Real Farmacy – by Matt Agorist
Americans consume somewhere in the ballpark of 5 billion hamburgers a year. To keep up with this demand, just over 4100 cows are slaughtered every hour in the U.S. That’s a lot of dead cows! When 68 cows a minute are slaughtered you can bet that mistakes are made or parts are shifted into the wrong areas. A study published in the Annals of Diagnostic Pathology helped to discover just how much “shifting of parts” is really going on.
The study presumed that most hamburgers are composed primarily of meat. 8 different popular fast food
hamburger brands were tested using histologic methods. The burgers were evaluated for water content by weight and then microscopically to verify tissue types. An additional test known as Glial fibrillary acidic protein staining was used to test for brain tissue. We’ll give you the good news first, none of the eight samples had brains in them. Unfortunately that is as good as it gets.
The mean water weight of the burgers was about 50%. Now for the strange part, actual meat content in the burgers ranged from 2.1% to 14.8 percent. That’s right, the product that you are expecting to get is only 2-14% of what you really think it is!
What made up the rest of the burger you ask? Well a variety of fun and interesting tissue types were found. The tissues found other than skeletal muscle tissue aka meat, were connective tissue, blood vessels, peripheral nerve, adipose tissue, plant material, cartilage, and bone. That’s not all folks, also found in some of the burgers were intracellular parasites known as Sarcocystis. An animal is infected with Sarcocystis when it ingests material contaminated with the infected feces of another animal. Below is a fun little info graphic on the life cycle of this parasite.
How do you avoid a hamburger that is not even made of meat and that can give you parasites? Well, you can avoid eating meat for starters. But for those of us who enjoy the occasional red meat you can find a local, sustainable, farmer, who raises cattle in grass pastures and organically. Grass fed meat is healthier, less susceptible to disease, and pastured cattle are raised in a much more humane way.
Read more at http://www.realfarmacy.com/fast-food-burgers-only-7-meat/#tKgMZt73AET62r78.99
This is only the start of the nasties with meat. I used to work on the kill floor in the early 70`s and how they treated the animals was bad enough but how they treated the meat before those sides of beef went into the cooler is/was back then nothing short of sickening. I can bet that most people would quit eating red meat if they saw what went on their because it was nasty beyond description, yep really nasty. Times have probobly changed now but every time I buy one of thoes juicy steaks or hamburger I remember what I saw on that kill floor and it makes me sick. People, you are best to go to your local small butcher shop if possible and buy something that wasn`t raised in a factory farm and mass butchered.
I’ll stick with Kyle’s digger.
Thats right too Millard. A good small town grocer supporting the local farmer. 🙂
Not a big fan of fast food anyway.
One more very good reason not to be.
not to mention the disgruntled employee that spits in the burger they hand ya, among other things.
HAD to mention THAT, huh digger? SICK!
Yep, I ran a small town cafe for a rew years and some of the waitresses were fired. I caught them spitting in sandwichs, burgers and even drinks. When I caught them we got into a bad argument and the owner heard about it. they were fired on the spot. Yep #1, there is no time for some one to do that to anybody like them or not ya know……………. By the way #1, sorry about my other comment about spitting in food. It is a nasty thing to do to someone.
No biggie, digger. I almost never do any kind of fast food anymore, anyway.
Haha I didn`t think you did #1 🙂