BODYBUILDING CAFO COWS Are Fattened Up With Many Powerful Steroid Hormones.

STEER AFTER STEER-OIDS

BODYBUILDING COWS part two of CAFO and Mad Cow: Big Meat’s Tale of Two Shitties

This post  is an excerpt from my upcoming book it is a continuation of the feed lot journey picking up after feeding cows Neotame and cull candy. Industry does this because with such narrow profit margins a chemically treated steer or cow can fetch about $80 more per head. There are currently 6 FDA approved drugs:

* Three natural steroids (17 beta-estradiol, testosterone, and progesterone)
* Three synthetic hormones (an estrogen zeranol, the androgen trenbolone acetate, and progestin melengestrol acetate).

These drugs are administered by a tiny implant-a pellet-placed under the skin behind the ear of an animal. As many as half of the cattle inspected however had their pellets illegally placed intramuscularly which improves bioavailability leading to even higher levels of hormones in the meat at slaughter.[1]

Let me give you an idea of how insanely powerful these hormones are. From a popular bodybuilding blog site I read that a serious bodybuilder illegally using trenbolone can gain 30 pounds of rock hard muscle in 2 weeks of dedicated weight lifting with daily dosing of this drug. That is an incredible feat of physiology if you ask me. Although the cow isn’t pumping iron it will still pack on a lot more muscle than without it.

Estrogen is used to fatten up the cow, to add marbling to the meat. So while trenbolone adds meat, estrogen marbles it and adds pounds of white fat to the steak-the type of fat everyone supposedly is looking for especially those darn Japanese. Progesterone is used to fake out the cow’s system so no energy is used to prepare for pregnancy.

There is also Posilac® or Bovine Somatotropin (BST) or technically known as rBGH (recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone) given to dairy cows to increase milk production. This is growth hormone geared for increasing milk production. It’s like adding gas to a milk-fire.

The statistics are indeed terrifying. At least one in six farmers injects his cows with genetically engineered growth hormone. Around 90 % of the 29 billion lb of beef consumed by Americans each year comes from cattle which have been fattened by hormone implants. For pork, the figure is almost 100 %.[2]

SYNTHETIC HORMONES CAUSE CANCER IN HUMANS

So what’s the big deal with hormones anyway? One of the biggest concerns has been that the meat may contain biologically significant levels of these powerful endocrine disruptors. Dr Sam Epstein of the University of Illinois Medical Center in Chicago has warned that contained within confidential reports to the FDA, CAFO meat does indeed harbor high concentrations of these drugs. An 8 year old boy could increase his estrogen level by 10% after eating just two hamburgers .[3]

According to Epstein a single ear pellet implant of Synovex-S a combo of estrogen and progestin can produce residues 20-fold higher than normal. Lifelong exposure to these residues poses a serious risk of breast and reproductive cancers, which have explosively risen since the fifties. We see an escalating increase of reproductive cancers in the U.S.: 36% for post- menopausal breast cancer, 51% for testicular cancer, and 88% for prostate cancer, since 1975.[4] These concerns have been strongly reinforced by recent evidence, from researchers at Ohio State University, that meat and blood from cattle implanted with zeranol have powerful hormonal effects, which resist cooking.

You see when humans ingest synthetic steroids we get cancer. That was the whole point of the Women’s Health Initiative or WHI study. Synthetic progestins fuel synthetic estrogen induced cancers of the breast and uterus. By the way bio-identical hormones, the hormones that chemically are exactly the same as the ones we naturally have do not cause cancers.

You could view this as biological experiment number two the first being GMO’s. We are being fed biologically active concentrations of synthetic cancer causing hormones on a daily basis without informed consent.

The EU issued a report indicting 17 beta-estradiol as a “complete carcinogen” because it can both initiate and promote tumor growth.[5]

BST is a suspect carcinogen. One study found a seven fold increase in breast cancer among pre-menopausal women who had high Insulin-like Growth Factor one or IGF-1 levels in their blood. IGF-1 is a product of growth hormone stimulation. Milk from BST cows contains much higher levels of IGF-1 which survives the human gut to stimulate growth in cells throughout the body.

Monsanto has been forced to admit to some 20 toxic veterinary effects on its POSILAC label. These include mastitis, resulting in pus cells in milk, and antibiotics used to treat the mastitis. …Of major concern is a wealth of longstanding scientific evidence incriminating these excess levels as delayed causes of breast, colon, and prostate cancers.[6]

WILL THE SPECIES HOMO SURVIVE?

