There's a reason Europeans have a ban on US meat imports.
It is no secret that in the war against meat pathogens in commercial U.S. meat production, the pathogens are winning. The logical result of the tons of antibiotics Big Meat gives livestock (not because they are sick, but to fatten them up) is clear: antibiotics that no longer work against antibiotic-resistant diseases like staph (MRSA), enterococci (VRE) and C.difficile. Antibiotic-resistant infections, once limited to hospitals and nursing homes, can now be acquired in the community, Florida public beaches and on the highway behind a poultry truck.
Big Meat has found some novel ways to retard the growth of
salmonella, E.coli and listeria on commercially grown meat, but it does not
necessarily want people to know about them and these substances are conspicuously
absent from labels.
1. Chlorine Baths
If you want to know the most problematic ingredients in our
food supply, just look at the items the European Union boycotts, starting with
GMOs, hormone beef and chicken dipped in chlorine baths. U.S. Big Food
lobbyists are pushing hard to circumvent the European bans, says MintPress
News, especially "bleached chicken." They claim the “many unwarranted
non-tariff trade barriers… severely limit or prohibit the export of certain
U.S. agricultural products to the EU.”
That's the idea. In fact, the EU has not accepted US poultry since 1997.
Why do U.S. poultry processors use chlorine? It "kills
bacteria, controls slime and algae, increases product shelf life [and]
eliminates costly hand-cleaning labor and materials" in addition to
disinfecting "wash down" and "chilling" water.
"Pinners" in the slaughter facility who remove the birds' feathers by
hand wash their hands with chlorinated water to "reduce odors and
bacterial count" after which the birds are sprayed to "wash all
foreign material from the carcass." Meat is similarly disinfected with
chlorine, says one industrial paper, especially because conveyer belts are
"ideal breeding grounds for bacteria."
In a 2014 directive, the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection
Service (FSIS) admits the many uses of chlorine in poultry and meat production,
none of which are required to be on the label under the "accepted
conditions of use" (which limit the parts per million of chlorine
allowed). And it gets worse. The FSIS directive also reveals that chlorine gas
is used on beef "primals," giblets and "salvage parts" and
for "reprocessing contaminated poultry carcasses." Bon appetit.
2. Ammonia
It has only been two years since the nation's stomach
churned when it saw photos of "pink slime" oozing out of processing
tubes and bound for U.S. dinner tables and the National School Lunch Program.
Looking like human intestines, "lean, finely textured beef" (LFTB)
was made from unwanted beef "trim" and treated with puffs of ammonia gas
to retard the growth of E. coli. While the company making most of the nation's
LFTB, Beef Products Inc. (BPI) shuttered three plants and laid off hundreds of
employees two years ago, it is since fighting back and has brought a lawsuit
against ABC news.
The suit alleges "that ABC launched a disinformation
campaign that had an adverse effect on BPI's reputation, and used the term
'pink slime' to describe the company's LFTB even after it had been provided
factual information about the product," reports Beef magazine. And,
indeed, a quick look at FSIS's 2014 directive, whose purpose is to provide an
"up-to-date list of substances that may be used in the production of meat,
poultry and egg products," shows that "lean, finely textured beef"
is alive and well. "Lean finely textured beef," says the FSIS, is
treated with anhydrous ammonia, "chilled to 28 degrees Fahrenheit and
mechanically 'stressed.'" Ground beef is also treated with anhydrous
ammonia "followed with carbon dioxide treatment." Neither treatment appears
on the meat label.
In November, Ag giant Cargill announced it is bringing back
pink slime, with two changes—instead of ammonia, E.coli will be killed with
citric acid and the meat will be identified as "Finely Textured Beef"
on its label.
3. Carbon Monoxide
Eight years ago there was an uproar about Big Meat using
gases like carbon monoxide to color meat an unnatural red even as it was aging
on the shelf. The brown color meat assumes after a few hours is as harmless as
a sliced apple turning brown, says the American Meat Institute. But like
mercury in tuna or ractopamine in beef, pork and turkey, Big Food didn't blink
or make any changes because it knew the contretemps would blow over—and it did.
