Ground Beef

            When first given the list of topics to research, the question about the safety of our meat supply instantly intrigued me.  I have always loved to eat meat, but I have never really paid any attention to what I might actually be eating instead of pure meat.  When doing my research, I learned tons of things about meat that I never knew and I will share them with you in the rest of this article.

            Over the past few years, researchers have decided that our meat is safer now than it has ever been before.  The E. coli breakout of 1993 gave many people the idea that there might be dangerous pathogens in their meat source.  According to Dan Glickman, the United States Secretary of Agriculture from 1995-2001, “[meat and poultry are] probably the safest things we eat, because it’s inspected.”  He says that seafood, fruits, and vegetables are not inspected nearly as well so they are not as safe.  Nowadays, all meat is required to be federally inspected because of the Federal Meat Inspection Act.  This act protects the consumer of the meat by making sure that meat products are healthy, unadulterated, and labeled and packaged correctly.  This gives many people a feeling of security and a sense of peace, knowing that their meat is safer.

            The Food and Drug Administration has five priorities and two of them are involved in protecting America’s food supply.  The first is strengthening the safety and integrity of the global supply chain, and the second is to strengthen compliance and enforcement activities to support public health.  Since the 1950s, the Food and Drug Administration has approved several steroid hormone drugs including estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone.  These hormones are used to increase animal growth, resulting in high profits and lean meat, but they are only used in cattle and sheep.  The Food and Drug Administration has also found that there are high amounts of saturated fat found in our meat sources that can ultimately lead to major weight gain.

            Many people think that eating meat will provide them with lots of fiber and other nutrients that are essential for our diets, but it won’t.  Meat contains animal protein, saturated fats, and, sometimes, carcinogenic compounds such as heterocyclic amines (HCA) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH).  These are typically formed during the cooking and processing of the meat.  HCA is formed when the meat is cooked at extremely high temperatures and PAH is formed when organic substances are burned.  When these two compounds are ingested, the individual’s cancer risk is greatly increased.  An increase of the risk of hormone-related cancers such as breast and prostate cancer occurs when there is a high fat content in the meat because it increases the hormone production.  Two other cancers that are not as common to see as a result from eating meat, but still exist, are kidney and pancreatic cancers.  One way to make sure that you do not get sick is to handle the meat properly by keeping it cold before cooking, storing it properly, and cooking it properly.  Cooking the meat properly simply means that the temperature of the inside of the meat must reach at least 160 degrees Fahrenheit and there should not be any pink left after it is cooked.

            According to Dr. Robert Tauxe, chief of food-borne and diarrheal diseases branch of the Centers for Disease Control, our food supply is 100 times safer now than it was one hundred years ago, but food-borne disease is still an important health issue.  He says that there is an estimated 76 million cases of food-borne diseases a year.  In the 1940s, there was a ton of salmonella reports that started coming in to the Center for Disease Control.  The number was fairly small when they started being reported, but they continued to increase in the 1950s through the 1980s, and then started to level off.  He says that in the past few years it seems to be decreasing.

            When doing research, I came across an article about a 22-year-old woman who had a food-borne illness caused by E. coli in a hamburger that she had eaten a few days before.  It started out just like any kind of food poisoning or stomach virus would, aches, cramping, diarrhea, etc.  After a day or two, her diarrhea turned bloody and she started experienced seizures and convulsions.  It became so bad that she was put in a medically induced coma for nine weeks and when she woke up, she was paralyzed from the waist down.  After doing studies on the meat she had eaten, researchers found that the cut of meat she had eaten had different parts of the cow and had even been through different slaughterhouses where the E. coli could have been picked up.  These are risks that we are all taking when we put a bite of meat in our mouth.  It is up to us whether we decide to take that risk or not.

            When researching and trying to find information about meat, my focus did kind of change a little bit.  At first, I wanted to focus mainly on how to make the food safer.  But when I started researching, I found a lot more information on the risks of eating meat and the problems that could potentially arise when eaten.  I found very little variety on what could be done to prevent these problems.  All of the sources that I found said the same things about keeping meat safe: cook it at the right temperature and store it at the right temperature.  When I first looked at the list of topics, this was the first topic that really intrigued me because I love to eat meat.  I have never really thought about the negative effects of eating meat because I have always been told that meat is healthy for you, especially red meat.  After doing research on the topic, I realized that meat is not as safe and healthy as everyone believes it to be.

            Meat is a very big part of many people’s lives.  However, some people know these scary facts and decide that they do not want to eat meat because they do not want to risk getting severely ill.  I, for one, love meat and I will continue eat it even after knowing these facts.  It has been proven that people who do not eat meat are less likely to get cancer and that the contents of what we eat account for 30% of cancer patients in Western countries.  A study done in England and Germany proved that vegetarians are 40% less likely to develop cancer when compared to people who eat meat regularly.  These studies may speak to some and others may choose to ignore them.  But others, like me, will take these facts into consideration and reduce the amount of meat that I ingest, but not completely stop eating it all together.

Meat is put through a meat grinder before packaged and sent to stores and restaurants

Uncooked Ground Beef

Cooked Ground Beef

The FDA has to approve all meat before it is sold

Storing meat properly and at the right temperature can keep bacteria from contaminating it

Sources:

Wikipedia - Ground Beef: Wikipedia gave me a brief background on ground beef and how it's made.  I also used it as a source to give me what all ground beef is made of.

PBS: This website gave an overview of how, over time, the safety of our meat has grown.  It had quotes from many high-up people talking about their views on meat and the safety of it.

New York Times article: This article is about a woman who was put in a coma because of a stomach virus after eating meat.  When she awoke, she was paralyzed from the waist down.  It talks about the dangerous and unfasten of our meat.

BBC: This article provided tons of information on the risks of eating red meat, along with the risks of eating all other kinds of meat.

CNN: This article provided information on the precautions that are being taken when it comes to making our meat safer.  It tells how they are trying to reduce the amount of illness from food.

United States Department of Agriculture: This source provides a lot of questions and answers that have to do with meat.  The main question that I focused on was how thoroughly our meat is inspected before it is sold.

Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine: This source provided information about the different kinds of cancer and illnesses that can occur from eating meat.  It tells about the contents of the meat that could potentially cause problems that will make the person eating it sick.

DHerbs: This source provided information on the Food and Drug Administration and what they do.

Food and Drug Administration: This source provides information on what the FDA is responsible for.

Cooks Info: This website provides information on how to cook the meat to reduce the risk of getting sick.