Transcription
Nations around the world are banning American meat. The European Union bans imports of most American poultry, do you understand? They ban American beef. Is there something they know that Americans don't? Let's take a closer look.
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I'm Dr. Eric Westman and welcome to my channel where I review and debunk nutritional misinformation online. In this video by Max German, Max is an influencer about the carnivore diet. He's going to take a closer look at American meat.
The European Union bans imports of most American poultry, do you understand? They ban American beef. They hate our beef because our beef is beautiful and theirs is weak. For a very long time, American beef and pork was universally known for being so flavorsome and tender that it built America into one of the largest meat exporters in the world. But then, something very strange started to happen.
And China is stepping up efforts to cut its dependence on American farm products, canceling record levels of US pork imports.
Gone from Moscow's meat counters, beef, turkey, and pork imported from the US. A wholesale ban has started. A market worth more than $500 million a year could be finished. Russia says it's anxious about a growth stimulant US farmers feed to animals to make their meat leaner. Ractopamine is banned in the European Union and China, but the United Nations say at low levels it won't harm humans. Russia disagrees and insists it's not singling out the US.
Of course, I always consider the source and in this video, Max is actually using video from good sources, so we're not trusting his judgment on something. But this was actually kind of something I didn't know much about. That there are additives in the US meat and poultry and other foods that are not in other countries' foods. And then the main question that I wonder is, does it matter? I mean, are the additives enough? Are they really harmful? Is this really just a political thing? So let's look a little deeper.
As time went on, more and more countries began banning American meats and poultry. Today, more than 160 countries now restrict or ban American meat entirely due to how it's produced. This even includes America's largest trading partner, the entire European Union. American politicians have been telling everyone that this is just politics, that these countries are banning American meat to gain leverage in the trade war. But something about this does not quite add up. Many Americans are noticing that something is seriously off with their meat.
Is it just me or is food not fooding right now? Like I've been a chef for nearly 30 years. I went and bought some inexpensive $10 a pound 80/20 Black Angus to make burgers on the grill today. While it's cooking, the smell hit my nose and I said, "This don't This don't smell right." I pull it apart, I look at it, and then I realize it's like Play-Doh. See, ground beef when it comes out of the extruder, it has strings and you can see them in the ground beef. This was more like putty. Almost like silly putty, like that slime that you see that they make burgers with, like frozen burger patties with. Institutionalized food. This is $10 a pound on sale, private selection Black Angus 80/20. And I'm going to tell you it crumbles like it. This ain't beef.
Well, let me know in the comments below if you've had this experience. Is this a one-off or is this a common experience? Let me know.
Now, these clips may just be the opinion of a few people, but here's what destroys this entire trade war narrative that US politicians and large cattle lobbyists are trying to claim. When a country bans an import for trade or political leverage, they specifically say that. They cite tariffs, retaliation, or protecting their own farmers, but none of these countries that have banned American meat have said that. Not a single one. Every country that has banned American meat, each and every single one, has banned it for the same single reason: because they believe that it is not safe for their citizens to consume. I even managed to find this old clip of Joel Salatin, arguably the most respected and well-known independent farmer in America, who has spent the last four decades exposing the industrial meat industry from the inside.
Farmer Joel Salatin.
The industry thrives in a shroud of secrecy, and that's why they don't let people come and visit their slaughterhouses, they don't let people come and visit their farms, they've got no trespassing signs. The truth is that if the average American knew how their food was produced, they would make very, very different food choices.
I do remember there were some movies and the vegan propaganda movies where they show how terrible some of the manufacturing slaughterhouses are for meat and pork, and yet I I thought that was kind of extremist at the time. You know, regardless of how the meat looks, or what additive there is in it, what matters to me is whether it's harmful or unsafe or, you know, deadly to eat. And I haven't seen anything yet that says that a human has been harmed or is possibly harmed. Let's keep going.
Think about it in the context of selling meat. Meat is sold by the pound. The larger the animal, the more money you can sell it for. By industry estimates, pigs fed a beta-agonist in the final weeks before slaughter gain weight more efficiently and yield more lean meat from the same feed. At the very low end, they make at least $2 extra per pig. Across the roughly 130 million pigs sold for pork in America each year, that's around a quarter of a billion dollars in additional revenue. And that's simply from pigs alone. Across all animals, it's billions of dollars per year.
So, giving a drug to the animals makes the muscles grow. And the money basically you're buying the steak, the pork chop is the size of it, the amount of it. Adrenaline or beta agonists are used, as you mentioned, as inhalers for asthma. The beta blockers are used in heart disease and other medical problems like high blood pressure. There is a small effect of beta blockers that blocks the fat burning. That. So, this kind of makes sense from a beta blocker, beta agonist, even medically, human medical response.
