ANIMAL HEALTH - HORMONE USE

NCBA Staff Contact: 
Dr. Elizabeth Parker, Chief Veterinarian
202-347-0228
eparker@beef.org

Summary:

As producers in the beef industry, we rely on a steady supply of new and innovative animal health products to keep our herds healthy and help provide American consumers with a safe and wholesome beef supply.

Background:
Numerous U.S. and international scientific studies have shown that the U.S. cattle industry produces safe and wholesome beef. Growth-promoting hormones help stimulate growth by increasing the efficiency in which feed is converted to muscle. Certain products, when administered to animals in very small amounts, supplement their natural hormone production and improve growth rates by allowing the animal to produce more muscle and less fat. This helps the industry produce leaner beef for consumers.

Key Points:

·         The growth promotants used in cattle production are vigorously tested by the FDA for safety – both for the animals’ well-being and for the trace amounts that may be in meat consumed by humans – and have been approved as safe.

·         There is a three-level threshold process that creates an enormous margin of safety to protect human health:

1.       It begins by identifying a level at which no effect on human health is seen in research studies.

2.       To that level, FDA adds a margin of safety (essentially taking the no-effect level and multiplying it many times over.)

3.       And the final threshold is at the production level where the level used in cattle is far less than the margin of safety FDA sets.

·         As an example, FDA has set a tolerance on estrogen levels in beef from cattle receiving an estrogen-containing implant.  The safe level is 21 billionths of a gram. On average, a serving of beef actually has a fraction of that allowable level (.3 billionths of a gram) nearly 57,000 times lower than what the FDA allows, and thousands of times lower than what our bodies naturally produce, not to mention a fraction of what is present in many other foods such as soybean oil, cabbage, cereals and grains.

·         The scientific conclusions of the FDA, the World Organization for Animal Health and the Codex Alimentarius Commission, the world’s food safety body, indicate that the miniscule amount of estrogen in beef from cattle receiving implants is well below any level that would be of significance to humans. 

·         In most instances, estrogen levels in beef from implanted cattle are so low, that it’s virtually impossible to detect.  Consequently the data illustrates the use if estrogen-containing implants has no impact on humans.