Your Health Part II: Contamination of Meat
(part 2 of a 4-part series; the best source on current scientific support for a plant-based diet is The Whole Foods Diet by Mackey, Pulde, Lederman)
Still not convinced that lowering meat consumption is healthy? You might want to look at what is really in meat—besides the meat. In this case, ignorance is not bliss (unless you mean the kind you might experience in the next life).
Howard Lyman was a fourth-generation dairy farmer and cattle rancher from 1965 to 1983. Gradually realizing how dangerous conventional beef raising was to human health, he turned vegetarian and then went on the Oprah Winfrey Show in 1996 to discuss his research. Her reaction to finding out what went into cattle feed—pesticides, dead animal parts, diseased tissue, manure, growth hormones--caused her to say she would never eat a hamburger again. Texas ranchers sued her for damages and Lyman gave testimony which helped her to win the case.
In 1998, Lyman published his expose Mad Cowboy: Plain Truth from the Cattle Rancher Who Won’t Eat Meat.[1] He took the title of his book from the fact that only the year before, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Federal Drug Administration had, under great pressure, finally banned the feeding of dead ruminants (cows, sheep, deer) to cattle (which are normally vegetarian). The practice had put both cattle and people at risk of getting mad cow disease (technically known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE and in humans is called new variant Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease or nvCJD). This disease is transmitted by eating the flesh of animals, especially brain or spinal cord tissue and is 100 percent fatal, with 200 people dying, mostly in Britain and France. Because the organism that causes it is almost impossible to destroy, 4.4 million potentially-infected cattle were killed in Britain alone and better testing and inspections put at least a temporary stop to its spread in Europe.
Canada had some cases, which caused imports to the U.S. to be banned for a while, but critics say the USDA-FDA policies are far too loose and not well-enforced. Michael Gerger, M.D., of the Organic Consumers Association points out that the U.S. regulations violate four key guidelines of the World Health Organization, including allowing other high-risk tissues to be put into feed and weaning calves on cow’s blood.[2] The USDA still only tests one in 2000 cows for BSE, while in Europe one quarter are tested and in Japan 100 percent of those bound for human consumption. Because the disease does not often show up in young cattle and most in the U.S. are slaughtered before they are two years old, much earlier than in Europe, it is likely that infected animals will get into the American food supply. Consequently, many nations have banned imports of beef from the U.S., which now exports half of what it did before 2003, when its first infected cow was detected. The incubation period for the disease in humans is four years. So far, there have been a few U.S. cases.[3] One study found that 13 percent of those who died with Alzheimer’s actually were suffering from nvCJD, which causes similar symptoms.[4]
But mad cow disease is just the smallest tip of the contamination iceberg. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that food-borne illness causes 76 million people to get sick each year and 5,000 to die (although many experts think the actual numbers are much higher). It also notes that “Information on food-related deaths is especially difficult to obtain because pathogen-specific surveillance systems rarely collect information on illness outcome and death certificates grossly underreport many pathogen-specific conditions.” Three pathogens, Salmonella, Listeria, and Toxoplasma, are responsible for 14 million illnesses, which is three-quarters of the total caused by known pathogens. That means 62 million get sick from unknown agents.[5] The CDC says that some of the ones it is most concerned about were not even recognized until 20 years ago. These include the following three:
E. coli 0157:H7: sickens around 62,000 people a year through food and kills 50-60. The primary source is undercooked hamburgers (but, as Robbins notes, overcooked hamburgers increase the chance of cancer). Hard to trace to the source because it incubates for three to seven days before symptoms occur.
