The Meaty Truth (12 page)

How can we avoid this issue? The researchers concluded that the only way is to not buy chicken. The carcasses are so contaminated that any chicken is bound to pose a threat. If the industry really wants to warn the consumer, shouldn’t food and restaurant menus state: “Warning: You might ingest animal feces with this steak?” Now that warning might actually produce a reaction.

More than just plain disgusting, the prevalence of feces in our food products is a serious threat to our health. Eating sh!t can (and does) kill us. Today, forty-eight million Americans, about one in every six people each year, are affected by foodborne illnesses. Friends, this is about one-third of America.
Salmonella
poisoning alone affects one million Americans each year. A scary realization is that these statistics underestimate the number of people who are affected, because the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO) never know the true extent of outbreaks. Although fortunately the number of deaths is much smaller than the number infected—about three thousand die each year—there shouldn’t be any reason for us to be getting sick from feces, let alone die from eating it. Beyond the three thousand recorded people who died last year from eating feces, thousands of others are now living with malfunctioning organs. Eating crap can permanently wreck our bodies.

Dying from Dinner

Six months after graduating from kindergarten, six-year-old Alex Donley ate a hamburger and died four days later without a single functioning organ. The toxins produced by
E. coli
had turned Alex’s organs to mush, including entire parts of his brain.
⁵
Nancy Donley, Alex’s mother, had to watch helplessly as her son suffered from abdominal cramps and severe diarrhea, to the point that he was wearing bloody diapers when his bowels became uncontrollable. Alex lost neurological control and experienced hallucinations and collapsed lungs all within a few days. Alex died unable to recognize his mother and father, all because he unknowingly ate sh!t that was in his burger.

Three-year-old Brianne suffered a similar fate. Brianne’s mother watched as

“Her intestines swelled to three times their normal size and she was placed on a ventilator. Emergency surgery became essential and her colon was removed. Her heart was so swollen it was like a sponge and bled from every pore. Her liver and pancreas shut down and she was gripped by thousands of convulsions, which caused blood clots in her eyes. We were told she was brain dead.”
⁶

Sadly, Alex and Brianne’s stories are a snapshot of the heartache from what the CDC calls a
preventable
illness.

Let us get a few points straight about food poisoning and foodborne illness. It is more than just stomach bugs and twenty-four-hour diarrhea. As Alex and Brianne’s stories attest, foodborne illnesses can cause serious and severe complications such as hemorrhagic colitis, bloodstream infection, meningitis, joint infection, kidney failure, paralysis, miscarriage, and arthritis.
⁷
E. coli
can literally melt your insides and
Campylobacter
can produce acute paralysis that results in a premature death.

Young children are especially susceptible to health complications. For example,
E. coli O157:H7
is the leading cause of acute kidney failure, or hemolytic-uremic syndrome (HUS), in children and babies. The frightening aspect of HUS is that there isn’t a cure. Doctors can tend to the symptoms but, along with the parents, they are virtually helpless to stop the infection from spreading. For the lucky ones who do survive, most of these children have to live with dialyses for the rest of their lives.

Let’s be honest, we wouldn’t knowingly eat animal sh!t. Why are we not aware that we are eating feces and that fecal contamination is ubiquitous?

What’s the Beef with E. coli?

E. coli
made headlines in 1993 from the Jack in the Box fiasco, where hundreds of people across the nation fell ill and four died from eating
undercooked hamburgers. Before this notorious incident, talk of foodborne pathogens was infrequent, if it occurred at all. However, the Jack in the Box incident pushed foodborne illnesses, as well as the glaring gaps in our food safety system, into the spotlight. The current food-safety policy was extremely lax. Inspectors from the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) followed a “poke and sniff” method where they merely looked at the carcasses to see if there was contamination.
⁸
This look-and-see method dates back to the first Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906. Yet meat production as we know it had changed significantly in both the production of more meat and the less than sanitary conditions.