Thank you for your short memory, John Q. Public. "Modified atmosphere
packaging" of meat, using assorted gases, is still a mainstay of meat
production and "safe and suitable" in meat production, according to
the FSIS report.
According to the FSIS directive, carbon monoxide is used as
a "part of Cargill’s modified atmosphere packaging system introduced
directly into the bulk or master container used for bulk transportation of
fresh meat products. Meat products are subsequently repackaged in packages not
containing a carbon monoxide modified atmosphere prior toretail sale."
Carbon monoxide is also used to "maintain wholesomeness" in packaging
Cargill's "fresh cuts of case-ready muscle meat and ground meat,"
says the FSIS directive.
Why is Cargill's name actually written into government
directives? Maybe because it's one of the world's biggest Ag players according
to Rain Forest Action. With annual revenues bigger than the GDP of 70 percent
of the world’s countries, Cargill is the world's largest privately held
corporation, says Rain Forest Action. It operates in more than 66 countries and
is one of a "very small handful of agribusiness giants that collectively
are shaping the increasingly globalized food system to their advantage."
4. Other "Safe and Suitable" Ingredients You Don't Know You're Eating
Unless you're a chemist, you may not recognize some of the
other ingredients in the 2014 FSIS directive, but that doesn't mean you want to
ingest them. Take "cetylpyridinium with propylene glycol for bacterial
control." While cetylpyridinium is a germ-killing compound found in
mouthwashes, toothpastes and nasal sprays, in meat production it is combined
with propylene glycol to "treat the surface of raw poultry carcasses or
parts (skin-on or skinless)." Yum.
How about, "aqueous solution of sodium octanoate,
potassium octanoate, or octanoic acid and either glycerin and/or propylene
glycol and/or a Polysorbate surface active agent," also to kill germs?
And, does anyone want to eat "hen, cock, mature turkey,
mature duck, mature goose, and mature guinea" into whose raw meat and
tissue has been injected protease produced from the mold Aspergillus for
tenderness?
Another unrecognizable chemical is sodium tripolyphosphate,
used as an "anti-coagulant for use in recovered livestock blood which is
subsequently used in food products," says FSIS. According to Food and
Water Watch, seafood like scallops, shrimp, hake, sole or imitation crab meat
may be soaked in sodium tripolyphosphate to make it appear firmer, smoother and
glossier. Sodium tripolyphosphate, "a suspected neurotoxin, as well as a
registered pesticide and known air contaminant in the state of
California," says Food and Water Watch, also can make seafood weigh more.
To avoid sodium tripolyphosphate, buy fish labeled as “dry,” says Food and
Water Watch and avoid seafood marked as “wet.” We have not found advice on how
to avoid the chemical in meat.
5. Bacteriophages
An underreported way in which Big Food is seeking to kill
meat pathogens, especially antibiotic-resistant pathogens, is with
bacteriophages. Phages are viruses that infect and kill bacteria, essentially
turning the bacteria cell into a phage production factory until the bacteria
cell bursts, releasing hundreds of copies of new phages, which go on to infect
and kill more bacteria. Phages, discovered in 1919, were used to treat
bacterial infections but fell out of favor when antibiotics became widely
available in the 1940s. Antibiotics had the advantage of attacking more than
one bacterium at the same time and were not usually recognized by a patient’s
immune system, so they could be used over and over in the same person to fight
bacterial infection without producing any immune response.
In 2008, OmniLytics, Inc. announced FSIS approval (issuance
of a no-objection letter) for a bacteriophage treatment for poultry it
developed in conjunction with Elanco, the animal division of Eli Lilly to
reduce salmonella. Other, similar products soon surfaced for meat production.