As more and more farmers across America began feeding their pigs ractopamine, reports started flooding in of them experiencing everything from uncontrollable trembling to broken limbs. Some farmers reported their pigs would simply collapse and couldn't stand back up. This became so common, the industry coined a name for these animals. They're called downer pigs. Ractopamine very quickly became the animal drug with the most adverse event reports ever filed to the FDA. By 2011, more than 160,000 pigs had been reported with adverse effects. For cattle, the numbers aren't as public, but one study looking at 79,171 cattle found that the ones administered ractopamine during the at-risk period of it were 91% more likely to die than those who were not. Despite the fact that it was now in most of the meat in the United States. As a result of these devastating effects on animals and the lack of human safety data, China and Russia followed in Europe's footsteps and also imposed strict bans of their own on ractopamine. And over time, more and more countries followed. Today, ractopamine in American meat is banned or restricted in more than 160 countries. In those who only have restrictions, in order to sell American meat there, the producer has to prove that the animal it came from was never fed ractopamine. Without exception, all of these countries cite the exact same reason for this. They say American meat is simply too beautiful. Yeah, no, that's not it. They all specifically use two keywords: safety concerns. This begs the question: if all of these countries are banning American meat, is it actually safe to be eating?
So, still, I'm wondering if this is unhealthy for humans. Certainly, it sounds like it might not be healthy, but I don't see the proof yet. But I'm seeing more and more people in my clinic who do carnivore diets and who eat a lot of meat, and some even say that they get reactions to different kinds of meats, and they think of it in terms of a histamine reaction, but I wonder if it's a ractopamine reaction. I wonder if there's an overlap there. I don't know for sure.
Cows are what is known as ruminant animals, which means they have a very complex digestive system. It has four chambers that can ferment and break down a very high percentage of essentially everything that they consume. So, very little ractopamine actually ends up in beef compared to other meats such as pork, which comes from animals who have much simpler digestive systems. This is why we see that on average, beef muscle tissue samples from cows fed ractopamine contain on average around 10 times less ractopamine than pork samples from pigs fed ractopamine. The reason for this difference in percentage between the number of cows who are fed ractopamine and the number that actually test positive for it is because the cow's digestive system is so good that when fed ractopamine, a large percentage of it is broken down and excreted, so the levels in their meat are so low that often it can't even be detected. One thing, however, that is very interesting is ractopamine doesn't distribute evenly across the entire animal. Three separate studies have shown that beef liver contains ractopamine at 10 to 15 times the level found in muscle tissue.
Although when you look at the concentration, it's nanograms per gram and not the gram amount that was studied in humans before.
But what actually matters is whether or not the levels that you're getting from your meat are anywhere near a dangerous dose. In that Eli Lilly human study, the volunteers were given escalating doses and they only started reporting racing, pounding hearts once they reached about 15 mg and above. In a single gram of beef from a cow fed ractopamine, there is between 0.33 and 0.76 nanograms. A typical 8 oz steak weighs around 230 g. So to consume 15 mg of ractopamine, where the subjects in that study started reporting effects on their heart, you'd have to eat more than 40,000 lb of steak at once, which looks a little something like this.
Yeah, so the argument is that it's a trivial amount and won't affect most people, but it might affect some people. There's a variability in effect, probably.
So although the Eli Lilly trial did find real heart effects in humans, it only saw them at concentrated single doses you yourself could never reach by simply eating beef. In terms of whether or not this very low quantity found in beef causes us humans any harm, well, I mean, it's kind of impossible to say for certain. We literally only have that one study with six people. But realistically, based on the animal safety data we do have, even if every single meal you have, you're eating meat that is from cows fed ractopamine, it appears the risk of it causing you any harm is extremely, extremely low. In more recent times, when the European Food Safety Authority has re-reviewed ractopamine, it has concluded that based on all data, it isn't strong enough to establish a safe residue level for human consumption, and therefore has refused to endorse any safe limit, maintaining a strict ban. All of these countries that have banned ractopamine, they essentially state the exact same reasoning.
So, I guess as a policy, if there's no data, you assume the worst, that it and you shouldn't allow it. That's one way to react to it, unless you're using it and you would argue, well, there's no evidence that it's harmful at this low amount. Somewhere in the middle is the answer.
At the end of the day, in an ideal world, a perfect society, none of the meat we eat would come from any animal that is fed ractopamine or any of these hormones. Luckily, because cows have such a complex digestive system and contain such small amounts of ractopamine as a result, even the cheapest ground beef you can find is still a great nutrient-dense food. The thing is, basically everything nowadays contains some sort of toxin. I mean, all fruits and vegetables are literally sprayed in a compound designed to be so toxic that animals can't eat it without dying, just so we can then eat it. So, even if all you can afford is the cheapest conventional beef, don't stress. It's still better than essentially everything else.
Well, so here we have a carnivore influencer criticizing some of the meat because of a possibly harmful additive, but gives some practical advice on how to avoid the ractopamine by looking at USDA organic, AGA certified, or never fed beta agonists. Interesting video. I'm still not convinced it's harmful for humans, but if you do get reactions from meat, this is one thing to try. See, maybe that was the cause of it. If you like this video, please like, subscribe, and ring the notification bell so you don't miss out on further content. If you enjoyed this video, consider joining our YouTube membership for early [music] access and exclusive live Q&A's with me. Just click the join button below or support us with a PayPal in the description.