Where's the Beef?

According the Nutrition Action Healthletter, ground beef would be a strong contender as the single food most likely to inflict damage on the American diet. They say that Americans stuff themselves with tacos, meatloaf, lasagna and the ubiquitous hamburger without a second thought as to the consequences.

The average American consumes about 30 pounds of ground beef each year. That's equivalent to a Quarter Pounder every three days. Hamburgers and cheese-burgers account for more than 76 percent of the beef sold in restaurants compared to just 5 percent for steak. Untrimmable ground beef products account for roughly 45 percent of the beef we eat and, unlike steak, the fat in ground beef can't be trimmed away. In fact, the health letter contends that many supermarkets "adjust" the fat content of their ground beef by adding ground-up beef fat. By law, no nutrition labels are required on ground beef packages. The medical community is very specific about limiting the amount of saturated fat in your diet. Ground beef is the third largest source of saturated fat in the average American diet after cheese and milk.

Much has been written about the disadvantages of commercial beef versus natural grass fed varieties. Commercial farmers have been using powerful synthetic fattening chemicals for a long time to enhance animal weight gain. It makes economic sense. More animal weight for less food [cost ]. the farmer makes more income. But, when the animals are sold, we eat them, chemicals and all. The end result is that our metabolism appears to be affected by a massive range of synthetic chemicals including those intended to fatten animals.

Because of policies started by the Nixon administrations USDA, we have amassed a hugh mountain of cheap corn to be used as cattle feed. The advantage to farmers is that corn fed cows get fat quickly and their flesh also marbles [fat layers ] well. But a growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn feed beef as well as the synthetic chemicals used. Ruminants are ill adapted to eating corn. In the same way, humans may be poorly adapted to eating ruminants that eat corn.

Michael Pollan, in his best selling book The Omnivore's Dilemma, tasting a hamburger from a steer raised in a CAFO, " I could not taste the feed corn, or the petroleum, or the antibiotics, or the hormones, or the feed lot manure. Nutrition facts don't enumerate the fact of what has gone into the making of the hamburger. You are what you eat is a truism hard to argue with, and yet it is, as a visit to a feed lot suggests, incomplete, for you are what what you eat eats too. And what we are, or have become, is not just meat but number 2 corn and oil.

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