We are days away from a new season at the farmers markets - Evergreen Brickworks on Saturday mornings, and Riverdale on Tuesday afternoons. Along with our fresh salad greens, herbs, vegetables - all certified organic - we will have a regular supply of grass-fed, grass-finished beef. For the benefits of this highly-nutritious food, go to http://products.mercola.com/organic-beef/.
As a reminder of the value of choosing grass-fed and grass-finished beef, read the latest on the failings of food safety regulation from Mike Adams at http://www.naturalnews.com/, re-printed here:
With superbugs contaminating fresh meat, the truth comes out about the FDA Food Safety Bill
Remember all the hubbub about the S.510 "Food Safety Bill" and how it would make your food safe to eat? Well, it turns out those expanded FDA powers do absolutely nothing to even address the safety of fresh meat products, and yet new research reveals that nearly half of all fresh meat and poultry products are contaminated with potentially deadly bacteria, including multiple drug-resistant superbugs (http://www.naturalnews.com/032099_poultry_superbugs.html)
This research was conducted by the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) and published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. It was based on 136 samples of fresh meat representing 80 different brands sold in 26 grocery stores from
The research reveals that factory animal farms are breeding grounds for drug-resistant bacteria which are then passed on to humans through the food supply. This happens because factory farm animals are routinely dosed with both antibiotics and vaccines, causing serious imbalances in their own intestinal flora and immune function. This makes these factory farm animals the perfect hosts for breeding drug-resistant superbugs such as S. aureus, a particularly nasty strain that can be fatal if ingested.
It's yet another reason to buy free-range beef, chicken or pork if you eat those meats, by the way. Only free-range animals that are not injected with antibiotics are safe from the kind of chemical abuse routinely used in factory farm operations.
The S.510 Food Safety Bill is a complete joke
What this situation reveals is just how ridiculous all the debate was over the S.510 Food Safety Bill which recently became law in the United States
What they didn't tell you is that S.510 did absolutely nothing to address the safety of meat products. It only attacked vegetables and thinks like raw milk and raw cheese, complete ignoring the safety of meat products altogether.
And now we know why: The meat products sold in
So the government, as usual, swept the problem under the rug and pretended that e.coli was a "vegetable farming" problem. Well, I have news for the federal regulators and geniuses in the U.S. Senate who passed S.510: E.coli grows in animals, not plants. So the only way it can even get onto the plants is if the factory animal farms are releasing e.coli downstream where it contaminates the vegetable farms.
The e.coli problem, in other words, is an animal farm problem, not a vegetable farm problem.
If you can't eat fresh meat, what about packaged meat?
So you might think that if so much of the fresh beef and poultry is so widely contaminated with potentially deadly bacteria, maybe the packaged "processed" meat is safer for you, right?
You might want to reconsider that: Packaged meat is almost always preserved with a dangerous, cancer-causing ingredient called sodium nitrite. It's listed right on the label of packages of bacon, sausage, sandwich meat, beef jerky, pepperoni, ham and many other packaged meat products. Sodium nitrite causes cancer (http://www.naturalnews.com/007024.html), and it's added to meat products primarily to turn them bright red (as a chemical food coloring agent). It also kills botulism, by the way, because it's yet another chemical antibiotic agent.
So if you eat fresh meat, you're likely to be encountering superbugs. If you eat packaged meat, you're probably eating cancer-causing chemicals.
So what to do?
Solutions for meat eaters
You could always go vegetarian, of course. A largely plant-based diet is not only safer for you; it's also safer for the environment. (Go check out the runoff from the factory cattle farms near Greeley , Colorado
For those who choose to eat meat, here are three things you can do to avoid these dangers:
1) Buy local, grass-fed or free-range meat products from farmers and ranchers you know. Check out the local food co-ops or Saturday farmers' markets.
2) Cook the snot out of your meat products just to be sure you kill absolutely everything that might be living on them.
3) Look for nitrite-free meats at your grocery store or health food store. They're always in the frozen meat section (in the freezers) because without the sodium nitrite chemicals, they have to be kept frozen to avoid spoilage.
And finally, don't believe anything the federal government tells you about so-called "food safety." The federal food safety laws are such a complete joke that they utterly ignore the single largest source of potentially deadly bacteria in the entire food supply: the factory animal farms that have now become superbug breeding grounds.
It's yet another side effect of the widespread abuse of antibiotics. Did you know that in
And yet, the only reason these antibiotics are even needed in the factory animal farm operations is because animal farms are so filthy and unsanitary in the first place. Have you watched The Meatrix animations yet? If not, visit http://www.themeatrix.com/ to learn more.
Mindless consumers created the factory animal farms, in a sense
Now, here's another thing to consider: Why do factory animal farm operations even exist? Because mindless consumers buy meat based on the lowest price and nothing else!
If more consumers demanded grass-fed beef and free-range chicken, the factory animal farms would be out of business! It is the mindless shopping habits of consumers who frankly don't even care where their meat comes from that has given rise to these "lowest price" cattle feed lots and factory farms.
If you don't care where your beef comes from, and you only shop price at the big box stores, guess what you're buying? Antibiotic-injected, superbug-infested factory-farmed beef!
Factory farm cattle companies, of course, are only giving consumers what they demand: the absolutely lowest price on beef, regardless of where it comes from or how the cows were treated, fed or medicated. Amazingly, probably 4 out of 5 beef consumers couldn't care less about what they're eating or where it really comes from. They would eat piles of doggy doo if it looked like hamburger and was on sale for 99 cents a pound.
So it's one thing to blame the cattle factory farms for all this, but the truth is that it is the consumers who create the demand that these factory animal farms are merely trying to meet. If food shoppers really cared what they were eating and changed their shopping habits accordingly, the factory animal farms would collapse virtually overnight.
And that's a point of empowerment for YOU to remember: When you refuse to buy the lowest-price beef (corn fed, factory farmed beef), you deny revenues to that entire model of cow abuse and antibiotics abuse. When you buy local, grass-fed, free-range beef, you support the local cattle ranchers who refuse to participate in the whole system of factory beef operations.
So the choice is up to you, and every dollar you spend makes a difference. If you eat beef or chicken, simply changing your own purchasing habits can have a powerful influence over the entire system. And when enough consumers refuse to buy factory-farmed beef, the beef factories will finally shut down and become yet another sad chapter in the history of food.
Personally, I don't eat beef, but I do buy beef for my dog. And I go to a local farmer's market where I can buy beef bones from locally grown grass-fed, free-ranged cattle.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/032111_fresh_meat_superbugs.html#ixzz1JtK3BvN3
