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02/18/2008: "Where is the Beef?"
If you have watched the news in the last few days, you may have seen the disturbing video of the mistreatment of sick cows at a major slaughterhouse. Though animal cruelty seems like a given at such a place, the major concern should be the general health of cows as they are processed for our food supply. We are now looking at the largest beef recall in America’s history.
I have been reading the book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and have found it disturbing. Like much of what I read to try and educate myself so I am better armed to fight my cancer, I am finding that ignorance is truly bliss. I am only about half way through it and have learned about the corn industry and its relationship to the beef industry. In subsidizing our farmers, we have encouraged them to grow and produce as much corn as possible regardless of demand. The increased nitrogen fertilizer and pesticides run-off ends up in the Mississippi and has caused an 8,000 square mile, oxygen starved, uninhabitable area in the Gulf of Mexico.
All this corn surplus has then been converted to cheap cattle feed. The problem? Cows are not made to eat corn. Their stomachs can’t handle it. Their complicated series of stomachs are designed to digest grasses and become highly acidic and bloated on corn. Their body fat increases (which the USDA prizes) while their liver tries to filter it all. They can only live in on a feedlot diet for about 150 days before they get too sick for slaughter. The solution is antibiotics. We pump tons of antibiotics and hormones into our beef. Still, disease is rampant. Pneumonia, coccidiosis, enterotoxemia, feedlot polio, Mad Cow Disease and others are common. Forty percent carry the deadly bacteria E. coli that cannot survive in a pH neutral stomach found in free-range cattle. And thus about 30% of feedlot cows have abscesses and tumors on their livers. We know that from our own experience as humans, antibiotics only last so long before the bacteria mutates to become resistant. Unfortunately, hormones and antibiotics pumped into cattle end up in their fat cells and on our dinner tables. To make it fit for human consumption, they have to irradiate the meat.
Even with the drugs, feedlot cattle are relatively sick. Scenes that we are seeing in the news today have been common for some time. If this information makes you think twice about your diet of beef, it should. Americans have the highest percentages of heart disease and colon cancer in the world. Most scientists studying our diet agree that the cause is the consumption of too much animal fat and not enough fiber. The danger of being this high on the food chain is that animal fat is where pollutants, heavy metals and chemicals are stored. I told you ignorance is bliss.
