Jeanette Maxwell worries about the modern age where responsibility for our own actions seems optional; wants farmers to engage more in industry bodies

By Jeanette Maxwell*

According to every statistic going we ought to be happy.

At no point in our existence have we ever lived longer or healthier.

We can even access places and information that 50-years ago would have been the stuff of dreams.

For all of this some still have to find reasons why this is somehow bad for us.

It has been suggested sugar ought to be taxed ‘because it’s bad’ and now ‘unhealthy’ fatty foods too

I guess it reflects this modern age where responsibility for our own actions seems optional, “it’s not my fault I am obese. I am a victim of big sugar.”  More on that thought later as I reflect on the turnout for Beef+Lamb’s Annual General Meeting. 

A certain section of society urges everyone to go ‘meat free’ and paradise will ensure. Others tell us we need to reject modern diets and hark back to the Neolithic when presumably everything was much better.

So here’s a fact check.  As a New Zealander, you can expect to live until at least 83 if you are a woman and 79.3 years for a man.  In less than a decade the average life expectancy has increased by 0.8 years for women and 1.3 years for men.  That’s now over 10-years longer than it was in the 1950’s and the curve is increasingly vertical. 

So despite our supposedly unhealthy modern lifestyle, people in the developed world are living longer and with a better quality of life. Even in the world’s worst trouble spots, life expectancy is heaps better than what it was in the Middle Ages. 

Back then, something like a third of children died before they were five while the second riskiest thing was to be women giving birth.  If you got to your 40’s before seeing the pearly gates you had done very well.  Life expectancy in the Neolithic, which is also a fad diet, was about half that for the Middle Ages so it doesn’t sound that good! 

But the next time someone bangs on about the evils of bacon, steak and cream donuts, basically any food high in saturated fats, point them to a new study suggesting that there's no link between saturated fat and a heart attack. Those findings were published recently in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

They found, “no evidence to support guidelines that say people should restrict saturated fat consumption to lower their risk of developing heart disease.  They also found insufficient evidence to support guidelines that advise eating more foods containing polyunsaturated fats (such as omega-3 and omega-6) to reduce heart risk..”

I am not suggesting you head to the nearest greasy spoon for a daily breakfast of bacon, steak and chips followed by a metre high stack on pancakes.  This study tells me what we already know; it is about eating everything in moderation.  Or, as the American specialist Dr Justin Levisay commented on this newest study, "There's such a morass of conflicting information out there ... It's enough to give you a headache."

We’ve seen this pendulum shift before. Foods such as eggs, dark chocolate and dairy products to coffee and wine have been good/bad/good.

It’s why I come back to the one statistic we cannot argue about and that’s improving life expectancy.  Simply put, the quality of food we eat today is the best it has been in human history and will only continue to get better.

What’s not getting better is the voter turnout for the recent Beef+Lamb AGM. 

It is easier to say that 85.7 percent of eligible farmers didn’t vote since only 2,451 valid votes were cast out of a possible 17,142.

It tells me that there must be a heck of a lot of rich sheep and beef farmers since the average farmer pays $1,500 every year in compulsory levies to Beef+Lamb.  Either that or 85.7 percent of farmers believe that Beef+Lamb is near perfection. 

Come on guys wake up and take an interest because your disengagement just emboldens those trying to take down what we produce.

So please check your post box and emails in the coming weeks as Federated Farmers swings into gear with our annual meetings from Northland to Southland.

Trust me red meat reform discussion at them is going to be huge.

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 Jeanette Maxwell is Federated Farmers Meat & Fibre chairperson and a version of this item was first printed in the Ashburton Guardian.