You Are What You Eat. Plastic, Animal Waste and Metal?

Earlier this year, a cyclist, three-time Tour de France champion Alberto Contador, was provisionally suspended after a trace element of a banned substance, clenbuterol was found in his urine.

He has since blamed a contaminated steak for his drug results. He may have a point.

Clenbuterol is used illegally in the US and throughout some parts of Europe to increase the leanness and protein content of cattle, swine and horses. It is added to the food of the animals to increase muscle to fat ratio and to induce growth spurts. In Europe, adverse human reactions include reversible symptoms of increased heart rate, muscular tremors, headache, nausea, fever, and chills.

Halloween is approaching, but what is really frightening is potentially what is going into the food of animals raised for slaughter.

For most meat, egg and dairy producing farms, long gone are the days of animals spending most of their time out to pasture. Even some supermarkets, that imply that their animals are out all day, need to be careful of their wording. Instead, we live in a time of mass produced meat, produced as cheaply as possible for the growing demand of consumers who do not want to pay highly for their dinner.

Farmers now have to contend with ever decreasing prices and large corporations who are trying to compete with the smaller farms. One way for reducing production costs lies within the food fed to the animals.

A study in the US reveals what exactly is going into the animals’ food. It is stomach turning. Since the outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), consumers are asking more questions about where their meat comes from. Sapkota et al 2007, report that amongst other things, rendered animal products, animal waste (yes, faeces), plant and animal based fats, antibiotics (to promote growth and improve feed efficiency), metals (such as copper) and a variety of biological and chemical agents are added to animal feed. Animals raised for meat require a high amount of roughage in their diet, a substitute for natural food they eat, is plastic, ground up into pellets.

This has devastating implications to human health.

Recent outbreaks have highlighted the potential consequences of feeding livestock anything other than their natural diet, Enterococcus faeciu, Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease to name but a few. For the list of known dangers so far, please see this table.

The researchers found that it was difficult to get the full records of exactly what was going into the animal feed; there were no accurate records of the amounts of some of the products added to the feed. These reports are from the US, what about the animal feed in other parts of the
world where people may not yet be aware of the implications of putting chemicals and animal waste into livestock feed.

Cows Grazing in a Large Open Field in the South of England