Toxic Shock
The meat and fish that are on our supermarket shelves today are loaded with antibiotics, hormones, heavy metals, pesticides, and a host of other toxins—none of which are found in any plant-based foods. These contaminates are bad enough for adults, but they can be especially harmful to children whose bodies are small and still developing.
For example, the cattle on American factory farms are pumped full of hormones, and other animals are fed heavy doses of antibiotics to make them grow faster and to keep them alive in the filthy, overcrowded conditions that would otherwise kill them. Feeding the flesh of these drug-filled animals to our kids is risky because children’s small bodies are especially vulnerable to antibiotic and hormone residues.
The risk to children is so great that many other countries have banned the use of antibiotics and hormones in animals who are killed and used as food—in 1998, for example, the European Union outlawed the use of growth-promoting antibiotics in animals on farms. In America, however, farmers continue to administer powerful growth-stimulating steroids and antibiotics to the animals whom they exploit, and your children are ingesting these drugs with every bite of chicken, pork, fish, and beef that they take.