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Fortunately for Monsanto the FDA refuses to label GM food in the USA

If you'd like an explanation, from University experts in the field as to WHY, check out this webinar I attended a few weeks ago. It was sponsored by the Federation of Animal Science Societies as part of their series of Science Policy Webinars.

For the tl;dw crowd... If you can't be bothered to spend 80 min learning about the why of a policy from the most qualified scientists in the field, then please shut up and stop pretending your objections are anything other than religious in nature.

Fortunately for Monsanto the FDA refuses to label GM food in the USA

If you'd like an explanation, from University experts in the field as to WHY, check out this webinar I attended a few weeks ago. It was sponsored by the Federation of Animal Science Societies as part of their series of Science Policy Webinars.

For the tl;dw crowd... If you can't be bothered to spend 80 min learning about the why of a policy from the most qualified scientists in the field, then please shut up and stop pretending your objections are anything other than religious in nature.

However, the only problem with feeding cattle a diet that is majority corn is the lack of fiber in the diet, not a problem with digesting the corn. Antibiotics do not have any impact on that.

is patently false. Only patently isn't a strong enough word. Ludicrous and laughable are more close to the truth (sorry if that comes off as rude, but it's true).

What you wrote is sort of correct. Antibiotics do help transition from roughage to a grain based diet and back. However, that is not their primary use in modern factory farming.

In the past, it was common to raise cattle in pasture and grain finish them for a few weeks prior to slaughter. This causes them to fatten up a little before sale. In the present, however, aggressive, grain-heavy diets are now the norm for most of the beef produced in North America. Corn is now much cheaper than it was 30+ years ago, so it can constitute upwards of 80-90% of the feed in finishing yards where in the past it was less than 50%.

A corn-based diet causes cattle's rumen to become more acidic, leading to more acid in the blood. Which isn't a significant problem for short periods of time. But now it is common for cattle to be fed for months on a majority corn diet. When cattle eat a corn-based diet for long periods of time, the increased acidity leads them to develop a condition called acidosis, which leads to significant health problems: liver abscesses, laminitis, and polioencephalomalacia all being common. Increased buildup of starch in the animals' intestines provides a home for many dangerous bacteria to grow, making sudden death syndrom and e coli significantly more prevalent. The solution to this? Pump them full of antibiotics and most of the animals make it to slaughter, even if they are ill.

Beyond that, having large numbers of cattle in industrial feedlots for long periods of time creates massively unsanitary conditions. Industrial feedlots can contain tens of thousands of animals at a time, all in very close quarters with poor sanitation. This increases the risk of common infectious diseases. The solution? Pump them full of antibiotics and most of the animals make it to slaughter, even if they are ill.

Some suggested reading for you:
Overview of common problems with high-grain diet in cattle
Acidosis in cattle.(PDF)
Prevention of liver abscesses by means of antibiotics Sorry, couldn't find a free version of the paper, so the summary will have to do.

OTOH, plump, farm-raised, hormone-injected turkeys? I guess they can't fly.

They also can't mate. Too much bird gets in the way. I can't make this shit up... Do not stroke the tom more than twice.

Yay for having a fiance in her last year of a Bachelor of Animal Science degree... Imagine what I'll learn when she goes for her Master's...

Correction # 1:
Cattle are not as sedentary as you may believe. Range raised beef cattle walk between 2.8 and 4 kilometers/day according to a 1991 study published the Journal of Animal Science. This means they are already doing a lot of walking. The real question is whether we can capture that energy they are already spending, and turn it into electricity at a price that is acceptable. (I doubt that they can, but I could be wrong)

Correction # 2:
Exercise does not increase "stress byproduct" concentrations (what every that's supposed to mean), unless the exercise in forced. As I mentioned before, the animals already do a fair amount of walking on their own initiative. In that case the actions taken to force the exercize would be causing the stress, not the exercise itself.

Correction # 3:
It is the intramuscular fat that is responsible for the great taste. Backfat is often cut off by consumers and not eaten due to texture issues, and sometime for cooking issues. Kobe beef is completely unlike anything raised for the general consumer market, so trying to draw conclusions based on that niche market is inadvisable.

Any reasonable definition of health is based on the organism's capacity to maintain homeostasis. Stress per se is not bad or good for an organism; the issue is whether the parameters of the stress are within the limits the organism can tolerate. In that case, stress is often beneficial.

You obviously have no idea what the fuck you are talking about. Every definition of "health" i've seen can be summed up as "the state of being free from illness or injury." You can be healthy while doing a polar bear swim, but you are simultaneously being stress to the point at which you are no longer considered to be within your Thermal Neutral Zone, and thus not in Homeostasis.

Stress is by definition bad because it causes a perturbation of homeostasis. A common working definition of physiologists is that "stress" consists of external body forces that tend to displace homeostasis and "strain" is the internal displacement brought about by stress. That is why we try to minimize fluctuations in temperature, air flow, feed quality and quantity, and negative social interactions (tail bitting, fighting, etc.). Unhealthy animals are stressed, Stressed animals must use a greater proportion of the absorbed energy, minerals, vitamins, and protein to try and get back to homeostasis, in unstressed growing animals those nutrients would be used for lean protein accretion, therefore sick animals will always grow slower than healthy animals, heat or cold stressed animals will always grow slower than animals raised in a controlled environment that minimized temperature fluctuations, etc.