At least nine bacteriophage uses are listed in the FSIS 2014 directive, mostly
sprayed on the hides or feathers of live animals to reduce bacterial count
before slaughter. While phages are certainly "greener" than
antibiotics, there are two reasons many food activists do not laud the
development. Bacteriophages accommodate rather than reform the high-volume,
low-ethics factory farming and do not clean up drug excesses. The other reason
is phages could become yet another tool of factory farming. Cattle and other
livestock operators could use phages to make animals gain weight without
risking antibiotic resistance, observed a recent documentary.
Martha Rosenberg is an investigative health reporter and the author of "Born With a Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks and Hacks Pimp The Public Health (Random House)."
To subscribe to
Martha Rosenberg visit the original article and scroll to the bottom.
Most meat eaters may be unaware that more than 70% of all beef and chicken in the United States, Canada and other countries is being treated with poisonous carbon monoxide gas. It can make seriously decayed meat look fresh for weeks. The meat industry continues to allow this toxic gas injection into many of the meat products people consume on a daily basis. The question is, how many people have become ill by this chemically altered meat that is being sold to families all over the world?
Carbon monoxide (often referred to as CO) is a colorless, odorless, tasteless gas, one measly oxygen molecule away from the carbon dioxide we all exhale. But that one molecule makes a big difference in that it does very, very bad things to the human body at very, very low concentrations.
CO is toxic because it sticks to hemoglobin, a molecule in blood that usually carries oxygen, even better than oxygen can. When people are exposed to higher levels of CO, the gas takes the place of oxygen in the bloodstream and wreaks havoc. Milder exposures mean headaches, confusion, and tiredness. Higher exposures mean unconsciousness and death, and even those who survive CO poisoning can suffer serious long-term neurological consequences.
The Canadian Meat Packers Council recommends that the internal meat temperatures not go above 39 degrees Celsius or 4 degrees Fahrenheit. That has also been defined by other international meat regulators as the optimum storage temperature of meat. Even small increases of one or two degrees can cause a huge increase in bacterial growth. For example, an increase in the temperature of -1.5 degrees Celsius to 2 degrees Celsius would cut the shelf life of meat in half.
However, keeping meat at these temperatures is very challenging for grocery retailers. The actual surface temperature of displayed fresh meat is often much higher than the thermometer of the display case due to UV radiation from the display case lighting which penetrates the meat packaging and heats the surface just as the sun can cause a sunburn on a cold winter day. Various studies have found that the internal temperature of meat from display cases does exceed 50 degrees Celsius which is more than 10 degrees higher than recommended temperatures.
The meat consequently decomposes very quickly, so the meat industry heavily invested in modified atmospheric packaging which utilizes carbon monoxide gas to extend the shelf life and resist spoilage.
In a carbon monoxide system, with low oxygen, the carbon monoxide will react with the myoglobin and give the meat a bright red colour. The low oxygen mixture artificially limits the growth of spoilage organisms that are commonly caused by increased levels of heat in display cases.
So although carbon monoxide is a gas that can be fatal when inhaled in large quantities, the meat industry insists that it is not harmful to human health when ingested via atmospheric packaging.
This is not true of course since C. perfringens bacteria, the third-most-common cause of food-borne illness, has been proven to grow on what is considered fresh meat right out of the supermarket that is well within the expiry dates on the labels. Marissa Cattoi a lab tech who analyzes meat samples for a health and safety agency says the bacteria are commonly found on fresh grocery meat. "We commonly test for C.perfringens bacteria and about half of the fresh meat products that come in are positive despite them being within the expiry period. 100% of the these cases come from packagers who adopted atmospheric packaging methods such as the use of carbon monoxide gas," she stated.
The United States, Canada, Australia, the U.K and many European countries currently utilize atmospheric packaging practices to prevent meat from spoiling.
Natasha Longo has a master's degree in nutrition and is a certified fitness and nutritional counselor. She has consulted on public health policy and procurement in Canada, Australia, Spain, Ireland, England and Germany.
Source: http://preventdisease.com/news/12/031112_Decayed-Meat-Is-Treated-With-Carbon-Monoxide-To-Make-It-Look-Fresh-At-The-Grocery.shtml
Freelee's:
Subscribe to Dr Greger here: https://www.youtube.com/user/Nutritio...
