5 Reasons Why You Should Be Mindful Of Factory-Farmed Meat

Here’s what’s really going on with mass-produced meats and why you might want to steer clear.

Which begs the question, what’s feedstuff? To put it simply, it can include not-so-healthy items like corn byproducts from the distilling industry, potato waste, orange peels, and even candy. So, when you eat factory-farmed animals, you might also get an unintentional serving of “feedstuff.” In short, their bad diet can become your bad diet, which can become counter-productive to your health.

The sickened animals can also be given chemical additives, plus constant, low-level doses of antibiotics. Their drugs in turn can enter your system2 when you eat antibiotic-treated animals, which can the stage for drug-resistance in your body3, particularly if you’re a heavy-duty carnivore. While more research is needed to make this correlation, if you don't want antibiotics in your food at all, it may be best to avoid factory-farmed meat.

So what’s the end-result of the feed-’em-fast-and-cheap factory farmed method? It may very well yield less nutritious food with more of the unhealthy fats. It's no wonder the stuff is so much cheaper than grass-fed.

In factory farms, chickens, turkeys, and pigs are typically raised in inhumane conditions, tightly packed into cages and pens, unable to practice normal behaviors, such as rooting, grazing, and roosting. In these conditions, the animals can become stressed and wind up producing products that are lower in a number of key vitamins and omega-3 fatty acids–we know that stress can affect our physical health, so it only makes sense that these animals have a negative reaction to stress, too.

In a conventional feedlot operation, for example, confined cattle deposit large amounts of manure in a small amount of space. The manure must be collected and removed. As it costs money to haul it away, the manure is often dumped nearby, close to the feedlot. As a result, the surrounding soil can become over-saturated with the stuff, resulting in ground and water pollution6. But when animals are raised on pasture, their manure is a welcome source of organic fertilizer, not a “waste management problem.” That said, raising animals on pasture can be much kinder to the environment.

To learn more about what to look for when buying meat, check out my post on meat labeling.