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Quotes about Beef Industry from the world's top natural health / natural living authors

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"Because the dietary guidelines were written in part by the beef industry! The facts about nutrition were well known in the 80s, when former surgeon general C. Everett Koop issued a milestone report in 1988 that established and presented the connections between red meat and cancer. It talked about sugar consumption, saturated animal fats and cardiovascular disease, yet these truths have been routinely ignored by government agencies ever since, because they've been caving in to special interest groups." - Mike Adams, Spam Filters for Your Brain (Get the book.)

"Secretary Johanns complained that the news coverage was inaccurate and had cost the beef industry billions of dollars. Johanns said the threat to humans from BSE was "minuscule" and had been overblown in the media. Arbitrary and capricious, once again. What do cheese, wine, bananas, beef, and airplanes have in common? They all have been pawns in sanctions and trade wars between countries. For example, in 1988 the EU refused to accept hormone-laden American beef and genetically modified grain due to the fact that hormones and GMOs are banned in the EU." - Linda Faillace, Mad Sheep: The True Story Behind the USDA's War on a Family Farm (Get the book.)

"The plaintiffs alleged that Winfrey wrongfully disparaged the U.S. beef industry, which negatively impacted their beef sales. In late 2000, while reading transcripts from the well-publicized trial, I noted that one of the plaintiffs, Paul Engler of Cactus Feeders, Inc., stated that "more than 10 cows with some sort of nervous system disorder were sent to Hereford Byproducts."28 Hereford By-Products is owned by Garth Merrick who also owns Merrick Pet Foods situated at the same location as the rendering plant." - Ann N. Martin, Food Pets Die For: Shocking Facts About Pet Food (Get the book.)

"In their highly acclaimed 1997 book, Mad Cow USA: Can the Nightmare Happen Here, John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton recount how they used a Freedom of Information Act investigation to pry loose secret planning documents from the beef industry and the USDA. These liberated documents included a "crisis management" plan for how to manipulate public perceptions and concerns surrounding a likely outbreak of mad cow disease in the United States. A central part of this plan was to keep quiet about the fact that leading experts on mad cow disease, such as Dr. Clarence Gibbs and Dr." - Linda Faillace, Mad Sheep: The True Story Behind the USDA's War on a Family Farm (Get the book.) "The beef industry had a vested interest in taking the spotlight off cattle and transferring it to sheep as the potential cause or vectors of BSE. In the middle of all this is the USDA. They are responsible for animal health and also for promotion of animal products, interests often in conflict. So in 1998 they paid the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis to "evaluate the robustness of U.S. measures to prevent the spread of BSE to animals and humans if it were to arise in this country." Three years and $500,000 later, Harvard determined the "U.S." - Linda Faillace, Mad Sheep: The True Story Behind the USDA's War on a Family Farm (Get the book.)

"Since then, under pressure from beef industry lobbying groups, government agencies have issued increasingly euphemistic advice. The direct statement "eat less meat" morphed into the self-canceling "choose lean meats" or the more convoluted "limit use of animal fats." In 2004, the committee advising the government about how to revise the Dietary Guidelines for Americans pointed to links between eating meat and cancers of the colon and rectum, and between animal fat and prostate cancer." - Marion Nestle, What to Eat (Get the book.) "The result was a catastrophe for the diseased cattle, the British beef industry, and the unfortunate people who died years after eating meat from those cattle. Nevertheless, Canada and the United States took the position that "it can't happen here." They did not take even the most basic preventive step —a ban on the use of meat-and-bone meal as feed for cattle —until 1997. It took three more years, until 2000, for the United States to ban imports of meat-and-bone meal from countries that had not been testing their cattle for BSE." - Marion Nestle, What to Eat (Get the book.) "You might guess that the beef industry would be desperate to put the tightest possible controls in place, but you would be wrong. This industry continues to argue that American beef is "very, very safe" and that countries are using the threat of BSE as an excuse to protect their own beef industries. How you should interpret the BSE situation depends on your point of view. From a statistical standpoint, the chance of your getting the human form of the disease from eating meat is very small. But it is not zero. If you are an optimist, you will not give the matter another thought." - Marion Nestle, What to Eat (Get the book.) "European beef industry from American competition. Research cannot yet settle the issue of hormone safety, so you can argue the situation either way. ORGANIC MEATS: THE SEARCH Buying organic meat should resolve uneasiness about hormones and mad cow disease, but finding organic chicken or beef in grocery stores is a challenge. One summer day, I went to the Columbus Circle outpost of the decidedly pro-organic supermarket, Whole Foods. A brochure in the store describes its meats as "beyond natural" and says the animals from which they come are raised according to "stringent quality standards . ." - Marion Nestle, What to Eat (Get the book.)