Recommended Documentaries:
* Healing Cancer from the inside out. Go to www.ravediet.com
* Cut, poison, burn.
* Cancer - The forbidden Cures
* Forks over Knives
* Youtube Search "The business of cancer"
* Read "The China Study" http://www.thechinastudy.com
★ My ebook http://www.30bananasaday.com/Freelees...
★ Blend: http://www.froothie.com.au/store/froo...
★ Follow me on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thebananagirl
★ Join the Banana Girl Movement http://www.BananaGirlDiet.com
★ Go FRUIT Yourself! http://www.go-fruit-yourself.com
★ My Fruit Community http://www.30bananasaday.com
★ Personal FB Updates http://www.facebook.com/freeleevegan
★ Check out my BLOG http://www.TheBananaGirl.com
★ Buy 30BAD Shirts etc here http://www.cafepress.com/30bad
★ One of the best sites in the WORLD http://www.adaptt.org
★ Another crazy fruitbat! http://www.durianrider.com
★ Real fruit jewellery http://realfruitjewelry.com
Thanks for reading!
Decayed Meat Treated With Carbon Monoxide To Make It Look Fresh At The Grocery
Most meat eaters may be unaware that more than 70% of all beef and chicken in the United States, Canada and other countries is being treated with poisonous carbon monoxide gas. It can make seriously decayed meat look fresh for weeks. The meat industry continues to allow this toxic gas injection into many of the meat products people consume on a daily basis. The question is, how many people have become ill by this chemically altered meat that is being sold to families all over the world?
Carbon monoxide (often referred to as CO) is a colorless, odorless, tasteless gas, one measly oxygen molecule away from the carbon dioxide we all exhale. But that one molecule makes a big difference in that it does very, very bad things to the human body at very, very low concentrations.
CO is toxic because it sticks to hemoglobin, a molecule in blood that usually carries oxygen, even better than oxygen can. When people are exposed to higher levels of CO, the gas takes the place of oxygen in the bloodstream and wreaks havoc. Milder exposures mean headaches, confusion, and tiredness. Higher exposures mean unconsciousness and death, and even those who survive CO poisoning can suffer serious long-term neurological consequences.
The Canadian Meat Packers Council recommends that the internal meat temperatures not go above 39 degrees Celsius or 4 degrees Fahrenheit. That has also been defined by other international meat regulators as the optimum storage temperature of meat. Even small increases of one or two degrees can cause a huge increase in bacterial growth. For example, an increase in the temperature of -1.5 degrees Celsius to 2 degrees Celsius would cut the shelf life of meat in half.
However, keeping meat at these temperatures is very challenging for grocery retailers. The actual surface temperature of displayed fresh meat is often much higher than the thermometer of the display case due to UV radiation from the display case lighting which penetrates the meat packaging and heats the surface just as the sun can cause a sunburn on a cold winter day. Various studies have found that the internal temperature of meat from display cases does exceed 50 degrees Celsius which is more than 10 degrees higher than recommended temperatures.
The meat consequently decomposes very quickly, so the meat industry heavily invested in modified atmospheric packaging which utilizes carbon monoxide gas to extend the shelf life and resist spoilage.
In a carbon monoxide system, with low oxygen, the carbon monoxide will react with the myoglobin and give the meat a bright red colour. The low oxygen mixture artificially limits the growth of spoilage organisms that are commonly caused by increased levels of heat in display cases.
So although carbon monoxide is a gas that can be fatal when inhaled in large quantities, the meat industry insists that it is not harmful to human health when ingested via atmospheric packaging.
This is not true of course since C. perfringens bacteria, the third-most-common cause of food-borne illness, has been proven to grow on what is considered fresh meat right out of the supermarket that is well within the expiry dates on the labels. Marissa Cattoi a lab tech who analyzes meat samples for a health and safety agency says the bacteria are commonly found on fresh grocery meat. "We commonly test for C.perfringens bacteria and about half of the fresh meat products that come in are positive despite them being within the expiry period. 100% of the these cases come from packagers who adopted atmospheric packaging methods such as the use of carbon monoxide gas," she stated.
