Hormones: Here’s the Beef
March 25th, 2007Environmental concerns reemerge over steroids given to livestock
Janet Raloff
Each year, U.S. farmers raise some 36 million beef cattle. Farmers fatten up two-thirds of these animals by using hormones.
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Most cattle that go through feedlots receive steroids to boost their growth rate and beefiness. |
Many cattle are fed the same muscle-building androgens—usually testosterone surrogates—that some athletes consume. Other animals receive estrogens, the primary female sex hormones, or progestins, semiandrogenic agents that shut down a female’s estrus cycle. Progestins fuel meat-building by freeing up resources that would have gone into the reproductive cycle.
While federal law prohibits people from self-medicating with most steroids, administering these drugs to U.S. cattle is not only permissible but de rigueur.
So far, almost all concern about this practice has focused on whether trace residues of these hormones in the meat have human-health consequences. But there’s another way that these powerful agents can find their way into people and other animals. A substantial portion of the hormones literally passes through the cattle into their feces and ends up in the environment, where it can get into other food and drinking water.
Some scientists say that it’s time to better manage livestock’s hormone-laced waste stream, which has flowed unabated in North America for decades.
Cancer threat
As much as anyone, John A. McLachlan knows what’s been happening. He first became interested in livestock hormones in the early 1970s, when he learned that farmers were giving the synthetic hormone diethylstilbestrol (DES) to chickens and cattle. Read the rest of this entry »
Le type d’alimentation idéal pour l’appareil digestif humain est basé sur la consommation des végétaux. Nous avons un intestin très long (environ 12 fois la longueur de notre corps) tout comme les autres animaux végétariens de la planète ; tandis que les carnivores ont un intestin beaucoup plus petit (environ 3 fois la longueur du corps) parfaitement adapté à la digestion de la viande. Les fibres indispensables au bon fonctionnement de notre appareil digestif n’existent simplement pas dans la viande.
Les animaux qui mangent des végétaux sont des faibles ! Vraiment ? L’hippopotame et le buffle sont les deux animaux les plus craints par la population africaine. L’éléphant est le vrai roi “intouchable” de la savane et non le lion. Chez les humains, il y a beaucoup de champions sportifs internationaux qui soient véganes (alimentation faite exclusivement de végétaux) comme Surya Bonaly, Carl Lewis et Martina Navratilova.
