July 9, 2019

Hormones in your beef?

Topic: Education

July 9, 2019: Don't be fooled by the those who try to get you to buy their meat products through fear-marketing. Your beef is safe whether or not the animal has had hormone therapy. 

Download and listen to our Don't be fooled by hormone-free labels mp3

Read the transcript:

Well it’s that time of year when you make the neighbor jealous, grilling those steaks or those hamburgers. It’s also at this time of the year when we seem to have an increase in advertising vying for market share of what kind of burger you may put on your grill.

If you’re putting a real beef patty on there, we have folks in the industry that say, “Ours has got no added hormones,” making it sound like there is such a frightful thing out there using a hormone therapy to get better weight gain and utilize less feed to get an animal finished.

Folks, it doesn’t matter what you put on your grill. That’s your choice. But make decisions based off of facts.

The fact of the matter is a regular hamburger from a steer that has not had any hormone therapy for efficiencies has two nanograms per eight-ounce serving. A hamburger from a steer that HAS had hormone therapy for increased feed efficiencies and better gains, using less resources to make that eight ounces of beef, has three nanograms.

You may think that, “Oh! Wow! That’s 50 percent more!” But then we have ingredients in these fake meat burgers out there. They may have soy. They may have peas. Which you might be surprised to know – now listen to this – that an eight-ounce portion of soy flour has 342 million nanograms of hormone. So, if you’re concerned about your hormone intake, you might want to be concerned about your fake meat intake.

There is no concern whether you have the non-hormone therapy burger or the burger from a steer that had hormone therapy, because from two to three nanograms is virtually undetectable in your body. In fact, an adult woman produces 513 thousand nanograms a day. And an adult man produces 136 thousand nanograms of estrogen a day.

You can put on your grill what you want. But we at NDFB want you to make that decision based off of facts, not some slick advertisement, or fear to get you to buy their product, but educate yourself of what agriculture does to provide nutritious, safe and affordable food products for all of us in the great United States of America.