The United States, Canada, Australia, the U.K and many European countries currently utilize atmospheric packaging practices to prevent meat from spoiling.
Natasha Longo has a master's degree in nutrition and is a certified fitness and nutritional counselor. She has consulted on public health policy and procurement in Canada, Australia, Spain, Ireland, England and Germany.
Source: http://preventdisease.com/news/12/031112_Decayed-Meat-Is-Treated-With-Carbon-Monoxide-To-Make-It-Look-Fresh-At-The-Grocery.shtml
Freelee's:
Please research the Gerson Institute www.gerson.org
Please watch EARTHLINGS here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ce4DJ...
Subscribe to Dr Greger here: https://www.youtube.com/user/Nutritio...
Recommended Documentaries:
* Healing Cancer from the inside out. Go to www.ravediet.com
* Cut, poison, burn.
* Cancer - The forbidden Cures
* Forks over Knives
* Youtube Search "The business of cancer"
* Read "The China Study" http://www.thechinastudy.com
★ My ebook http://www.30bananasaday.com/Freelees...
★ Blend: http://www.froothie.com.au/store/froo...
★ Follow me on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thebananagirl
★ Join the Banana Girl Movement http://www.BananaGirlDiet.com
★ Go FRUIT Yourself! http://www.go-fruit-yourself.com
★ My Fruit Community http://www.30bananasaday.com
★ Personal FB Updates http://www.facebook.com/freeleevegan
★ Check out my BLOG http://www.TheBananaGirl.com
★ Buy 30BAD Shirts etc here http://www.cafepress.com/30bad
★ One of the best sites in the WORLD http://www.adaptt.org
★ Another crazy fruitbat! http://www.durianrider.com
★ Real fruit jewellery http://realfruitjewelry.com
There are 14 billion hamburgers consumed each year in the United States
alone. The people who eat those burgers, though, have little knowledge
of what's actually in them. Current USDA regulations, for example,
openly allow beef contaminated with E. coli to be repackaged, cooked and
sold as ready-to-eat hamburgers.
This simple fact would shock most consumers if they knew about it. People assume that beef found to be contaminated with E. coli must be thrown out or destroyed (or even recalled), but in reality, it's often just pressed into hamburger patties, cooked, and sold to consumers. This practice is openly endorsed by the USDA.
But E. coli may not be the worst thing in your burger: USDA regulations also allow chicken feces to be used as feed for cows, meaning your hamburger beef may be made of second-hand chicken poop, recycled through the stomachs of cows.
According to the FDA, farmers feed their cattle anywhere from 1 million to 2 million tons of chicken feces each year. This cross-species contamination practice worries critics who are concerned it may lead to increased risk of mad cow disease contaminating beef products. So they want to ban the practice and disallow the feeding of chicken litter to cows.
Now, you might wonder how chicken feces could pose a mad cow infection risk to cows? It's because chickens are fed ground up parts of other animals such as cows, sheep and other animals as part of their daily feed. Some of that chicken feed spills out and gets swept up as chicken litter, and then fed to cows.
So now we have a bizarre experiment in animal feed lots where dead cows, sheep and other animals are fed to chickens, and then chicken feed spills onto the floor where, combined with chicken poop, it gets swept up and fed to cows. Some of those cows, in turn, may eventually be ground up and fed back to the chickens.
Why not to feed animals to each other? First off all, in the real world cows are vegetarians. They don't eat other cows, or chickens, or feces for that matter. Chickens don't eat cows in the real world, either. If given free range, they live primarily on a diet of bugs and weeds.
But through the magic of horrific factory food production practices in the USA, dead cows are fed to chickens, and chicken feces is fed to cows. This is precisely how mad cow disease could contaminate this unnatural food cycle.