Campylobacter: sickens two million Americans a year through food and kills100. About a third of all Guillain-Barre Syndrome paralysis occurs from this bacteria (causing 1,400 cases of GBS a year). Widespread in chickens (Consumer Reports found 42 percent of one market’s 500 packages of chicken to be contaminated).[6]
Listeria: 2,500 food-borne cases in the U.S. each year, with 500 deaths, one-third of those pregnant women and their fetuses. Others miscarry as a result of infection. It takes 70 days to incubate, so hard to trace, but the Center for Science in the Public Interest says regulations are inadequate and recommends that pregnant women especially avoid deli meats, soft cheese, undercooked meat and poultry, raw shellfish, pates, and foods containing raw eggs.[7]
And the familiar enemies are still dangerous, especially salmonella, with foods carrying it sickening 1.3 million Americans a year, resulting in 600 deaths. Salmonella is most common in poultry and a fair estimate is that 60 percent of raw poultry sold at retail is contaminated with some disease-causing bacteria.[8] But the CDC says salmonella also occur in beef, pork, eggs, and milk products and it has historically been an animal pathogen. However, produce contamination may be on the rise as the result of animal feces getting into irrigation water and because of centralized packaging and shipping practices that can spread it.[9]
Meat Inspection
Not surprisingly, the meat industry has strongly resisted increased inspection and regulation at every point of the production process. Under the new federal Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points system instituted in 1998, meat inspection often largely involves looking through paperwork, rather than at carcasses, and the joke among meat inspectors is that the new rules stand for “Have a Cup of Coffee and Pray.” One Montana meat inspector, Bill Lehman, testified that he was not allowed to do anything more than glance into a truck packed with meat products. “I can’t touch the boxes. I can’t open the boxes. I can’t use a flashlight. I can’t walk into the truck.”[10]
The Center for Public Integrity did an investigation in the 1990s and found that the cattle industry had 124 lobbyists on Capitol Hill, 20 percent of them either former lawmakers or their staff, and $4 million a year was donated by this lobby to members of Congress. “During the escalating public health crisis of the past decade, the food industry has managed to kill every bill that has promised meaningful reform,” the CPI concluded. Cattlemen are now allowed to do their own animal health inspections, while labeling their records “trade secrets” to avoid allow them to be examined by the public. The CPI also discovered that 43 percent of packages subject to meat recalls was never actually recovered.[11]
If they can’t catch the must obvious problems, inspectors aren’t going to be very useful in detecting more subtle chemical contamination. Because stockyards and cages for factory farms are so crowded and dirty (with cows sometimes up to their stomachs in manure and pigs and chickens barely able to move), disease is rampant and fought with massive doses of antibiotics. Veterinarians are barely able to keep up with the regimen for the 33 million animals slaughtered each year. As Rice observes:
Drugs can get into end-product meat via overdoses, uneven releases of drugs throughout the animals’ bodies (in the case of time-release implants), or because of inadequate pre-slaughter drug-withdrawal periods. Troughs of drug-laced feed are not always thoroughly cleaned before necessarily drug-free feed is poured in, and since up to 90 percent of certain drugs can survive an animal’s digestive tract, manure, which is often a component in feed, can transmit residues.[12]
One problem with using antibiotics on animals is that consumption of their meat
is making the bacteria that prey on humans more resistant to antibiotics used by physicians to treat disease.[13]
An even bigger worry is that some of the animal diseases will make the jump to humans, as the avian flu virus did in Asia in 2003 and 2004, killing 24 of the 35 people infected (and prevented from spreading further by the death from disease or preemptive slaughter of 200 million chickens). It was the first time in human history that the influenza virus had moved directly from animals to humans, says Rice.[14]
Toxic Fish
Nor is seafood safe. About 80 percent of seafood consumed in the U.S. is imported from 130 countries, many of which have lower standards for food safety, yet inspections of the imported packages are inadequate. Around 40 percent of the fish comes from aquaculture.[15] According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, in a study from 1973 to 1987, the U.S. had an average of 178 reported cases of seafood-related illness each year, only a quarter of these from shellfish. But the FAO noted that during this period, meat consumption in the U.S. was 10 times greater than seafood and poultry was five times greater. It added that as little as one percent of food-borne illnesses may be reported worldwide.[16]
Although polychlorinated byphenyls (PCBs) were banned as pesticides in 1977, they accumulate in the sediment at the bottom of rivers and lakes and take a long time to break down. In the most recent study of PCBs in fish in 2003, the Environmental Protection Agency said that there were 884 advisories about high levels covering two million lake acres and 130,000 river miles.[17] PCBs are suspected of causing cancer, as well as damage to circulatory, nervous, immune, endocrine, and digestive systems, especially in infants. Adults aged 49-86 who ate fish containing PCBs had lower scores on several measures of memory and learning.
