CattleWomen Promote Beef, Encourage Comments on Dietary Guidelines

CattleWomen Promote Beef, Encourage Comments on Dietary Guidelines

By Lynda Grande-Myers, Columbus, Montana CattleWomen President

Montana CattleWomen may be staying closer to home these days, but they remain actively engaged in beef promotion and educational activities around the state.

Fallon County CattleWomen and Gallatin County CattleWomen both hosted local Junior Beef Cookoffs and received a good response to this tried and true program. Gallatin CattleWomen had a booth at Bozeman’s Wild West Winter Fest and Central Montana CattleWomen represented us at Winter Fair.

CattleWomen from Yellowstone, Musselshell and T-Bone local affiliates took turns working at MATE show in February highlighting beef on Saturday as they prepared Hot Beef Sundaes for attendees.

Suze Bohleen presented her “Cut a Little, Save a Lot” demonstration in Miles City. This is a great program, which explains how even with high prices at the stores, a family can eat well on a limited budget by using one cut for multiple meals.

T-Bone CattleWomen donated beef gift certificates to the local food banks in Carbon, Stillwater and Sweetgrass Counties in recognition of National Ag Day.

Montana CattleWomen will have a booth at the Capitol during the Agriculture Legislative luncheon on March 18th. We are lucky to have Jay Bodner as the CattleWomen’s lobbyist this year and he is doing a great job of keeping us up to date on issues and representing us at the Legislature.

Since the new dietary guideline recommendations from the HHS and USDA are such a contentious issue at this time, I wanted to share some of the reasoning behind their decision making process as explained by Wayne Campbell from Purdue University, who served on the committee and spoke at the annual convention.

The committee was given studies on which to base their decisions and could only consider those studies provided to them in making their decisions. The prepared studies combined red meat and processed meats as one food group with no differentiation between them. The committee was also not allowed to  consider any medical studies, as BOLD was described, as it was considered to be a therapeutic study for people who already had underlying health concerns rather than one contributing to a healthy lifestyle.

At one point, the committee recommendations were to “increase consumption of lean meat” and “decrease consumption of red meat”. When the contradictory nature of these statements were pointed out, their decision was to move from a recommendation to increase consumption to dropping lean meat from the recommendations altogether. It is believed that concerns about sustainability of meat production was also factored in.

With this in mind, please submit your comments emphasizing the importance of lean beef in a healthy diet to HHS and USDA by May 8th, 2015, by visiting BeefUSA.org and following the link.

From local promotions to state and national issues, the Montana CattleWomen remain committed to supporting and promoting our livelihood and our lifestyle.