Everyone wants to do the best for their children, but many well-intentioned parents are unaware that meat contains dangerous toxins and that feeding meat increases the likelihood that children will become obese and develop dangerous diseases.
toxic shock The meat and fish we see on supermarket shelves are chock full of antibiotics, hormones, heavy metals, pesticides and a host of other toxins – none of which can be found in any plant based product. These pollutants are quite harmful to adults, and they can be especially harmful to children, whose bodies are small and still developing.
For example, livestock and other animals on American farms are fed high doses of antibiotics and hormones to make them grow faster and to keep them alive in dirty, overcrowded cells before they are killed. Feeding children the flesh of these animals, stuffed with medicines, is an unjustified risk, since small children’s organisms are especially vulnerable to antibiotics and hormones.
The risk to children is so great that many other countries have banned the use of antibiotics and hormones in raising animals that are supposed to be eaten. In 1998, for example, the European Union banned the use of growth-promoting drugs and antibiotics on farm animals.
In America, however, farmers continue to feed powerful growth hormone-stimulating steroids and antibiotics to the animals they exploit, and your children ingest these drugs with every bite of chicken, pork, fish, and beef they eat.
Hormones Vegetarian products do not contain hormones. The same, exactly the opposite, of course, can be said about food products that are made from animals. According to official data, meat contains a large amount of hormones, and these hormones are especially dangerous for children. In 1997, the Los Angeles Times published an article stating: “The amount of estradiol contained in two hamburgers is such that if an eight-year-old boy eats them in one day, it will increase his total hormone levels by as much as 10%, because young children have very low levels of natural hormones.” The Cancer Prevention Coalition warns: “No dietary hormone levels are safe, and there are billions of millions of hormone molecules in a penny-sized piece of meat.”
The negative effects of feeding meat to children were clearly established in the early 1980s, when thousands of children in Puerto Rico developed precocious puberty and ovarian cysts; the culprit was bovine meat, which was filled with drugs that promote the activation of sex hormones.
Meat in the diet has also been blamed for early puberty in girls in the US—nearly half of all black girls and 15 percent of all white girls in America are now entering puberty when they are only 8 years old. In addition, scientists have proven a link between the sex hormones in meat and the development of deadly diseases such as breast cancer. In a major study commissioned by the Pentagon, scientists found that zeranol, a growth-stimulating sex hormone given to cattle for food, causes “significant” growth of cancer cells, even when administered in amounts that are 30 percent below levels currently considered safe by the US government.
If you feed your children meat, you are also giving them doses of powerful sex hormones that cause precocious puberty and cancer. Give them vegetarian food instead.
Antibiotics Vegetarian foods are also devoid of antibiotics, while the vast majority of animals that are used as food are fed growth promoters and antibiotics to keep them alive in unsanitary conditions that could kill them. Giving meat to children means exposing them to these powerful drugs that were not prescribed by their pediatricians.
Approximately 70 percent of the antibiotics used in the United States are fed to farm animals. Farms across America today use antibiotics that we use to treat human diseases, all to stimulate growth in animals and keep them alive in appalling conditions.
The fact that people are exposed to these drugs when they consume meat is not the only cause for concern – the American Medical Association and other health groups have warned that overuse of antibiotics leads to the development of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria. In other words, the abuse of powerful pharmaceuticals is driving the evolution of countless new strains of antibiotic-resistant superbugs. This means that when you get sick, the drugs your doctor prescribes won’t help you.
These new strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria have quickly made their way from the farm to the butcher section of your grocery store. In one USDA study, scientists found that 67 percent of chicken samples and 66 percent of beef samples were contaminated with superbugs that antibiotics can’t kill. In addition, a recent U.S. General Accounting Office report issued an ominous warning: “Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are transmitted from animals to humans, and through many studies we have found that this poses significant risks to human health.”
As new antibiotic-resistant bacteria emerge and are distributed by meat suppliers, we can no longer count on the availability of drugs that will effectively fight new strains of common childhood diseases.
Children are particularly vulnerable because their immune systems are not yet fully developed. Therefore, you and I must protect our families by refusing to support an industry that abuses our most powerful medical resources for its own profit. The use of antibiotics to promote growth in farm animals poses a serious threat to human health: the best way to reduce the threat is to stop eating meat.