Much of the hormones and antibiotics fed to farm animals are resulting in tough meat. To counteract this problem, meat manufacturers have the meat mechanically tenderized. This process involves driving blades and needles through the steak, which in turn drives any bacteria on the surface of those blades right into the center of your steak. What does that mean for those of you who like a steak rare in the middle? That searing it on the outside no longer kills off all bacteria. There could be some trapped inside.
You already knew that many cuts of meat are fatty by nature, but there could be another plumping factor to your steak: the antibiotics. Some studies suggest that the antibiotics we’re consuming via the farm animals that we eat could be disrupting the chemical balance in our own stomachs, causing us to gain weight.
Think choosing chicken in your burrito is the slim option? Chicken today contains 266% more fat than it did 40 years ago. What’s even worse is that it contains 33% less protein than it did 40 years ago, meaning you’re getting far less bang for your buck and consuming empty calories. Not something you’d ever expect from meat.
Sorry but you may have to forgo that juicy chicken breast for an overcooked, tough piece if you want to make sure you won’t end up in the hospital. About 12 % of supermarket chicken carries Salmonella and almost 50% carries Campylobacter, one of the main causes of food poisoning.
In order to clean your meat, manufacturers send their product to a company called Beef Products, which shoves the beef through pipes that expose your meat to ammonia—a poisonous gas.
Around 80% of all antibiotics used in America are being given to farm animals raised for meat to speed up growth. Here’s a scarier fact: while you need a prescription from a doctor to get antibiotics at the pharmacy, anybody can walk into a farm store and purchase enormous quantities of antibiotics. Nobody is monitoring how many antibiotics these animals are ingesting.
MRSA, a bacteria that kills more people than AIDS, has been found in supermarket bacteria. In fact, more than half of the tested meat contained staph infection bacteria. The worst culprits were turkey, pork and chicken.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture found traces of several veterinary drugs and heavy metals in U.S. beef. Some drugs included animal wormers that can cause humans neurological damage, penicillin which many people are deathly allergic to and flunixin, which can cause kidney damage and ulcers.
Cows are not supposed to consume grains, but to speed up their growth, many farms feed cows hoards of grains every day. Since grains are unnatural to the cows’ systems, this changes the chemistry in their stomachs and makes it much easier for E. coli to grow here.
Researchers found that 71% of the E. coli bacteria found in the urine samples of women with UTI’s matched the strain found in supermarket chicken.
