Fwd: [S-A] [SoFlaVegan] Plump, Juicy People

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" Misty L. Trepke "

Fri, 22 Aug 2003 23:32:40 -0000

[s-A] [soFlaVegan] Plump, Juicy People

 

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Misty L. Trepke

http://www..com

 

Plump, Juicy People -- How Drugs Fed to Animals are Causing Eating

Disorders in Humans

 

Thanks to Holly Sternberg for her excellent review of the book, " The

Body Restoration Plan. " Published in 2002, it was written by a

Scottish M.D., Paula Baillie-Hamilton, and is called The Body

Restoration Plan. In this book, Baillie-Hamilton uses animal growth

promoters as support for her more general theory that some toxic

chemicals (mainly synthetic ones, i.e. made in a laboratory) are

" fattening. " She specifically mentions these broad groupings:

organochlorines, organophosphates, carbamates, heavy metals,

solvents, and plastics and plasticizers. She uses the word

" fattening " not in the sense of " containing calories, " but in

damaging the body's metabolism (e.g., hormones and the liver) in a

way that causes weight gain. She has gathered evidence--partly from

animal studies, partly from human studies--that while high doses of

any toxic chemical will make you very sick and cause weight loss, LOW

doses of toxic chemicals make you just a little sick and a little

tired and can cause weight gain in one or more of the following ways:

increasing your appetite, slowing your metabolism, decreasing your

ability to burn stored fat, and reducing your ability to exercise.

 

Question:

 

A factory farmer gives a steer a drug specifically designed to cause

rapid, substantial, abnormal weight gain. The drug works well: the

animal becomes about 20% heavier, on 15% less food per pound, than

genetically similar cattle who aren't given the drug. The drugged

steer is killed with residues of this drug still in her body. A

meat-eater consumes the residues of this drug, along with residues of

other weight-promoting drugs, in her diet of cow, pig, chicken, and

other meat, plus dairy products, every day for years.

What is the MOST LIKELY effect of these drug residues on the person's

body?

 

Cancer.

The drugs are ineffective when the person takes them to fight a

bacterial infection. Premature puberty if she's young, birth defects

in her children if she's older.

 

Weight gain.

 

How about (d), weight gain? That's not to say that the others aren't

very strong possibilities, and they are all being extensively

investigated--antibiotics causing resistance, steroids interfering

with sexual development, and other drugs causing cancer. Some of

these drugs may eventually be banned (or have been banned in some

countries) for these reasons, but drug companies are already

developing replacements. Strangely, the possibility that drugs used

to fatten animals might also be fattening people seems to have been

considered by only a handful of people. Maybe it's just too obvious.

 

Suppose it turned out that a drug that, say, artificially stimulates

appetite in a pig or chicken is being passed on to humans through

residues in meat, making people feel hungry when they normally

wouldn't be. Maybe instead of reaching that point of " can't eat

another bite, " they keep going. Without a known cause, that would

feel uncomfortably like compulsive eating. Finding out that drugs

are compelling them to eat would be pretty shocking and annoying to

people trying to lose weight, and hopefully they would avoid eating

dead, drugged animals and stop feeding them to their mysteriously

overweight children. That would be pretty cool.

 

Don't get me wrong - I think people should stop eating animals

because of the horrendous conditions these animals live and die in.

But if there's one way to get people to change their eating habits

in a hurry, it's the chance of losing weight without feeling hungry.

Unfortunately, just when the obesity epidemic is getting a lot of

press, how are people trying to lose weight? By eating even more

animal products, thanks to the absurd popularity of the Atkins

books, which have sold 15 million copies and are still on the

bestseller list. Never mind that that meat causes cancer, heart

disease, strokes, hardening of the arteries-they think meat will help

them lose weight, and that's more important to them than health.

Well, for those who aren't swayed by ethical and health arguments

against eating animals, maybe this will catch their attention. Not

only is meat fattening, but the drugs in factory-farmed meat could be

making people literally-if you'll forgive the expression--eat like

pigs.

 

Over the past 20 or 30 years, as more Americans have been getting

fatter, and while we animal rights people have been working hard to

expose the cruelty of factory farming, the factory farmers-aided by

large drug companies - have gone merrily on their way, confining more

and moreanimals to smaller and smaller spaces and drastically

increasing the amount of antibiotics, steroids, pesticides, and other

drugs they are using.

