Eating Your Way to Health - The Definitive Guide

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Most often the beef you buy at the supermarket has been injected with growth hormones soon after birth. Generally these hormones contain estrogens. There has been enough press about these estrogens causing increased risk of breast and prostate cancers, so we don't need to go into that here. The beef is normally finished in a feed lot where the cows stand for weeks in the cold wind, hot sun or mud up to their bellies. These conditions do nothing but foster disease so the animals are routinely fed antibiotics. It's no wonder germs are becoming increasingly resistant when we continually consume antibiotics in the foods we eat.

The industry itself has done studies that show a reduced incidence of E-Coli if the beef is taken off grain the last 30 days before slaughter, yet it doesn't follow it's own suggestions. Read the study here.

Packing plants are notoriously careless with the handling of your meat products. Conditions are often less than clean and accident prone. Tumor or abscesses in your beef? Never mind! They just cut around it, barely getting the diseased flesh and the rest is packaged for serving at your dinner table. (Read the entire rather gross facts below).

If this isn't enough to convice you to buy naturally grown organic meet then read the following:

Dave Gifford, a student at Trinity College, visited a slaughterhouse and wrote about his experience:

"I entered the kill shed through a short, tunnel-like hall through which I could see what I soon learned was the third butchering station. The kill shed consisted of one room in which a number of operations are performed by one or two of six butchers at four stations along the length of the room. In the kill shed there is also a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) inspector who examines parts of every animal who goes through the kill shed.

The first station is the killing station. It is worked by one man whose job is to herd the animal into the killing stall, slaughter him or her, and begin the butchering process. This stage of the process takes about ten minutes for each animal, and begins with the opening of a heavy steel door that separates the killing stall from the waiting chute. The man working this station must then go into a corridor adjacent to the waiting chute, and prod his next victim into the killing stall with a high- voltage electric cattle prod.

This is the most time-consuming part of the operation because the cattle are fully aware of what lies ahead, and are determined not to enter the killing stall. The physical symptoms of terror were painfully evident on the faces of each and every animal I saw either in the actual killing stall or in the waiting chute.

During the 40 seconds to a minute that each animal had to wait in the killing stall before losing consciousness, the terror became visibly more intense. The animal could smell the blood, and see his or her former companions in various stages of dismemberment. During the last few seconds of life, the animal thrashes about the stall as much as its confines allow.

All four of the cows whose deaths I witnessed strained frantically, futilely, and pathetically towards the ceiling -- the only direction that was not blocked by a steel door. Death came in the form of a pneumatic nail gun that was placed against their heads and fired." Satchell and Hedges tell us "Agricultural refuse such as corncobs, rice hulls, fruit and vegetable peelings, along with grain byproducts from retail production of baked goods, cereals, and beer, have long been used to fatten cattle."

The authors continued, "In addition, some 40 billion pounds a year of slaughterhouse wastes like blood, bone, and viscera, as well as the remains of millions of euthanised cats and dogs passed along by veterinarians and animal shelters, are rendered annually into livestock feed--in the process turning cattle and hogs, which are natural herbivores, into unwitting carnivores."

In the 1950's, beef and chicken farmers (unless they are organic or range farmers and use ONLY natural feed) began to use growth hormones to get their animals to market bigger and quicker. Steroids. The hormone they use is synthetic estrogen made from - the urine of a mare. It normally takes sixteen weeks to raise a chicken but these farmers can do it in six weeks! What do you think these growth hormones do to our bodies? They don't just cook away!

Estrogen in natural form is the hormone God intended for females to start producing in their bodies about the age of 15 or 16. This is what initiates puberty. This is the hormone that regulates a woman's life and makes it possible to have children. This is the hormone that the female body slowly stops producing after child-bearing years have ended. So what happens to the body of a woman when these hormones are added to the meat she eats?

Girls today begin their menstrual cycles at 10, 11, or 12. When a woman eats only foods that God intended, without the addition of artificial hormones, the blood flow is usually light to non-existent, without pain, aches or mood swings (PMS). In third world countries where meat and dairy products are not a staple and where women are physically active you will find that problems associated with PMS and menopause are almost non-existent.

 

You may not be familiar with the idea of rendering plants. The dead animal and discarded flesh disposal industry. Yet rendering represents a mult- billion dollar business, and these facilities operate 24 hours a day just about everywhere in America, and they've been in operation for years.

Here is an article entitled "The Dark Side of Recycling" from the Fall, 1990, Earth Island Journal to learn about rendering plants:

"The rendering plant floor is piled high with ’raw product’: thousands of dead dogs and cats; heads and hooves from cattle, sheep, pigs and horses; whole skunks; rats and raccoons --all waiting to be processed. In the 90- degree heat, the piles of dead animals seem to have a life of their own as millions of maggots swarm over the carcasses.

"Two bandanna-masked men begin operating Bobcat mini-dozers, loading the ‘raw’ into a 10-foot-deep stainless-steel pit. They are undocumented workers from Mexico, doing a dirty job. A giant auger-grinder at the bottom of the pit begins to turn. Popping bones and squeezing flesh are sounds from a nightmare you will never forget.

Rendering is the process of cooking raw animal material to remove the moisture and fat. The rendering plant works like a giant kitchen. The cooker, or ‘chef,’ blends the raw product in order to maintain a certain ratio between the carcasses of pets, livestock, poultry waste and supermarket rejects.