Along with the increases in cancers is the simultaneous decrease in sperm counts. In the fifties the average sperm count in any given hood, pot-scrubbing dandy or soda jerk was about 150 million per cc, now it’s 30 million per cc. After 20 million per cc you need fertility assistance to conceive. Swan et al published a study in 2007 which concluded that beef consumption among pregnant mothers led to decreased sperm counts in their male offspring:

These findings suggest that maternal beef consumption is associated with lower sperm concentration and possible subfertility, associations that may be related to the presence of anabolic steroids and other xenobiotics in beef.[7]

Apparently in China sperm counts are so low that many young Chinese men are considered sterile.

In America researchers are getting very concerned about the causes of these declining sperm counts. If they continue to drop we may indeed be on our own apple cart heading for execution.

THE PAUCITY OF TESTOSTERONE FUELED BULLIES

Incidentally, are there a lot of fights at your kid’s high school? The reason why I ask is that just the other day my younger brother and I were talking about our high school experiences. There were fights all the time both at the public and Catholic schools were I had friends. I was training like a banshee in Karate sometimes spending an entire 12 hour day taking class after class just waiting to get into a scrap. Furthermore, my libido was through the roof. But my brother tells me that there basically are no fights at his kid’s school and the kids do not seem as girl crazy as I was back then. It’s just a though but what if the burger’s estrogens are really getting to these kids? Add in a heavy dose of the sedative fluoride and GMO’s and who knows? That’s why I am referring to consumption of these Industrial Dinners as experiments, using powerful mind altering and gender-bending drugs, without our knowledge or permission.

MENSES STILL ARRIVING EARLIER AND EARLIER

These same residues are being blamed for the skyrocketing rates of precocious puberty in girls.

It is “very likely” that hormone residues in North American beef is a factor in the early onset of puberty among girls in recent decades, said Carlos Sonnenschein of the Tufts University School of Medicine at Boston.

“There is no other reason to explain it,” Sonnenschein said in an interview Friday.

Pediatricians say the onset of menstruation has steadily decreased in recent decades. The average age for a first period is now 12½, up [sic] from age 14 in 1900.[8]

As usual the federal government maintains the hormones are safe, despite strong
misgivings on the part of its own scientists at the Health Protection Branch, where four of the most vocal scientists with concerns have been placed under orders not to discuss the issue in public.

CREATURES OF THE COW PIE LAGOON

Lastly don’t forget about environmental runoff. There are tons of these hormones produced and injected into animals. Their manure is then generally kept in lagoons where it eventually seeps into the ground water table or into nearby lakes and streams causing endocrine disruption on any target cell it encounters masculinizing female fish and feminizing male fish or causing amphibian hermaphrodites. This is another canary in a coal mine which we currently ignore to maintain Big Meat’s status quo. Comments from Farm Sanctuary put it into perspective:

“The quantity of waste produced by farm animals in the U.S. is more than 130 times greater than that produced by humans. Agricultural runoff has killed millions of fish, and is the main reason why 60% of America’s rivers and streams are “impaired.”

When you look at the dangers pesticides cause in endocrine disruption since many act like sex hormones the weakest of the steroid hormones given to cattle as growth promoters is 100 to 1,000 times stronger than the most potent of the industrial chemicals “I figured these drugs could pose a real environmental threat,” says Bernard Jegou, who’s the director of research at INSERM (the French Institute of Health and Medical Research) in Rennes. Since 1988 American beef has been banned from the EU because of the recognized hormonal threat to its citizens.

These same residues are in our drinking water as well. One rancher commented on a blogsite that if everyone stopped using steroids the meat would be less tough and taste better thus offsetting the recent declines in beef sales and more than making up for the lost weight at slaughter.

MECHANIZED MEAT IS ENERGY INTENSIVE

In the end if beef were not subsidized by the feds this whole nightmare would end. You see the industrialization of meat in America is an oil intensive endeavor. By the time a calf reaches 1,250 pounds he will have burned up 284 gallons of oil in the form of feed at roughly 25 pounds of corn and other things per day. This is not including the costs of all the other oil intensive side lines like rendering, trucking, heavy use of fertilizers and pesticides for Big Agra’s feed, slaughter, etc. They are so heavily subsidized that this irrational and insane practice can give us rib eye steaks at $3.99 a pound on sale at Safeway. They would probably be more like $35.00 per pound otherwise. How can grass fed compete with this terribly unfair playing field? What about subsidizing organic and grass fed beef? Just kidding, that would be too normal. It will never happen (unless of course we-meaning you-wake up and demand it).

Tags: CAFO, decreasing sperm counts in humans, , industrial dinners, inflammation, manure lagoon runoff, Posilac, precocious puberty, steroid beef, trenbolone use in cattle

Category: CAFO, CAFO Beef