Some of you may already know this, but many probably don't. For the last decade or so, there has been a large amount of hamburger meat (or what could feasibly pass as hamburger meat) being rinsed with ammonia in a facility in the U.S. prior to packaging it for public consumption. Why is this happening you ask? Because some brainiac (and I use this term loosely) imagined that this would be the perfect solution to preventing salmonella, E. coli, and various other foodborne illnesses caused by the way most of the animals eaten in the U.S. today are kept prior to consumption.
If you don't already know this - and many of you probably do - the conditions your beef is kept in prior to it's arrival on your plate are pretty horrendous. Unless you are buying from a local farmer and see where his beef cattle are wandering around in the pasture, or buy from a store that has pledged only to buy free-range, grass-fed beef, then anything and everything you eat, from store to fast food joint, to high end restaurant, has a 99.9% chance of having lived it's life in pretty awful conditions. Most people will pass this off as being irrelevant. They are just stupid animals right? Well, really, they aren't - but that's a whole other story. These animals are kept in small pens with little room to move. They stand in their own excrement pretty much their whole lives once they are put in the barn, and fed a grain diet with lots of antibiotics in it in order to fatten them up in the shortest time possible. All this is done in order to maximize the profits of the businesses that are investing their time and money in them.
In the process, the overall well being of the animal is lost in the bottom line. Either way, what this means for you is that the quality of the meat that ends up on your plate is way below that of what our ancestors ate. Due to the lack of natural diet, these animals have little to none of the good and necessary nutrients your body needs from them in order to maintain your health. They cannot have antioxidants, amino acids, and natural wholesome vitamins in their meat if they aren't consuming them directly from nature. There is also a huge problem with feeding animals only grain diets as well. The balance of their fatty acids is off - meaning that there is a considerable amount of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) lost by eating grains. This in and of itself is important, because CLA has been shown to be a major factor in helping with long term weight management and health. It has also been shown to help combat cancer, high blood pressure, heart disease, high cholesterol, osteoporosis, insulin resistance, inflammation, immune system invaders, and food-induced allergic reactions. And that's just ONE important nutrient lost when these animals are kept in pens and fed nothing but grain!!
Anyway - to get back on topic, the bottom line is that the way these animals are kept is unsanitary to say the least. Which would lead to the obvious assumption that illness would abound among and between these animals, and it does. Many of them are so sick by the time they get transported to the butcheries that they can't even stand up. Killing these animals for human consumption was legal in all states until recently, and only some of them have started to make it illegal to give "downer" meat to the public (even to pets). The ones that can still stand and make their way in are of course killed. These diseased animals bleed and defecate all over the place and cause very unsanitary conditions. This is of course how E.coli and salmonella, and other diseases spread very easily. Dairy cows are usually the most abused animals coming in, and for this reason, most of their flesh is used for hamburger since it isn't fit for steaks, roasts, etc. In an effort to try to prevent breakouts of sickness from this meat, the beef industry has now started to soak up to 80% (and likely more) of the ground beef used mainly in fast food restaurants (but also in sit-down restaurants and school cafeterias) in ammonia prior to packaging it for distribution.
Ammonia! I don't know about you, but I sure don't take a nice shot of ammonia every day for good health. It's pretty stinky, and it would probably make me gag, and get sick, or worse. But for some reason, the beef industry has found it completely okay to do this, and of course, not make it common public knowledge. The crazy irony of it is, it hasn't even been found to lessen the outbreaks of E.coli or salmonella in the meat! But, they are still doing it! (Please read the links I've included below for more information.) They also don't know what the long term effects of eating meat contaminated with the ammonia is on the public, but that hasn't stopped them either. And this is just one of the many problems with buying factory farmed meat, which is oftentimes labeled as being completely "natural". I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure that cows don't naturally ingest ammonia. And I don't want to either. And I certainly don't want our kids exposed to it in school either.
You may want to know what you can do. There are many options, not the least of which is to stop supporting the factory farming industry. Buy your meat from local farms, or from stores that make it a point to buy from farmers that raise their cows humanely. Buy organic meat, which isn't as good as free-range, grass-fed, but it's definitely a somewhat better alternative. Protest against this type of meat being sold to restaurants and to school lunch programs. Write letters to McDonald's, Burger King, etc. to ask them to stop using this beef to make their burgers. You have the power to make change. We shouldn't accept anything less than the best for ourselves and our kids. It's our right, and it should be our choice, without having to weed through what's been tainted with chemicals and what hasn't. Take your family's health into your own hands.
http://www.mercola.com/beef/cla.htm
http://www.lawyersandsettlements.com/articles/13399/food-poisoning-recalls-false-advertising-3.html
http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2010/01/yuck-factor-ammonia-in-your-beef/
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