What was the government’s response? FSIS declared
E. coli
an adulterant, which made it illegal to sell
E. coli
-contaminated meat. This means that processing plants had to start actually testing the meat. While the government’s actions were praised, the meat industry had a very different response. In fact, it sued the government, claiming the USDA didn’t have the authority to declare
E. coli
an adulterant and illegal to sell. We aren’t quite sure what role they thought the USDA is reputed to have when it comes to food safety. Fortunately, a judge also didn’t buy into the beef industry’s ridiculous logic and declared in
Texas Food Industry Association v. Espy
that the USDA does, in fact, have the authority to make our food supply safer.
⁹
We know this seems like common sense, but the beef industry seemed to have a hard time swallowing this logic.

Interestingly, only one offending strand,
E. coli O157:H7
, was declared an adulterant in ground beef at the time. It took until 2012, almost twenty years later, for the FSIS to declare
E. coli
an adulterant in beef trimmings as well as non-intact beef. It also took thousands of children and adults dying horrendous deaths for the USDA to declare six more strands of
E. coli
adulterants. It took another two years after several hundred more Americans were stricken with a virulent form of
E. coli
for the Obama administration to declare these six strands adulterants as well.
¹⁰
We know government can be slow moving, but this crawl toward a common-sense ruling is beyond frustrating.

Even though
E. coli
is naturally produced in the stomach linings of both humans and animals, there are about one hundred strains that are lethal. Many of these strains are now antibiotic resistant due to antibiotic-overuse in factory farms.
E. coli
, by nature, is extremely resilient. It can live on kitchen countertops for days, it can withstand freezing temperatures, and it can survive heat of up to 160 degrees Fahrenheit. Unlike
salmonella
poisoning, which requires a fairly large dose of the pathogen, it only takes as few as five to ten
E. coli
particles to infect you. This means a microscopic piece of hamburger meat can prove fatal.

For those who do survive the illness, recent studies indicate that
E. coli
has frighteningly long-term health effects. For instance, in May 2000, heavy rain caused manure runoff from factory farms to enter the nearby waterway and aquifer that supplied the drinking water for a town in Ontario. Five thousand people were sickened after drinking the contaminated tap water. The long-term study published in 2010 on this incident found that those sickened “had a 33 percent greater likelihood of developing high blood pressure, a 210 percent greater risk of heart attack or stroke, and a 340 percent greater risk of kidney problems in the eight years following the outbreak.”
¹¹
The study found that everyone, no matter their level of infection, had an increased risk of long-term health problems.

Studies consistently find that lifelong-health complications include higher incidence of heart attack and stroke, continuous digestive problems, onset of arthritis, permanent brain damage, end-stage kidney disease, and insulin-dependent diabetes. These long-term consequences indicate a new side of foodborne illnesses that we haven’t considered, because news stories tend to focus on immediate deaths and illnesses.

We have drastically underestimated the costs of foodborne illness to society. Our government’s slow regulatory process shows obvious weaknesses in our food-safety system. Even more eye-opening is that
E. coli
is the most-regulated pathogen and the only pathogen declared an illegal adulterant.

This could be due to the fact that the industry’s attitude has not shifted in more than twenty years. James Hodges, the vice president of the
American Meat Institute, declared, “The USDA will spend millions of dollars testing for these strains instead of using those limited resources toward preventive strategies that are far more effective in ensuring food safety.”
¹²
Mr. Hodges, you are right. Prevention is key to mitigating foodborne illness. But, Mr. Hodges, what does the industry consider preventative? Surely it isn’t starting to regulate the foul practices at factory farms that create this massive quantity of unregulated manure or avoiding eating the meat altogether as a wholesome preventative strategy. We are still waiting for a clear answer.

Ladies, Feeling the Burn Isn’t Worth it

Ever had that uncomfortable burning sensation down in your privates? You constantly have to run to the restroom and are so uncomfortable and sore you just have no idea where to put yourself. Urinary tract infections affect millions of women each year, but they are not just from sex or hygiene. Increasingly, they are from eating chicken.

