UConn Connection and Human versus Animal

Last week I had the pleasure of a lunch meeting with the University of Connecticut College of Agriculture, Health, and Natural Resources (CAHNR) Interim Dean of Students Dr. Cameron Faustman while he was visiting Seattle.  This was an unexpected meeting, but connecting with with the Physical Therapy program newly housed in CAHNR, I've felt limited connection between the University and the Physical Therapy Alumni which I was looking forward to discussing. There were several purposes to our meeting - but primarily it was an opportunity to discuss ways for CAHNR to connect with alumni, learn more about changes going on in Storrs, CT, and see if there are opportunities for collaboration and relationships with the school.  (As a side note, CAHNR just recently released a beautiful write up on my PT classmate and friend regarding her work with MS that you can read about here.  She's the reason I Climb to the Top for MS every year and wrote about here.  I can see that they're trying to get us involved, and I appreciate that).

The meeting started out discussing each other's backgrounds and some scholarly interests.  Dr. Faustman is a native of Wallingford, CT - which is basically next to my hometown of Cheshire, CT.  He went to UConn for his undergraduate schooling where he studied Agricultural Education and Natural Resources Conservation before ultimately continuing his studies at the University of Wisconsin where he studied Animal Science.  He told me that his current interests lie in working to improve food waste, but that his initial research involved looking at the color of meat - which directly relates to muscle tissue. He has previously published papers on several topics, but we discussed his work with myoglobin quite a bit.  Myoglobin is the protein found in muscle tissue that uses iron to bind oxygen which is needed for energy. I explained that I did all of my studies at the University of Connecticut with an undergraduate degree in Exercise Science and then later my Doctorate in Physical Therapy.  My undergraduate research interests were childhood obesity and muscle fiber typing and my graduate research was women's basketball lower extremity injuries, which you could be the fifth person to read that publication if you clicked here.  Common bond: we both studied muscles!

http://nosetotailapp.com/meat-cuts.php

We discussed a recent conversation I had with a local surgeon who told me about comparing meat cuts to human "cuts" where if you ever were stuck in a situation where you had to be a cannibal, the hamstring would not be the optimal choice of meat... (we never reached the point of determining what part of the human body you should eat if faced with these conditions).  I recalled the way the hamstrings felt if I treated them with manual therapy interventions in the clinic: fibrous, gristly, and tough.

I wanted to learn more about this, and found this article by Bret Contreras which summarized muscle fiber analysis of the hamstrings.  It states that while most research finds the hamstrings to be predominantly fast twitch muscle fibers (type II fibers that don't require as much oxygen and are used for short bursts of energy), the distribution of type I (aerobic oxygenated fiber which would have a higher blood supply and capillaries nearby also contributing to the color) to type II fibers varies between people and is not exactly known, but probably at least tilts more toward those type II fibers.  In simpler terms - most research says that the composition of the hamstrings is made up of about half of fibers that don't use much oxygen, but oxygenated fibers are the ones that look bright red (or dark in chicken) in meat sources.  This directly relates to the work Dr. Faustman does concerning the color of meat.  When you buy a chicken leg or thigh, the dark meat, these are muscles that the chicken is using constantly, running around, and as such they use more oxygen - compared to the breast muscles which would flap the chicken's wings occasionally - but they rarely leave the ground in their flight.  These concepts apply similarly to the cow and your beef cut - the leg muscles that are used most often or continuously look different and ultimately have a different texture and flavor.  Interestingly, I found this article which outlines how you should cook your meat based on the color because this can indicate the composition of what you're about to eat - and what type of method will optimize its moisture.

The conversation shifted onto fish.  Now, I personally do not consume red meat, but I do eat poultry and fish.  Considering which human pieces of meat would be optimal for consumption may have cemented my stance as a non-beef/pork/lamb eater... but until having this lunch meeting, I had never considered that when I ate fish, I was also eating muscle.  The few people I've discussed this meeting with in the past week have been pretty 50/50 split on whether they had previously considered this idea. It makes sense - I just hadn't thought of it.  Fish don't bear weight through their tiny bones and are suspended in water so their structure is different.  The muscle structure of a fish is called a myotome (which has a totally different meaning in the physical therapy world - though I would be willing to bet that the PT version is named after the fish structure). Where the other creatures previously discussed have muscles that are structured as fibers that are collected into bundles, like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle#/media/File:1007_Muscle_Fibes_(large).jpg

the muscle structure of fish is layered.  Think of what it looks like when you flake apart your salmon and you can consider what each muscle layer looks like.  Or here is a picture of a tuna steak where you can sort-of see the layers.

http://star-gazypie.blogspot.com/2010/06/behold-power-of-tuna-recognize.html

Want to know what makes that tuna steak look red?  Myoglobin! The same stuff in humans that helps our muscles optimize oxygen use.  Tuna has more of it than some of the more white-colored fish because they swim faster and more extensively.  Salmon's pink flesh is not from myoglobin, though.  It comes from the food that salmon consumes, just like the flamingos.  So for the past several days I've been looking into animal muscle structures and tissues and gaining an understanding of similarities and differences between people and animals and it has been really interesting to think about the way the human body works from this different perspective.  How I failed to gain this understanding during my whole undergraduate course of Animal Physiology is beyond me!

So where I focus on human movement, including muscle tissue, Dr. Faustman focuses on animal muscle tissue which is food.  These are surprisingly very similar concepts and it was fun to think in a new way.  It helps to make sense of why the Physical Therapy program and the Department of Kinesiology would fit well into the College of Agriculture.

We concluded by discussing some of our current projects.  I knew there was a lot of wasted food in the US, but when looking further into it, I came upon Feeding America, which estimates that almost half of the food grown, processed, and transported in the US is wasted!  This is terrible.  It's not just food, either.  There's tons of fresh water used to produce food, so if the food is wasted, that's a lot of water waste, too.  Interestingly, I learned from Feeding America that unsold food at Starbucks at the end of the day is brought to food banks to reduce waste... so now I feel a little better about my occasional splurge of a $7 grilled cheese and $5 frappuccino at Starbucks if part of my purchase supports less food waste.

Thanks for lunch, UConn!