"Reestablished buffalo herds could also be managed sustainably to supplement the beef industry with another kind of red meat. Bison burger, anyone? EG Cow Power Dairy cows produce copious milk. They also produce copious poop. It's not something most people think of as environmental pollution, but cow poop is a real problem when allowed to run into waterways and seep into the ground. But we don't have to let cow waste go to waste. If processed correctly, it can become a power source." - Alex Steffen, Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century (Get the book.)

"A private investigator in Wisconsin reporting that our office telephones were tapped, probably by the beef industry. A national news producer sheepishly apologizing to me for "alterations" in the script of a nationally televised ABC News story on mad cow disease that aired in 1997—following what he described as a "call from the White House." And more. Fruitlessly petitioning the Centers for Disease Control to make the human equivalent of mad cow disease, Creutzfeldt- Jacob Disease (CJD), an officially reportable disease." - Linda Faillace, Mad Sheep: The True Story Behind the USDA's War on a Family Farm (Get the book.)

"Below, I reprint sections of his 1990 article published in The International Journal of Health entitled, "The Chemical Jungle: Today's beef industry." - Mike Adams, Grocery Warning: How to recognize and avoid the groceries that cause cancer, diabetes, heart disease, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and other common diseases (Get the book.) "To get a real look at what goes on in the beef industry, you have to examine the illegal use of growth-promoting hormones, antibiotics and other substances used in cattle in the U.S., as well as the international community's response to that abuse. Illegal use of carcinogenic hormones in cattle This subject has been tackled quite well by author Samuel S. Epstein, M.D., who is one of the most well-informed, well-respected doctors on the subject of environmental and food toxins." - Mike Adams, Grocery Warning: How to recognize and avoid the groceries that cause cancer, diabetes, heart disease, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and other common diseases (Get the book.) "In response to Oprah's comments about beef on the public airwaves, the beef industry went into full-scale assault: Prices for cattle futures were said to have fallen by more than 10 percent in the moments following the broadcast and to have taken weeks to recover. One Texas cattleman told a reporter that his company lost $7 million as a result of the show and that "We're taking the Israeli action on this thing... Get in there and just blow the hell out of somebody." He and other Texas cattle ranchers instituted a $10.3 million class-action suit against Ms." - Mike Adams, Grocery Warning: How to recognize and avoid the groceries that cause cancer, diabetes, heart disease, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and other common diseases (Get the book.) "Personally, my knowledge of what really goes on in the beef industry is one of the many reasons why I simply don't buy any meat products made from cows, pigs or chickens. By the time you factor in all the hormones, pesticides, chemical toxins, bizarre food sources and advanced recovery machinery, you're left with a meat product that, in my opinion, isn't safe for long-term human consumption. And yet most Americans gobble it up by the plateful, thinking they are now "healthier" than when they consumed grains." - Mike Adams, Grocery Warning: How to recognize and avoid the groceries that cause cancer, diabetes, heart disease, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and other common diseases (Get the book.)

"What Oprah and Howard said on the program provoked the U.S. beef industry first to pull $600,000 in advertising from Oprah's network, and then to sue her and Howard Lyman for $20 million.60 What did Oprah do to prompt such a reaction? After learning that cattle byproducts were being used in cattle feed and that the American beef industry, in turning the cow —a natural herbivore —into a cannibal, was doing just what Britain had done for so many years, Oprah said, "That has just stopped me cold from eating another burger." - John Robbins, Food Revolution: How your diet can help save your life and our world (Get the book.)

