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. When 68 cows a minute are slaughtered, mistakes are made! 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. Eight 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. None of the eight samples had brains.
The mean water weight of the burgers was about 50%. 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? Well a variety of interesting tissue types were found. Other than skeletal muscle tissue (a.k.a. meat) were connective tissue, blood vessels, peripheral nerve, adipose tissue, plant material, cartilage, and bone. 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 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 Factory Farmed meat. 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.
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