I never said that 2-5 years is an insignificant amount of time, only that the ban was not the panacea that many appear to believe it to be. I've previously suggested that the EU regulations be modified to reflect the data we have collected over the last 10 years. The ban should be on the use of all novel antibiotics for which resistance genes have not yet become prevalent in the human-colonizing bacterial populations. Once the genes appear, the effect of antibiotic use in livestock is going to be negligible by comparison to the effect of human-to-human transmission rates. At that time allowing there use in animal production costs human medicine nothing while benefiting animal agriculture. My proposed regulations would by their vary nature require efforts to detect the development of novel resistance genes and their level of ubiquitousness, but we could very easily make the drug companies cover part of that cost. The earlier they detect the resistance gene, the earlier they can start marketing the drug to agriculture. (obviously the efforts to prevent the spread once discovered would not be funded by the drug companies due to a potential conflict of interest).

Maybe you should read before just googling for links to prove your point.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B7XNX-4NX2W1C-3&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1129045548&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=7c6f338c09d052a7154ec84c8c581f8f: Belgian Blue (BB) beef cattle is particularly prone to selenium (Se) deficiency due to the poor Se content of soil and roughages on rearing farms and the higher requirements of this hypermuscled breed.

The study then went on to test Se supplements to see which worked best.

http://www.ansi.okstate.edu/breeds/cattle/belgianblue/index.htm: Some sources stated that delivery in Belgian Blue cows is often by caesarean.

How very authoritative.

http://genome.cshlp.org/content/7/9/910.full: How much of a stress tolerance reduction? It doesn't say enough to know if its a problem or not.

http://jas.fass.org/cgi/reprint/79/5/1162.pdf: The only mention of vitamins is saying more is better, and then it follows it with a high sodium / fat diet has a negative effect. Of course the same is true in any normal animal as well.

http://bioethics.agrocampus-ouest.eu/pdf2009/Bioethic_aspects_of_genetic_selection_of_animals_U-Korzecka.pdf: Really? You're linking to a powerpoint exploring BIOETHICS of genetic modification, which doesn't list its sources, as proof?

I suspect you and the author of the last link have something in common; you believe there to be some ethical problem with this, and thus are more interested in pushing an agenda then science.

Why do you assume myostatin is "there for a reason?" Have you considered that at one time we didn't have it? Or perhaps that we have it is just a random fluke?

I hate to break it to you, but there's no intelligent design.

Maybe you should read what has been posted before you try pontificating. Myostatin is actually there for a reason. Here is a list of health problems which arise in other mammals:

• Selenium (Se) deficiency.
• Birthing problems; sometimes resulting in the need for caesarean section.
• Reduction in stress tolerance.
• Very low fat concentrations; can result in health problems due to insufficient fat soluble nutrient/vitamin uptake.
• Weak bones.

Seems like there is probably a reason we have myostatin and if you disable it, other health problems may result. We're just don't know what they are yet.

Actually, while we do not know what health problems arise in humans, we do know of multiple health problems which arise in other mammals:

• Selenium (Se) deficiency.
• Birthing problems; sometimes resulting in the need for caesarean section.
• Reduction in stress tolerance.
• Very low fat concentrations; can result in health problems due to insufficient fat soluble nutrient/vitamin uptake.
• Weak bones.

The way it works is that carbon that's absorbed by the growing plants that the ruminants eat is converted to methane in their rumen. This is then burred by the animal during the day. The problem is that methane is a much more potent green house gas then CO2. Methane has a global warming potential of 25. This means that methane has 25 times the global warming potential of CO2.

Methane has a lifetime in the atmosphere of 9.6 years, so during that time it can cause significantly more warming then the same quantity of CO2.

There has been work done with ruminant diet to reduce methane production here and other work done to reduce total green house gas production from livestock using LCA here. It's no use reducing the methane emissions if by doing so you increase your total global warming potential...

Or we could not feed cows so much corn that they end up having stomachs of pH 3. If cattle had stomach pH they evolved to have E. Coli would die in our stomachs. There is published paper that says this.

>Strangely, there are not many academical papers about cream cheese.

Pubmed brings up 45 hits on "Cream cheese".
Most relevant is probably "Characterization of Particles in Cream Cheese" (M. R. Sainani, H. K. Vyas and P. S. Tong - J. Dairy Sci. 87:2854-2863).

The gene-altered variety, GT200, was approved for production in Canada but not in the United States because Monsanto decided to market a slightly different variety, known as RT73, Wassell said. Both varieties are engineered to be immune to Monsanto's powerful Roundup weedkiller.

Unpasteurized dairy products are historically linked to many dangerous bacterial infections, such as Brucellosis. Europeans are not immune. Human Listeriosis Outbreaks Linked to Dairy Products in Europe