We tend to focus on the intestinal
E. coli
found in hamburgers, but there are strains of
E. coli
that cause extra-intestinal infections. This form of
E. coli
is becoming a huge problem and being cited as an “underappreciated killer.”
¹³
According to renowned physician Dr. Michael Greger, one strain of E. coli can cause urinary tract infections that infect the bloodstream and cause up to thirty-six thousand deaths per year.

How do we know it’s in the chicken? Well, researchers spent billions of health-care dollars testing nearly two thousand food samples. They found that half of retail poultry samples were contaminated with the UTI-associated strains of
E. coli
. Ladies, when we eat contaminated chicken, it infects our lower intestinal tracts, and the infection creeps into our bladders, causing us that immensely painful illness. UTIs are serious business. Beyond the burn, they have the potential to invade the bloodstream and cause sepsis or blood poisoning, which can be fatal.

Researchers find that overcrowding in factory farms, especially the confinement of egg-laying hens to small cages, is one of the premier risk factors for the disease in chickens called colibacillosis. More space would
drastically reduce the most common disease in poultry by 33 percent. Remember, a chicken lives in a space smaller than the size of a piece of paper. The need to address this issue is paramount, as many of the UTIs from poultry are resistant to our most powerful remedies.
¹⁴

How Clean is Our Salmonella-Tainted Chicken and Turkey?

How many times have we eaten raw cookie dough and joked about
salmonella
poisoning? While chicken is touted as the healthiest meat, it is also the most feces-contaminated meat on the market. A breaking news study by Consumer Reports found that 97 percent of the chicken sold is covered in fecal contamination. This means it is extremely hard or nearly impossible to eat feces-free chicken. What’s more is that half of these chickens contained antibiotic-resistant pathogens.

This finding wouldn’t be such a problem if chicken consumption was relatively minimal, but chicken is the most consumed meat product in America. Americans ate about 100 million pounds in wings alone during the Super Bowl. That’s one day and 1.25 billion chicken wings.
¹⁵
While red-meat consumption has been slightly decreasing over the past few years, chicken consumption is at an all-time high and only expected to increase. Chicken prices have not only fallen, but the meat is also touted as our “leanest” meat. At a time when our health is failing and our waistlines are expanding, the lean-meat myth is rapidly increasing chicken consumption. Our indulgence in chicken mirrors the rapid increase in
salmonella
outbreaks. Coincidence? We think not.

While
E. coli
is often the most talked-about foodborne pathogen,
salmonella
kills more Americans than any other foodborne pathogen and is increasingly the most common.
Salmonella
poisoning is now responsible for about one million infections due to the increase in outbreaks. Recent studies indicate that up to half of the chickens, turkeys, and eggs found in our grocery stores are contaminated. Unlike
E. coli,
which has only about one hundred strains,
salmonella
has about 2,500 different, lethal strains. These strains are virulent by nature. Cooking your eggs
sunny-side up, scrambled, or over-easy does not kill
salmonella,
according to studies by the American Egg Board.

In 2011 alone, there were nine
salmonella
outbreaks.
¹⁶
There were also nine
salmonella
outbreaks in 2010, and they weren’t small either. One of the 2010 outbreaks led to a recall of half a billion eggs.
¹⁷
One of the latest outbreaks on September 29, 2011, which infected about 129 people in thirty-four different states, was antibiotic resistant.
¹⁸
This is compared to 2006, when there was only one major
salmonella
outbreak.

The increase in
salmonella
outbreaks is directly attributable to the increase in consumption of poultry products as well as factory farm conditions and practices.
¹⁹
Before eggs were produced in factory farms,
salmonella
in eggs was virtually nonexistent. Now,
salmonella-
tainted eggs infect nearly two hundred thousand Americans every year. Keeping over one hundred thousand chickens in cramped conditions with massive amounts of fecal-airborne dust rapidly increases the spread of
salmonella
. Additionally, CDC researchers found that more than one million cases of
salmonella
poisoning are directly linked to the practice of feeding ground-up animals to other animals.
²⁰
Once hens can no longer lay any more eggs, they are ground up and used as additives to chicken feed. Studies indicate that over half of the chicken feed given to factory-farmed chickens contains
salmonella
.