"We will see, for example, that the culture of opposition to food safety measures so permeates the beef industry that it led, in one shocking instance, to the assassination of federal and state meat inspectors. To explain this culture of resistance, we need to understand that current problems of food safety are not new but are different. A century ago, the main sources of foodborne illness were milk from infected cows and spoiled meat from sick animals." - Marion Nestle, Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism (Get the book.) "All in all, the experience with mad cow disease confirms that the British beef industry, like that in the United States, acts in its own self-interest regardless of consequences for public health. It also confirms that no government agency willingly makes decisions in the public interest if those decisions oppose industry interests. Finally, the mad cow experience reveals the international nature of diseases that affect the food supply." - Marion Nestle, Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism (Get the book.)

"This led to the wholesale slaughter of British cattle and the collapse of the English beef industry. Years later, English beef is still regarded with suspicion in Europe. The little that is known about the agent responsible for the disease ought to be worrying. The group of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs), which includes mad cow, scrapie, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob, is believed to be caused by a rogue protein called a prion (pronounced PREE-on). They are not living organisms per se, not like bacteria, or even viruses (which are, arguably, mere bundles of RNA with a mission)." - James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (Get the book.)

"Although beef industry officials were relieved to learn that fruit and vegetables could also be sources of E. coli Oi57:H7, meat products continued to cause outbreaks and unfavorable press. The USDA responded to the Odwalla outbreak by extending its generic E. coli testing requirements to include meat from goats, ducks, geese, and other animals but, in accordance with provisions of the old laws governing such matters, only after the animals had arrived at slaughterhouses.31 Limitations on USDA authority became even more evident as a result of yet another E." - Marion Nestle, Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism (Get the book.)

"Others claimed the beef industry had persuaded the government to wait out the vGJD cases; there were still fewer than 100 in the year 2000, so why put people in a panic about beef? All the uncertainty raised the stakes of answering the most controversial question of the day: How many people might have been infected with the mad-cow prions? By the end of 2001, several vGJD victims had appeared in Ireland and France. The slowness in defining or announcing vGJD in the United Kingdom also may have slowed international realization that prion diseases in herd animals might cause human disease." - Elinor Levy, Mark Fischetti, The New Killer Diseases: How the Alarming Evolution of Germs Threatens Us All (Get the book.)

"In the 1870s, refrigeration turned the beef industry into a nationwide, year-round industry centered in Kansas City and Chicago. Game generally refers to any fish, bird, or animal that is hunted rather than farmed or cultivated (in a sense, all animals eaten by humans were once "game"). Common game animals eaten today are likely to be deer (venison), rabbit, and pheasant. The wild boar, once popular prey, has largely been supplanted by readily available pork products. Some traditional "game" birds or meats—like duck, or less commonly ostrich or bison—now are bred on farms." - The New York Times, The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge: A Desk Reference for the Curious Mind (Get the book.)

"That country's beef industry was soon crippled as more than thirty of its trading partners banned the import of Canadian beef. The first U.S. cow with BSE was detected on December 23, 2003, in Mabton, Washington. The six-year-old had been imported from Canada in August 2001 along with eighty other cows." - Elinor Levy, Mark Fischetti, The New Killer Diseases: How the Alarming Evolution of Germs Threatens Us All (Get the book.)

"Despite the new regulations, government officials promised support to the beef industry. The prime minister, John Major, said he was "absolutely determined to reduce the burden of regulation on business."* Although the government vehemently denied it, beef producers often ignored the 1988 feed ban and nearly half of all the BSE cases occurred in cows born after that year. In 1990, the government appointed yet another BSE review committee, but, according to a later investigation, pressured its members to declare beef safe to eat." - Marion Nestle, Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism (Get the book.)

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