 

The 20% weight gain on 15% less feed used in the example above is

what's commonly obtained in cattle from steroids alone, not counting

the effects of other drugs and the huge effect of selective breeding.

Antibiotics alone cause about a 4-8% increase in weight of chickens,

pigs, and cows, with the higher gains occurring in sicker animals. I

don't know what the weight gains are for drugs other than steroids

and antibiotics. As you know, these are animals who are sick, in

constant pain, depressed, and being fed poor-quality foods. That

would make most animals feel like not eating. Yet these drugs keep

them eating. They must be pretty powerful. And you can bet that if

any drug being used was found to make the animals LOSE weight,

factory farmers would drop it like a rock.

 

The residues of these drugs in meat, our government assures us, are

insignificant, except when some careless or greedy factory farmer

continues feeding a drug until shortly before the animal is

slaughtered, which, as Howard Lyman will tell you, actually happens

all the time.

 

When Jim Mason wrote Animal Factories in 1990, he reported an FDA

estimate that 20,000 to 30,000 different drugs were being used in

food animals, 90% of those illegally, and with testing for residues

unavailable for most of them. He's probably updated those figures by

now. But even assuming that's all been straightened out now (not

likely) and that factory farmers are only using the 1,705 drugs

officially approved by the FDA (294 of which include " weight gain " in

their descriptions), there is no question that there are all kinds of

drug residues in meat and dairy products.

 

If you check out the FDA website, the " guidance " section under

" animal feeds, " it nicely spells out its guidelines (not laws) for

minimizing drug residues in animal products. If I understand it

correctly, the drug company not only tests the drug in the farmed

animal but also feeds enough of the drug to rats, dogs, and sometimes

monkeys to make them seriously ill in short-term studies (generally

they are looking for cancer), and then rather arbitrarily sets the

acceptable residue level at 100 or 1,000 times below that, measured

in parts per million. Any residues under the established level are

considered insignificant, unless they turn out to cause major

problems in people, at which time the FDA starts thinking about maybe

banning the drug in a few years. As far as a piddly little thing like

weight gain goes, toxicologists usually think animals are doing great

if they gain weight instead of losing weight on the way to dropping

dead, according to the author I'm about to discuss.

 

Searching Google for " growth promoters " plus " obesity " turned up a

very interesting and clearly written diet book, which I hope you'll

read. I'll summarize it here. It's by a Scottish M.D., Paula

Baillie-Hamilton, and is called The Body Restoration Plan. It came

out in 2002. In this book, Baillie-Hamilton uses animal growth

promoters as support for her more general theory that some toxic

chemicals (mainly synthetic ones, i.e. made in a laboratory) are

" fattening. " She specifically mentions these broad groupings:

organochlorines, organophosphates, carbamates, heavy metals,

solvents, and plastics and plasticizers.

 

She uses the word " fattening " not in the sense of " containing

calories, " but in damaging the body's metabolism (e.g., hormones and

the liver) in a way that causes weight gain. She has gathered

evidence--partly from animal studies, partly from human studies--that

while high doses of any toxic chemical will make you very sick and

cause weight loss, LOW doses of toxic chemicals make you just a

little sick and a little tired and can cause weight gain in one or

more of the following ways: increasing your appetite, slowing your

metabolism, decreasing your ability to burn stored fat, and reducing

your ability to exercise.

 

So her idea is, reduce your exposure to toxic chemicals, and you lose

weight, since your body is getting healthier and its metabolic

functions will work the way they are supposed to, keeping you at a

normal weight. How can you reduce your exposure to toxic chemicals?

She says our main exposure is in foods that contain pesticides, so

you should go organic when possible or at least avoid the most

heavily contaminated foods. She considers it important support for

her theory that some of the same chemicals currently or previously

used (before being banned) as animal growth promoters-

organophosphates and carbamates--are currently sprayed on foods as

pesticides. The FDA regularly monitors 90 different pesticides in

fruits, vegetables, and some animal products. Based on these FDA

reports, plus her idea of which chemicals are the most " fattening, "

she rated foods as very high (in fattening chemicals), high, medium,

low, and very low.

