Do you consider obesity offensive ? And who do you blame ?

If you walk in any public area, go to the mall, restaurants or anywhere you will pass a good number of obese people .... and your reaction is either gazing with incomprehensible wonder, or if you are with somebody , commenting with dismay or even disgust as to "why don't these people cut down on their eating" .

But do you ever stop to think beyond the general concept of "excessive food consumption" and wonder if there are any causes that stem from beyond the amount of food..

If you are in your 30s or 40s, ask your parents and grandparents if they recall how often did they encounter excessively overweight people when they were your age?

I bet their answers would be that they cannot recall anything like this , and even you do not probably recall anything like this when you were growing up .

In the mid 1950s the use of Hormones in US Cattle was sanctioned by the FDA and to this date they are still defending it and bowing to the lobbyists of the very powerful companies that produce these hormones.

It is reported that at least two thirds of the cattle in the USA and consumed in the form of steaks, roast, hamburgers etc.. comes from cows that have been given 6 kinds of growth hormones . Three are naturally occurring—Oestradiol, Progesterone and Testosterone—and three which are synthetic—Zeranol, Trenbolone, and Melengestrol.

The Use of these hormones are banned around the world , except for the USA, Canada & Mexico .

Barry Bonds is being indicted over steroids , yet the general public is unknowingly consuming steroids on a daily basis through our meals , though in much smaller amounts , over time everything compounds.

Then in 1993 the FDA, in spite of strong opposition from scientists, farmers and consumers, approved the use of "recombinant bovine somatotropin " (rbST) ,
a synthetic version of BGH that is injected into dairy cows to artificially increase milk production. rBST is banned in Canada and the EU countries.

In 1998, the American Cancer Society reported a correlation between human blood levels of IGF-1 (often associated with obesity) and breast cancer,[17] prostate cancer,[18] and colorectal cancer.[19] Increased plasma levels of IGF-1 are associated with a higher risk of diabetes and a shorter lifespan in animal studies (e.g. Nature, vol 444, pages 337-342, 2006).

On May 22, 2006, Scientific American reported that Dr Gary Steinman of the Long Island Jewish Medical Centre published a paper in the Journal of Reproductive Medicine proposing a link between IGF and the incidence of twin births. He cites the May 6 issue of The Lancet which compared the relative increase of twinning rates in the USA and UK.[20]

In March 2007 Oxford University Journal in March 2007 , commissioned by the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology published a report titled " Semen quality of fertile US males in relation to their mothers' beef consumption during pregnancy". The report can be found at OxfordJournal.org .

The problem is even if you are a vegetarian and do not consume meat or milk ... the excreted waste from the cows end in the ground and the irrigation system of farmed lands, then end up contaminating the oceans and the fish supply. So its supply chain keeps on giving.

As for the non vegetarians , when the milk has rBST, then your cheese , your ice cream your yogurt etc... etc is going to have rBST.

Fortunately many companies now are offering only no rBST dairy products; Trader Joes, Wild Oats and Henry's Stores , Whole Foods , and lately I read somewhere that Safeways in Northern California are eliminating rBST (to be confirmed) , and Starbuck is now eliminating the use of rBST dairy from its stores.

As for beef, you do not need to buy organic if you can't afford it, you can buy

Natural & 100% Grass Fed beef , they have no hormones , antibiotic or pesticides

As for cheese & butter , buy imported to be sure they do not contain rBST .

I have a friend who has a son who drinks close to a gallon of milk everyday . He is now 13 years old and has the body and fat of a lazy 30 year old. I wonder how much of that growth is attributed to induced hormones.

Good health starts with good information.

We can write all we want about any subject, yet, it won't be until people hear it on TV that they will start believing it . But the Media as the trend has become, are too busy with more pressing junk news to feed the unsuspecting general public.

And unfortunately in this case, it is "What people don't know will kill them".

Meanwhile powerful companies ,their lobbyists and the politicians on both sides of the isle will keep treating us as "YOU the Consumers" instead of "YOU the People".