Meat

Industrial meat production maximizes water content, and therefore profit per pound, through pre-slaughter stress and post-slaughter chemical soaking. The result is a lower-quality, more toxic product sold by weight rather than food value.

Production practices

The US Department of Agriculture allows meat producers to soak meat in water and chemical solutions until it has increased its weight by 8%. Chemicals such as trisodium phosphate (solutions as strong as 12%) and sodium citrate are chosen because they powerfully stimulate swelling and water retention; ozone and hydrogen peroxide, used to deodorize meat, cause immediate lipid peroxidation and protein carbonyl formation on top of the added water. Most supermarket meat is now packaged with thick diapers so the buyer won't notice the pink water they are paying for.

Pre-slaughter stress and estrogen

Before it is ever soaked, an animal driven to slaughter under stress has already been pushed toward massive edema. Fatigue, stress, crowding, fright, malnutrition, and excess estrogen all cause the tissues to swell hugely, adding water weight without adding protein.

Synthetic estrogens such as DES were used in animals from the 1940s specifically because they cause massive water retention. Meat scientists are the only people who refer to estrogen as an anabolic steroid, in the sense of "building muscle," despite estrogen excess being commonly associated with sarcopenia, muscular dystrophy, and skeletal muscle atrophy in humans and animals. DES was outlawed once its carcinogenicity was publicized around 1970, but its illegal use continued; other estrogens remain in open use in the industry.

Polyamines and tissue quality

Grain- and soy-fed animals carry their feed's polyunsaturated fats into the meat, along with degradation products such as isoprene, acrolein, and isoprostanes. These reactive breakdown products stimulate polyamine production, and polyamines in turn drive cell division, altered gene expression, and, when excessive, degeneration and cancer growth. See Polyamines for the mechanism.

Aging

Deliberate cold-storage "aging" of meat, common in English-speaking markets, raises polyamine and reactive-oxygen content further. Once an animal's glycogen is depleted after slaughter, anaerobic protein breakdown accelerates; without oxygen no CO2 is produced, so the normal route of ammonia disposal as urea is blocked and polyamines form instead. Two of the main polyamines produced, cadaverine and putrescine, are named for the flavors they impart to aged meat. Meat sold fresh, without aging or heavy water retention, such as traditional butcher-shop meat in Mexico, tastes different and lacks this degraded chemistry; liver especially deteriorates within a day and is best sold and eaten fresh.

Cancer epidemiology

Prostate-cancer mortality is often compared across countries by meat quantity (Japan's low consumption and low mortality versus the US's higher consumption and higher mortality). Mexico and Argentina break that pattern: both eat far more meat per capita than the US, yet their prostate-cancer mortality ranks very favorably with Japan's. If meat contributes to the high US cancer rate, it is the quality of the meat, not the quantity, that matters.

Practical guidance

Because the polyamines intensity the neurotoxic and carcinogenic effects of estrogen and of polyunsaturated fats, those three types of substance should be considered as a functional unit in making food choices. (Grass-fed organic beef fresh from a local farm would be a reasonable choice.) Unfortunately, the meat industry has maximized all of those dangers, just for the increased weight of their product.

— Ray Peat

Fresh, minimally stressed, grass-fed and locally sourced meat avoids most of the added water, polyamine, estrogen, and PUFA load of the industrial product.

See also

• Polyamines
• Estrogen
• PUFA
• Cancer
• Gelatin