In a 1994 report from the EPA, it stated that there was no known safe level of dioxin, a cancer-causing chemical best-known for having been part of the defoliant Agent Orange, widely used in Vietnam, and found in the poisoned Love Canal neighborhood of Niagara Falls, New York. Dioxin was generated as a byproduct of manufacturing processes, such as making paper and contaminated rivers.[18] A scientific analysis of food in 2001 found that freshwater fish was by far the biggest source of dioxin and PCBs, followed by butter.[19]
Consumption of fish is also the primary reason for mercury poisoning. Mercury is a powerful neurotoxin, second only to plutonium as a toxic heavy metal, and is found in trace amounts in most fish and accumulates in larger fish which eat smaller ones. The FDA claims that 12 oz. a week of fish (two average portions) is safe if from low-mercury species like light tuna, salmon, pollock, catfish, or shrimp. Albacore (or white) tuna, shark, swordfish, king mackerel, and tilefish contain high levels of mercury.[20]
But mercury is especially toxic to newborns because it affects developing nervous systems and in 2004, the EPA raised the number of newborns it believed were born each year suffering from mercury poisoning from 320,000 to 630,000.[21] It had learned from the CDC that 8 percent of pregnant women had blood levels over the 5 parts per billion level it deemed safe. The CDC also discovered that the level of mercury in umbilical cord blood is 1.7 times higher that in the mother’s blood, leading to a theory that fetuses may have trouble expelling mercury. That would mean that if a mother’s blood shows a 3.5 parts per billion level, that would lead to the fetus having a toxic level of 5.8 ppb. The blood mercury levels were seven times higher in women who told the CDC that they had eaten fish two or more times a week over the prior month, compared with women who said they had not eaten fish in the prior month.
Mercury can also accumulate from many other sources, including coal dust, dental amalgams, the preservative in vaccines prior to 1999, and exposure to mercury from old thermometers. In a highly accurate new fecal laboratory test used by one dentist, almost all patients were shown to have very high levels of mercury.[22]
Minamata disease is the name for mercury poisoning since its discovery in 1953, in a study from 1959 to 1995, of the 2,252 people who had officially contracted it, 1,043 had died .[23] At non-fatal levels accumulated in the liver, kidney, and nervous system, it can cause mental retardation, brain damage, depression, blindness, seizures, and the inability to speak. It is also like to be a cause of cancer.[24] It is also suspected as a possible culprit in autism.[25]
[1] Howard Lyman, Mad Cowboy (New York: Scribner’s, 2001; the hardcover is out of print).
[2] “U.S. continues to violate World Health Organziation guidelines for BSE,” www.organicconsumers.org.
[3] “Bovine spongiform encephalopathy,” Wikipedia.org, 6.
[4] E. Manuelidis, et al., :Suggested links between different types of dementias: Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease, and retroviral CNS infections,” Alzheimer’s Disease and Associated Disorders 3:1-2 (1989):s 100-9.
[5] “Food-related illnesses and death in the U.S,” Centers for Disease Control www.cdc.gov.
[6] “Of birds and bacteria,” Consumer Reports, Jan. 2003
[7] “Miscarriage, birth defects too high a price to pay for tainted food,” Center for Science in the Public Interest Jan. 13, 2000 www.cspinet.org.
[8] “How to stop food-borne illness before it starts,” Medical College of Wisconsin https://healthlink.mcw.edu
[9] “U.S. salmonella outbreak explained,” New Scientist, June 11, 2008.
[10] James Ridgeway, “Slaughterhouse Politics,” Village Voice, Dec. 31, 2003.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Rice, 34-35.
[13] “Of birds and bacteria”
[14] Rice, 37.
[15] Testimony of Steven Solomon, DVM, director of the Office of Regional Operations of Regulatory Affairs of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Oct. 4, 2007.
[16] “Statistics on seafood-borne disease,” Fisheries and Aquaculture Department, Food and Agriculture Organization www.fao.org.
[17] “PCBs in fish and shellfish,” Environmental Defense Fund, Aug. 29, 2004 www.edf.org.
[18] Dioxin homepage www.ejnet.org/dioxin.
[19] Schecter, Cramer, Papke, Olson, Silver, Schmitz, “Intake of dioxins and related compounds from food in the U.S. population,” Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part A, 63:1-18, 2001.
[20] “What you need to know about mercury in fish and shellfish,” 2004, Environmental Protection Agency www.epa.gov.
[21] “EPA raises estimate of newborns exposed to mercury,” Scripps Howard News Service, Feb. 4, 2004.
[22] Debbie Sklar, “Dr. Harold Ravins: Detoxing Heavy Metals,” Doctor of Dentistry-Los Angeles, June 2007.
[23] Khaniki, Alli, Nowroozi, Nabizadeh, “Mercury contamination in fisgh and public health aspects: A review,” Pakistan Journal of Nutrition 4 (5): 276-281, 2005.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Debbie Sklar.