You might think that cooking a burger destroys the mad cow disease prions? Not true, even burgers that are fully cooked and handled according to federal safety standards can infect consumers with mad cow disease, and it's only a matter of time before humans start to be stricken with the disease.
Dying from mad cow disease isn't pretty, painless or quick. It's ugly. Your brain cells start to turn to mush, slowly shutting down cognitive function little by little like some strange, aggressive form of Alzheimer's disease. First you lose concentration ability, then your speech goes, and eventually all brain function stops altogether. It's a horrifying way to waste away.
Remember: Right now, the practice of feeding chicken feces to cow herds continues. So there is a risk of mad cow disease infection in U.S. beef right now. Very little testing is currently being conducted for mad cow disease, meaning an infection could very easily go undetected for years. Meanwhile, the average hamburger contains beef parts from as many as 1,000 different cows.
Do the math. Unless cattle feeding practices are significantly reformed, eating beef products made from conventional beef - hot dogs, hamburgers, steaks - is like playing Russian Roulette with your brain cells.
This simple fact would shock most consumers if they knew about it. People assume that beef found to be contaminated with E. coli must be thrown out or destroyed (or even recalled), but in reality, it's often just pressed into hamburger patties, cooked, and sold to consumers. This practice is openly endorsed by the USDA.
But E. coli may not be the worst thing in your burger: USDA regulations also allow chicken feces to be used as feed for cows, meaning your hamburger beef may be made of second-hand chicken poop, recycled through the stomachs of cows.
According to the FDA, farmers feed their cattle anywhere from 1 million to 2 million tons of chicken feces each year. This cross-species contamination practice worries critics who are concerned it may lead to increased risk of mad cow disease contaminating beef products. So they want to ban the practice and disallow the feeding of chicken litter to cows.
Now, you might wonder how chicken feces could pose a mad cow infection risk to cows? It's because chickens are fed ground up parts of other animals such as cows, sheep and other animals as part of their daily feed. Some of that chicken feed spills out and gets swept up as chicken litter, and then fed to cows.
So now we have a bizarre experiment in animal feed lots where dead cows, sheep and other animals are fed to chickens, and then chicken feed spills onto the floor where, combined with chicken poop, it gets swept up and fed to cows. Some of those cows, in turn, may eventually be ground up and fed back to the chickens.
Do you see how this might be a problem?
Why not to feed animals to each other? First off all, in the real world cows are vegetarians. They don't eat other cows, or chickens, or feces for that matter. Chickens don't eat cows in the real world, either. If given free range, they live primarily on a diet of bugs and weeds.
But through the magic of horrific factory food production practices in the USA, dead cows are fed to chickens, and chicken feces is fed to cows. This is precisely how mad cow disease could contaminate this unnatural food cycle.
You might think that cooking a burger destroys the mad cow disease prions? Not true, even burgers that are fully cooked and handled according to federal safety standards can infect consumers with mad cow disease, and it's only a matter of time before humans start to be stricken with the disease.
Dying from mad cow disease isn't pretty, painless or quick. It's ugly. Your brain cells start to turn to mush, slowly shutting down cognitive function little by little like some strange, aggressive form of Alzheimer's disease. First you lose concentration ability, then your speech goes, and eventually all brain function stops altogether. It's a horrifying way to waste away.
Is the risk of that really worth eating burgers?
Remember: Right now, the practice of feeding chicken feces to cow herds continues. So there is a risk of mad cow disease infection in U.S. beef right now. Very little testing is currently being conducted for mad cow disease, meaning an infection could very easily go undetected for years. Meanwhile, the average hamburger contains beef parts from as many as 1,000 different cows.
Do the math. Unless cattle feeding practices are significantly reformed, eating beef products made from conventional beef - hot dogs, hamburgers, steaks - is like playing Russian Roulette with your brain cells.
Thanks for reading!
Have a great day!
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To get e-mail notifications of new posts from this blog, contact me at: genevieve-parry@live.com
