Our Food
Beef - Back to the future - Berkeley Wellness Letter Feb, 2003
Biting into a juicy burger or slicing a filet mignon, few people realize that beef isn’t what it used to be. Before World War II, beef cattle were raised on grass. It could take four years to fatten a steer. But then the industry switched to corn, a sort of time machine for a steer. Today calves start out on milk and grass but then, when six months old, they’re sent to a feedlot. By the time they are about 14 months old, corn-fed steers weigh enough to be slaughtered.
“Corn-fed” may sound wholesome, as normal as Kansas in August and blueberry pie, but in fact corn is not healthy for cattle. Cattle are ruminants. Their digestive systems are designed for grass, not grain. Fed on corn, they fatten in a hurry—it’s similar to force-feeding a goose to make its liver fat. A corn diet makes cattle sick, sometimes fatally. The animals must have antibiotics to stave off illness and infection until they weigh enough to be slaughtered, as well as hormones to promote quick growth. All this saves money for the growers and keeps the price of beef low.
Corn is a problematic crop, too. It’s heavily subsidized by the government and thus overproduced. It demands vast doses of pesticides and fertilizers, requiring huge quantities of natural gas and oil to produce. Toxic runoff from feedlots has become an environmental hazard, polluting ground water and land. In addition, corn-fed beef is not good for people, particularly the people who regularly eat fatty steaks and burgers. Corn-fed beef is tender, with the marbling consumers have come to expect— and thus is high in fat, especially saturated fat. A four ounce serving of grass-fed beef typically has 7 to 10 grams of total fat, compared with 14 to 16 grams in the same cut of corn-fed beef. Grass-fed beef, besides being lower in saturated fat, it also contains more of the beneficial unsaturated fatty acids called omega-3s (similar to those in fish), as well as more vitamin E. Grass-fed beef also supplies more conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), another type of fat that has potential health benefits.
Hormones and antibiotics
And then there’s the matter of the hormones in corn-fed cattle. By the time the meat gets to your plate, residues are very small—not enough to worry about from a health standpoint. What is worrying is not the effect on consumers, but on the environment. Hormones from cattle (and other sources) end up polluting water. And not all scientists are comfortable with the idea of residues in meat: the European Union has refused to import American beef raised with hormones.
Another problem is the antibiotics used in corn-fed animals to prevent or treat disease. Again, residues in meat are not likely to hurt people, but use of antibiotics leads to resistant strains of bacteria in animals and in the environment. (Thus, if you get sick from Salmonella, for example, the strain may be resistant to many antibiotics.) Meat from corn-fed cattle is also far more contaminated with E coli bacteria, partly because corn interferes with ruminant digestion, and partly because the animals are crowded.
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