Once the mass is cut into small pieces, it is transported to another auger for fine shredding. It is then cooked at 280 degrees for one hour. The continuous batch cooking process goes on non-stop 24 hours a day, seven days a week as meat is melted away from bones in the hot 'soup.’ During this cooking process, the soup produces a fat of yellow grease or tallow that rises to the top and is skimmed off. The cooked meat and bone are sent to a hammermill press, which squeezes out the remaining moisture and pulverizes the product into a gritty powder. Shaker screens sift out excess hair and large bone chips. Once the batch is finished, all that is left is yellow grease, meal and bone meal.

As the American Journal of Veterinary Research explains, this recycled meat and bone meal is used as ‘a source of protein and other nutrients in the diets of poultry and swine and in pet foods, with lesser amounts used in the feed of cattle and sheep. Animal fat is also used in animal feeds as an energy source.’ Every day, hundreds of rendering plants across the United States truck millions of tons of this ‘food enhancer’ to poultry ranches, cattle feed-lots, dairy and hog farms, fish-feed plants and pet- food manufacturers where it is mixed with other ingredients to feed the billions of animals that meat-eating humans, in turn, will eat.

Rendering plants have different specialties. The labeling designation of a particular ‘run’ of product is defined by the predominance of a specific animal. Some product- label names are: meat meal, meat by-products, poultry meal, poultry by-products, fish meal, fish oil, yellow grease, tallow, beef fat and chicken fat.

Rendering plants perform one of the most valuable functions on Earth: they recycle used animals. Without rendering, our cities would run the risk of becoming filled with diseased and rotting carcasses. Fatal viruses and bacteria would spread uncontrolled through the population.

Death is the number one commodity in a business where the demand for feed ingredients far exceeds the supply of raw product. But this elaborate system of food production through waste management has evolved into a recycling nightmare. Rendering plants are unavoidably processing toxic waste.

The dead animals (the ‘raw’) are accompanied by a whole menu of unwanted ingredients. Pesticides enter the rendering process via poisoned livestock, and fish oil laced with bootleg DDT and other organophosphates that have accumulated in the bodies of West Coast mackerel and tuna.

Because animals are frequently shoved into the pit with flea collars still attached organophosphate- containing insecticides get into the mix as well. The insecticide Dursban arrives in the form of cattle insecticide patches. Pharmaceuticals leak from antibiotics in livestock, and euthanasia drugs given to pets are also included. Heavy metals accumulate from a variety of sources: pet ID tags, surgical pins and needles.

Even plastic winds up going into the pit. Unsold supermarket meats, chicken and fish arrive in styrofoam trays and shrink wrap. No one has time for the tedious chore of unwrapping thousands of rejected meat-packs. More plastic is added to the pits with the arrival of cattle ID tags, plastic insecticide patches and the green plastic bags containing pets from veterinarians.

Skyrocketing labor costs are one of the economic factors forcing the corporate flesh-peddlers to cheat. It is far too costly for plant personnel to cut off flea collars or unwrap spoiled T-bone steaks. Every week, millions of packages of plastic-wrapped meat go through the rendering process and become one of the unwanted ingredients in animal feed.

The most environmentally conscious state in the nation is California, where spot checks and testing of animal-feed ingredients happen at the wobbly rate of once every two-and-a-half months. The supervising state agency is the Department of Agriculture's Feed and Fertilizer Division of Compliance. Its main objective is to test for truth in labeling: does the percentage of protein, phosphorous and calcium match the rendering plant's claims; do the percentages meet state requirements? However, testing for pesticides and other toxins in animal feeds is incomplete.

In California, eight field inspectors regulate a rendering industry that feeds the animals that the state's 30 million people eat. When it comes to rendering plants, however, state and federal agencies have maintained a hands-off policy, allowing the industry to become largely self- regulating. An article in the February 1990 issue of Render, the industry's national magazine, suggests that the self- regulation of certain contamination problems is not working.

One policing program that is already off to a shaky start is the Salmonella Education/Reduction Program, formed under the auspices of the National Renderers Association. The magazine states that ‘...unless US and Canadian renderers get their heads out of the ground and demonstrate that they are serious about reducing the incidence of salmonella contamination in their animal protein meals, they are going to be faced with... new and overly stringent government regulations.’

So far, the voluntary self-testing program is not working. According to the magazine, ‘...only about 20 per cent of the total number of companies producing or blending animal protein meal have signed up for the program...’ Far fewer have done the actual testing.

The American Journal of Veterinary Research conducted an investigation into the persistence of sodium phenobarbital in the carcasses of euthanised animals at a typical rendering plant in 1985 and found ‘... virtually no degradation of the drug occurred during this conventional rendering process...’ and that ‘...the potential of other chemical contaminants (e.g., heavy metals, pesticides and environmental toxicants, which may cause massive herd mortalities) to degrade during conventional rendering needs further evaluation.’

Renderers are the silent partners in our food chain. But worried insiders are beginning to talk, and one word that continues to come up in conversation is ‘pesticides.’ The possibility of petrochemically poisoning our food has become a reality. Government agencies and the industry itself are allowing toxins to be inadvertently recycled from the streets and supermarket shelves into the food chain. As we break into a new decade of increasingly complex pollution problems, we must rethink our place in the environment. No longer hunters, we are becoming the victims of our technologically altered food chain.

The possibility of petrochemically poisoning our food has become a reality."