthy animal-source foods, which are crucial for physical and mental health. Livestock is also important to influence soil health through so-called regenerative production. There is a downside, Finns also eat a lot of processed and ultra-processed foods. That's bad for their physical and mental health. Finland is the world leader in Alzheimer's. Why do Finnish researchers and mainstream media reiterate a false narrative about food/nutrition? One part of the answer is tribal thinking, another is mental fallacies, and a third is work climate.
See my presentation from the International Dairy Federations global Conference 2021 in Copenhagen:Why do people hate agriculture (The case for rational entrepreneurial thinking).
Please support the blog via Swish (Sweden) or MobilePay (Finland).
More about my expertise:
Executive coaching for CEOs/managers and workshops to facilitate Organizational Performance, Learning, and Creativity for Problem Solving | Lectures: Nutrition for physical and mental health | Course/lecture: children's emotional and social adjustment and cognitive development | Language training - Swedish | Academy Competency | CV | Teaching skills and experience | Summary of research project | Instagram | Linkedin | YouTube-channel | TikTok | Twitter
No comments:
Post a Comment