 

On her list, butter is at the very top of the " highly contaminated "

list, and cheese and hamburger are up there pretty high, but so are

heavily sprayed fruits and vegetables like strawberries, apples, and

zucchini. I was disappointed to see that other animal products show

up as low. She notes that " these levels may be misleading, as many

products, such as eggs, meat, and dairy, can also contain

antibiotics, other growth promoters, and environmental pollutants,

which were not tested by the FDA. Meat and products of intensively

farmed animals, such as chickens, turkeys, and pigs, may actually be

much higher [in fattening toxic chemicals] than these initial charts

suggest. " I would certainly think so-much higher, especially since:

 

--The government measures the numerous allowable drug residues in

animal products in parts per million. According to many sources on

the Net, human hormones are believed to operate at levels of parts

per trillion. So the level of drug residues in meat should be able to

disrupt hormones pretty easily.

 

--Animals concentrate environmental pollutants in their tissues,

especially fat. The Institute of Medicine, a division of the National

Academy of Sciences, recently warned fidyl women to reduce their

consumption of meat and cheese because high levels of dioxins in

these products could damage their infants (Wash. Post, July 2, 2003).

It's well-known that salmon and other fish are dangerously high in

mercury.

 

--The grain that animals are fed contains pesticides. Howard Lyman

states in Mad Cowboy, " About 80% of pesticides used in America are

targeted on 4 specific crops-corn, soybeans, cotton, and wheat-that

are the major constituents of livestock feed. "

 

--Pesticides are used on and in farmed animals to keep away insects,

rodents, and worms.

 

--Slaughterhouses are usually filthy, and testing for drug residues

is very limited, so it's not as if someone is making sure these

residues, even in illegal amounts, are not being passed along to

consumers.

 

--Often, cooking does not destroy toxic chemicals in meat and dairy

products. Sometimes it actually makes them more toxic.

 

If Baillie-Hamilton is right that the amount of pesticides sprayed on

foods is sufficient to cause weight gain in people (and that is a

huge, unproven IF), the bodies of factory-farmed animals should be

extremely high in toxic chemicals and should be particularly

fattening to meat-eaters. She doesn't advocate vegetarianism; she

recommends that people eat organic meat and low-fat dairy products.

But I would hope that if this idea ever caught on, people wouldn't be

able to find or afford organic meat, and they'd avoid it altogether.

 

Anyhow, her book offers a number of other useful observations, such

as that weight gain is a common, usually unwanted, side effect of

many medications used by humans. If you've known a person or animal

on Prednisone, you've probably seen this effect. It's also a common

side-effect of the Pill and some antipsychotic medicines. So it's not

too outrageous to suggest that if people unintentionally ingest small

quantities of weight-promoting drugs, weight gain is likely result.

In general, it looks like synthetic hormones used in meat, because of

their long-lasting effects, are particularly likely culprits in

causing weight gain in humans, but I wouldn't want to focus on

one particular class of growth promoters, since if that one gets

banned, people will think everything's safe again and will go on

eating animal products. As long as any growth promoters are being

used in farmed animals, there's the potential for them to be passed

along to people.

 

It could be years before anyone tests whether eating organic foods

keeps you slimmer than conventionally grown foods, or whether animal

growth promoters are fattening people, so it's a little premature to

print " Factory Farmers: Here to Plump You Up " on T-shirts. Too bad.

But it can't hurt to raise the issue now.

 

Baillie-Hamilton's theory has interesting implications for vegans who

feel they eat pretty virtuously but are still not as trim as they'd

like to be. On her list, some foods that I (and I assume other

vegans) eat very frequently turn out to be in the " highly

contaminated " category. These include leaf lettuce, kale, collard

greens, zucchini, broccoli (medium), peanut butter (very high),

olive oil, peaches, grapes, strawberries, and a number of other

foods. For the past 11 weeks, I've used the organic versions of

those foods, while otherwise maintaining my usual eating habits (not

following her recommendations about taking vitamins, fiber, and

counting calories). I have lost a few pounds, but then I'm also

taking care of two rescued bunnies, and they keep me hopping, so a

survey of one isn't too helpful.