Meat: Not Suitable for Children

Everyone wants to do what's best for their kids, but many well-meaning parents don't know that meat can contain dangerous toxins and that feeding meat to their children increases the odds that their kids will become obese and develop life-threatening diseases.

Toxic Shock
The vast majority of meat and fish in supermarkets today contains one or more of the following types of contaminants: antibiotics, hormones, heavy metals, or other toxins. These contaminants are bad enough for adults, but they can be especially harmful to children whose bodies are still growing and developing.

Cattle raised on U.S. factory farms are dosed with hormones and other animals are fed large amounts of antibiotics in order to make them grow more quickly and to keep them alive in filthy, severely crowded conditions that would otherwise kill them. Feeding the drug-tainted flesh of these animals to our kids is risky—children's small bodies are especially vulnerable to antibiotic and hormone residues.

The risk to children is so great that many other countries have banned the use of antibiotics and hormones in animals who are raised and killed for food. In 1998, for example, the European Union outlawed the use of growth-promoting antibiotics in farmed animals. In the U.S., however, most farmers continue to administer powerful growth-stimulating steroids to cattle and antibiotics to all animals raised for food, and it is very likely that our children are ingesting these drugs every time they take a bite of chicken, pork, fish, or beef.

Hormones
Confidential industry reports to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration show that beef contains high levels of hormones and that these hormones are especially dangerous to children. The Cancer Prevention Coalition warns, "No dietary levels of hormones are safe, and a dime-sized piece of meat contains billions of millions of [hormone] molecules."

The negative consequences of feeding meat to children were clearly shown in the early 1980s when thousands of children in Puerto Rico experienced premature sexual growth and developed painful ovarian cysts. The culprit was meat from cattle who had been treated with growth-promoting sex hormones. Meat-based diets may also be to blame for the early sexual development of young girls in the U.S.: Nearly half of all African-American girls and about 15 percent of Caucasian girls now enter puberty when they are just 8 years old.

Continue reading here: To Be Or Not To Be Vegetarian

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