Beef Safety: Perceptions and Facts

Jeff Pastoor, Senior Cattle Consultant

Safe food is a given, whether you are the consumer or the producer.  Nobody wants to buy an unsafe piece of meat, and nobody I know wants to produce an unsafe piece of meat.

Beef in the Spotlight

It often seems that beef gets the spotlight when food safety is an issue.  Feedlot Magazine (July 2003) had an article on new research done by Kansas State and North Carolina State Universities that shows we aren’t just imagining this.  They researched the top 50 English language newspapers from 1982 through the third quarter of 1999 for articles that related to food safety.  They found that on average, there were 174 articles per quarter that addressed beef safety, while there were only 153 per quarter on poultry safety and only 43 per quarter on pork safety.  Even more extreme were the peak quarters for each meat group; the peak quarter for beef safety had 1283 articles, while poultry had 582 and pork had 292 in their peak quarters.

So why does beef get most of the attention?  It’s a little annoying to always be the lighting rod, isn’t it?  I believe it’s for a very good reason and that reason is demand.  Beef is seen as the king of meats, the epitome of flavor and satisfaction, so it is going to be held to a higher standard.  We have to be prepared to live up to this higher standard, but we also need to know and share the truth with the consumers.

What are the odds?

Feedstuffs magazine covered the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents & Chemotherapy in September of 2003, where potential antibiotic resistance was a topic.  Testing had been done on two drug compounds called macrolides – you and I would know them more commonly as Tylan and Micotil.  There has been some concern that use of these drugs could lead to antibiotic resistant bacteria in the meat.  which could cause humans to have treatment failures to Campylobacter and E. faecium bacterial infections.  In the following table from Feedstuffs are the chances of experiencing such a treatment failure, along with some other interesting odds from everyday life:

Known Risks Comparison

Since I don’t see too many people giving up the great outdoors or the ocean to avoid lighting and sharks, than people should certainly not be giving up beef to avoid food safety concerns.

The USDA has recently released studies showing that the rate of Salmonella incidence in raw meat and poultry is down by 66% in the last six years.  The USDA has also released data showing similar reductions in E. Coli 0157:H7 and Listeria monocytogenes in ready to eat meat and poultry products.  So, the government confirms that our meat products are getting safer all of the time.

 What about hormones?

Besides disease organisms and drug residues in meat, implants are also a common food safety concern with the consumer.  Using implants in our product can be a scary thing for the uninformed consumer (imagine some vegan agitator doing a push poll – “do you like having hormones in the beef that you eat”).  A friend of my wife was told by her doctor to stop eating beef because the hormones from the implants were putting her at risk for breast cancer. 

At the same time, implants are considered necessary by the feedlot for cost effectively improving performance and carcass weights.  It is estimated that the use of anabolic implants saves the beef industry nearly 3 million tons of feed per year – that’s efficiency we cannot put aside.

So, how much do we need to worry about the hormone levels in beef from implanted cattle?  The first thing we need to realize is that the hormones are already there naturally, so we really need to measure the difference between implanted and non-planted cattle. 

One of the downsides of scientific advance is that they can now measure differences that really aren’t a difference for all practical purposes.  Estrogen concentrations in meat tissue can be measured in picograms; that’s one trillionth of a gram.  A gram is what is contained in the pink or blue packets of artificial sweetener.

The University of Minnesota Extension has an excellent web article on food safety (http://www.extension.umn.edu/distribution/nutrition/DJ5513.html) where I got the following facts.

In meat from an implanted steer there are 530 picograms of additional estrogen per 6 oz portion compared to a non-implanted steer.  They cannot measure a difference between implanted and non-implanted heifers.

Now let’s try and put those 530 picograms of additional estrogen into perspective.

We produce estrogen in such huge amounts that the contribution of estrogen from what we eat is minimal, and beef should be the least of our worries.  If you sat down to a dinner of steak, potatoes, dinner salad, green peas, and a whole wheat dinner roll, the steak would be the lowest contributor of estrogen in the entire meal.  No need to fear ladies; the additional estrogen in 6 oz of steak from an implanted steer is less than 1 millionth of what you produce naturally every day.

Besides what we produce and what we consume, the body also does a very efficient job of metabolizing estrogen and clearing it from the body.  What estradiol is absorbed into the blood stream before digestion is metabolized at the rate of 1250 ng/hour (a nanogram is one billionth of a gram).  This means that it would take about 5.5 seconds for the body to metabolize the total estrogen consumed in a 6 oz serving of beef, if it was all absorbed; in reality only 10% is absorbed and the rest is digested. Proteolytic enzymes in the stomach break down steroids and they are digested as proteins.

We need to be consistent in our mission of producing wholesome beef for the consumer.  We need to follow the guidelines for Beef Quality Assurance.  We also need to continue the support through our Beef Check-off dollars for advertising and educational materials that act as a positive counter-balance to the misinformation put out by the lunatic fringe.

We can and should be proud of our product.  Somehow, nothing seems to satisfy like beef.