By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now
Recently I was hashing over with a family member about the reasons people are vegetarians, or vegans or mostly veggie. We agreed that people get off the meat, for a variety of reasons, often complex and intertwined, regardless of whether they’re just cutting way back or drawing a hard line deep in vegan territory.
(Image: FoodandWaterWatch.org.)
I proposed that health reasons were the paramount motivator, given the United States’ high rate of heart disease, still the number one killer here. Not to mention our obesity issues. And I was about to further dominate the conversation when my companion blurted that he thought more people were primarily motivated by animal rights concerns, followed by health reasons. Vegetarians think that way, he said.
Come to think of it, animal rights probably are front of mind for most vegans and strict vegetarians. Thinking of my vegetarian kids, and my years as a vegetarian or mostly veggie person (don’t get me started on that, NO ONE likes you when you eat ethically raised meat sometimes), it made sense.
I mean, how many videos of some poor, limping cow being shoved onto an intake ramp does it take before you start to cringe at the sight of your hamburger? For some people, that visual message is indelible. And yet, I’m recalling Steve Kinnear in Fast Food Nation chomping away on a hamburger after a stroll through the packing plant. I think a lot of people are like that, also, divorced from what they feel about their food — or not wanting to think too much about where it came from. Or they’re simply OK with humans at the top of the food chain. After all, we aren’t the only carnivores/omnivores in the world. I can respect that.
On the other hand, maybe they also haven’t heard that the burger they’re eating has most likely been sanitized with an ammonia treatment to tamp down the E.coli that plagues ground beef, a necessary evil necessitated by the way industrial beef are speed-raised and handled.
Did I mention the muck and overcrowding these bovine endure? Consider that unmentioned.
After mulling these reasons for trimming back on the beef (and pork and chicken), I stumbled on some information that illustrates how difficult it is to separate the key twin issues — the well being of livestock and the healthfulness of the product they provide.
It comes from Dr. Samuel S. Epstein, a doctor and chairman of the Cancer Prevention Coalition, a group that often stands just outside the mainstream cancer treatment community, hollering from the sidelines about matters others seem content to ignore.
The CPC is asking the Food and Drug Administration to issue “an urgent ban on hormonal meat” because it increases the risk of certain cancers in humans that eat it.
Not a new issue, true. But Dr. Epstein, a professor emeritus of Environmental and Occupational Medicine at the University of Illinois School of Public Health, is an agitator. And agitators don’t give up.
Epstein, sincere and committed to his advocacy of showing how chemicals increase cancer risks, knows that the FDA is unlikely to drop everything and heed his call. In fact, his press release explains why: This is a matter that the federal government has side-stepped for 30 years.
But Epstein’s group sees that as no excuse for continued inertia. The coalition’s petition wants a label for meat similar to the admonishments on cigarette packages.
Feed lot (Photo: USDA.)
The warning Dr. Epstein proposes for commercial meat – the vast majority of which is today “beefed up” with hormones: “Produced with the use of sex hormones, and poses increased risks of breast, prostate, and testis cancers.”
Cattle are routinely implanted with sex hormone pellets to fatten them on feedlots (a government- allowed practice), increasing their meat production — by about 50 pounds per animal, according to the coalition. The result is more meat, and, the coalition believes, riskier meat; meat pre-marinaded in chemicals that raise our chances of getting breast, prostate and testicular cancers.
Increased hormones, for example from birth control pills, have been implicated in cancers. And increased red meat intake also has been found to play a role in the development of the most common type of breast cancer, according to large studies of American women.
Of course it could be the meat itself that is the larger part of the problem, and not the hormone residues. That question is moot anyway, according to the U.S. government, which maintains that the meat produced by hormone-treated animals is free of harmful hormonal residues.
The FDA and the USDA both report that industrially produced meat is safe in this regard, even becoming embroiled in a long running debate with the EU, which refuses to import American meat because of the widespread use of growth hormones. (For more on how the EU does it differently, see this NPR report. For info on how some ranchers in the U.S. raise livestock humanely and healthfully see American Grassfed Association.)
Dr. Epstein simply points to an increase in hormonal cancers since 1975, which roughly coincides with the introduction of the wholesale use of hormones to grow livestock. He says that since that time:
- Breast cancer is up by 23%
- Prostate cancer by 60%
- Testicular cancer by 60%
In fairness, this is a debatable point. Some people believe we’re better at detecting cancers. There also have been studies suggesting that some early cancers, say some found on mammograms, might not ever become full-blown cancers, but because of our excellent screening system, they now get counted and treated.
So we have to add a caveat — these statistics may or may not be the ones to go by.
On the other hand, the practice of fattening animals on hormones raises many questions, even before we get to the one about the ethical treatment of animals, which this is surely not.
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