Hormones: Here's the Beef
Environmental concerns reemerge over steroids given to livestock
Each year, U.S. farmers raise some 36 million beef cattle. Farmers fatten up two-thirds of these animals by using hormones.
Many cattle are fed the same muscle-building androgens—usually testosterone surrogates—that some athletes consume. Other animals receive estrogens, the primary female sex hormones, or progestins, semiandrogenic agents that shut down a female's estrus cycle. Progestins fuel meat-building by freeing up resources that would have gone into the reproductive cycle.
While federal law prohibits people from self-medicating with most steroids, administering these drugs to U.S. cattle is not only permissible but de rigueur.
So far, almost all concern about this practice has focused on whether trace residues of these hormones in the meat have human-health consequences. But there's another way that these powerful agents can find their way into people and other animals. A substantial portion of the hormones literally passes through the cattle into their feces and ends up in the environment, where it can get into other food and drinking water.
Some scientists say that it's time to better manage livestock's hormone-laced waste stream, which has flowed unabated in North America for decades.
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