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Armstrong wrong on dairy by Catherine Logan Frank Armstrong’s article ‘Contrary about Dairy [Village, June-July) contains numerous inaccuracies regarding dairy. Dairy foods play a significant and important role in a healthy, balanced diet and are included in dietary recommendations throughout the world. Inaccurate information and communications on dairy, or indeed any food/nutrient, may lead to misconceptions and adverse dietary implications. Here in Ireland, dairy foods have been enjoyed for generations. The taste and versatility of these foods are greatly appreciated but, moreover, they are an important feature of the Department of Health’s Food Pyramid. The Food Pyramid aims to provide guidance on achieving a healthy, balanced diet (for adults and children over five years). Recommendations advise three servings from the ‘milk, yogurt and cheese’ food group each day as part of a balanced diet, increasing to five daily servings between the ages of 9-18 years of age due to the importance of calcium during this life-stage. Also, as mentioned previously, these foods are acknowledged in dietary guidance throughout the world. It is true that lactose intolerance may impact the intake of dairy foods. But, it is important to realise that the frequency of lactase-nonpersistence in Ireland is estimated at just 4% (lactase is the enzyme which is responsible for lactose digestion). This figure is very much at odds with the impression portrayed in the article (i.e. around 70%). Furthermore, variation in individual tolerances to lactose among people with lactose maldigestion is recognised and intolerance does not necessarily mean the elimination of dairy from the diet. Acknowledging some dietetic guidance can assist in the management of lactose intolerance while maintaining some level of dairy in the diet. For example, consuming milk with other foods, spacing dairy intake throughout the day, recognising the lower lactose content of many cheeses and possible increased tolerance of some yogurts. The article also refers to saturated fat, but, again, acknowledging up-to-date, scientific thinking is vital. Scientific evidence is emphasising the importance of the ‘whole food’ and the ‘whole diet’ in relation to health, as opposed to focusing on single nutrients. For example in relation to cardiovascular health, numerous studies show no adverse effects of regularly consuming milk and dairy foods. In fact, in some cases, particularly for milk, a cardio-protective effect has been observed. The presence of specific nutrients and bioactive components in milk, which may potentially benefit various cardiovascular health parameters, may, at least partially, underpin such observations. Since it is a very complex disease, many factors are thought to influence cancer development and progression, including genetics and lifestyle choices. There are a number of measures you can take to help reduce your risk of cancer. For example, the Irish Cancer Society released a press release earlier this year stating that “Cutting smoking, reducing the amount of alcohol you drink and maintaining a healthy weight are key to cancer prevention”. Research is continuing to strive to identify effective diet and lifestyle guidance for cancer prevention as well as successful treatment approaches. Calcium is probably the nutrient most commonly associated with dairy – this is due to the fact that milk, yogurt and cheese provide a particularly important source of calcium. As implied in the article, there are other sources of calcium in the diet, however, these foods should be considered in terms of calcium content, bioavailability and the frequency with which they are typically consumed. National surveys clearly demonstrate the importance of milk and milk products to the intake of dietary calcium in the Irish diet – the recent National Adult Nutrition Survey showed that milk and yogurt were the highest contributor to calcium intake in the diet of Irish adults, contributing 30% in adults aged 18-64 years and a similar level for adults aged 65 years and over. Cheese contributed an additional 9% and 7%, respectively. Sustainable food production is certainly a pertinent issue at present and research in this area is very much evolving. Reports and analysis often use different and conflicting methodology – often resulting is different conclusions. One key point to note is the nutritional consequences of changing dietary patterns. Furthermore, worldwide, the dairy industry (as well as many other food sectors) is working to continue to provide nutritious, tasty and affordable, foods whilst addressing the natural environment and sustainability considerations. Finally, to address farming practices and standards, farming practices described in the article are by no means reflective of the high quality of dairy farming that exists in Ireland or the basic quality standards accepted for quality and regulatory compliances. Ireland is recognised globally for the high quality of our pasture-based farming, with a number of milk quality programmes being rolled out by organisations such as Teagasc and Animal Health Ireland to help farmers keep up to date with the best available practices. For detailed information on dairy farming practices in Ireland – please contact Teagasc – the agriculture and food development authority in Ireland. The National Dairy Council strives to ensure the promotion of accurate, science-based information regarding dairy, nutrition and health. We produce many resources for health professionals, media and consumers, facilitating well-informed food choices. Dr Catherine Logan is Nutrition Manager of the National Dairy Council Frank Armstrong says Dairy Council just an industry mouthpiece Far from proving ‘numerous inaccuracies’ Catherine Logan does not identify a single inaccuracy in the article I wrote on cows’ milk products. I quoted extensively from the website of The Harvard School of Public Health which is a free online resource which does not bow to vested interests. On the other hand, Catherine Logan promotes dairy consumption on behalf of the National Dairy Council and her arguments are tainted by that association, a reality that her scientific qualification should not mask. This is PR spin. As regards lactose intolerance which is a reality for 70% of human beings, this may be lower in Ireland than elsewhere but simply because dairy is tolerated does not mean that it is beneficial. By way of analogy, unlike many Asians, most Europeans have evolved an enzyme

Heaney:going through the poetic motions Ireland’s timeless bard of farmyard, bogs and prehistory by Kevin Kiely After his death last year the Independent newspaper described Séamus Heaney as “probably the best-known poet in the world”. According to the BBC, at one time Heaney’s books made up two-thirds of the sales of living poets in the UK. Séamus Heaney won a Nobel prize and every bauble imaginable but was it as much for his affable and erudite PERSONA as for his poetry or his insight? Heaney immersed himself in a world of mythology and archaeology, finding his contemporary if anachronistic focus down on the farm, close by the sights and sounds of the bog. The poetic method isn’t great. For example in his totally famous poem, ‘Digging’, Heaney claims that his grandfather could cut more turf in a day “than any other man”. This is his trademark: anecdotes chopped into lines of verse. But is it poetry? In the same poem he views himself as unfit for farm work or turf cutting having only his pen, and concludes implausibly: ‘I’ll dig with it”. The image does not work. Though great poets must be particularly alive to the spirit of their times, Heaney’s inspiration is not modern. In the introduction to his translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf he admits his passion for “a nostalgia I didn’t know I suffered until I experienced its fulfilment”. This fulfilment saturates his final collection, The Human Chain set – characteristically – in the old familiar farmyard and prefaced with a workaday title poem about lifting grain on to a trailer “with a grip on two sack corners”. Timeless perhaps, but searingly relevant to a traumatised post-industrial world, to an adolescent Ireland of abuse, corruption, pillage, Trouble – hardly. It was not untypical that when Heaney finally decided to address the issue of the road proposed to dissect the ancient site of Tara, it was in the letters pages of the Irish Times. And too late, since a decision had already been taken. He never commented publicly on the destruction of the environment in the country he called home, which reached an uncosy, corrupted crescendo during his prime. Heaney’s poetry rarely leaves the farmstead for its subject matter. A Heaney poem entitled “Thatcher” will not be about politics. All of his pastoral work is nostalgic and anecdotal: “Churning Day” ; “The Forge”; “Gifts of Rain”; “Blackberry-Picking”; “Turkeys Observed”; “The Harrow-Pin” ; “Conkers” ; “The Seed Cutters” ; “Nostalgia in the Afternoon” ; “A Basket of Chestnuts”; “The Pitchfork”; “The Settle Bed”; “The Sandpit”; “Bog Oak”; “The Hill Farm”; “The Water Carrier”; “At A Potato Digging”; “The Gravel Walks”; “The Skylight”; “The Baler”; “Fireside” and “At the Wellhead”. Heaney’s obsession with the farm is about as broadening as a visit to an agricultural folklore museum. The preoccupation with bogs was all-enveloping as he turned to bog corpses, skeletons and bones – all safely distancing him from the sectarian Troubles whose heinous burials of course find no resonance in Heaney. At base, Heaney is a poet of nostalgia for home, hearth, turf fire, hen-house and bicycle. His accessibility to readers equals that of Maeve Binchy whose chick-lit is if anything slightly more modern in content. The broadcasting equivalent is Miriam O’Callaghan (completely modern). He became everybody’s favourite, famous Séamus. Everyséamus. Approachability is Heaney’s be-all. Last August, in a New York Times article, ‘Another Kind of Music’on the day of Heaney’s death, songwriter Paul Simon – the thoughtful half of Simon and Garfunkel (“Lie la lie, lie la lie la lie la, lie”) – noted his “verbal virtuosity, his wit and Irish charm. Recovering from a stroke in the hospital, he greeted his friend and fellow poet Paul Muldoon with, “Hello, different strokes for different folks”. One wonders how Simon or Muldoon would have coped with the verbal virtuosity, wit and Irish charm of an unwell Joyce or Beckett. Heaney’s lack of engagement with the Northern conflict was on display early on, in ‘Summer 1969’. “While the Constabulary covered the mob/Firing into the Falls, I was suffering/Only the bullying sun of Madrid”. The poem concludes with his retreating for the “cool of the Prado” to look at Goya’s painting ‘Shootings of the Third of May’. His empathy was that of the tourist. His procrustean admirers explain that he was actually always obliquely engaging with the North. Heaney’s best-known poem “Digging” ludicrously compares a pen to a gun to a shovel! It begins: ‘Between my finger and my thumb/The squat pen rests; snug as a gun’. It’s inaccurate, of course, in that a gun is not usually held between finger and thumb like a pen: a hand-gun has to be held using all fingers. However – after he had indeed toasted the queen – Heaney’s most trenchant utterance came in 2013 and was surprisingly non-Nationalist for someone of his background: “There’s never going to be a united Ireland. So why don’t you let them [Loyalists] fly the flag?”. Bill Clinton serially, and nearly every cliché-unaware tout with a speech to make about the North and a message of political blandness, can be relied upon to marshal Heaney’s phrase from Sophocles in translation that occasionally “hope and history rhyme”. The poetry has became jingle before it acquired resonance, or even meaning. Heaney did world leaders and celebrities and was quite at home, for example in the Unicorn at a table of Clinton, Bono and twenty others, with Denis O’Brien picking up the tab, and – one imagines – private jets waiting at the airport for when the post-prandial brandies and payoff recitation had finally been discharged. Séamus Deane, a direct peer of Heaney, wrote of him in the New Yorker in 2000 as having been from the beginning ‘“well in” with those in power – teachers, professors, and the like [but a]t the same time, he was conspiratorially against them, holding them at arm’s length by his humour, his gift for parody […] it was Heaney’s way of dealing with