Eat To Live: How beef may cut sperm count

By JULIA WATSON The top tourist food on the U.S. and the British Virgin Islands is the burger. Sailors sway off their yachts into the waterfront restaurants on wobbling sea legs to tuck into a patty of grilled ground beef, just as though they'd never left home.

If they knew what a U.S. study into beef fed on growth-promoting hormones has just found, they might want to switch their order to the yachters' No. 2 favorite, defrosted pizza.

Research from the University of Rochester in New York has discovered that these chemicals can damage human sperm.

Men whose mothers ate a diet high in beef during pregnancy were three times more likely to have a sperm count so low, they could be classified as sub-fertile.

The use of all growth-promoters has been banned in the European beef industry since 1988. But although some were banned by the United States in 1979, the sex hormones testosterone and progesterone are still permitted.

The study in Human Reproduction looked at 387 men born between 1949 and 1983. They got their mothers to fill in a questionnaire about their prenatal diets. During these years, hormone residues would have been hard to avoid, as chemical additives were commonly used in beef products.

Of the sons of mothers who ate more than seven helpings of beef a week, nearly 18 percent had a sperm concentration below the World Health Organization's sub-fertility threshold of 20 million sperm per milliliter of seminal fluid. For the men whose mothers ate less beef, the sperm concentrations were 24 percent higher.

The researchers point out, however, that all of the men who took part in the study were able to conceive a child naturally. So while sperm counts were low in some cases, none of them was infertile. And since the capacity of testicles to develop sperm begins in the mother's womb, to fully establish the role of growth hormones, it would be necessary to examine men born in Europe after the 1988 ban of growth promoters in cattle.

While other meats, fish, chicken, vegetables and soy products in the mothers' diets were also considered by the researchers, they found no meaningful association between these foods and sperm counts.

"What we are really doing here is raising an issue. The average sperm concentration of the men in our study went down as their mothers' beef intake went up. But this needs to be followed carefully before we can draw any conclusions," said study leader Shanna Swan, director of the Center for Reproductive Epidemiology at the university ' s School of Medicine and Dentistry. Also, such research is limited by the fact mothers were asked to recall their diets, which may not be accurate.

Use of the first synthetic hormone in cattle, diethylstilbestrol, was withdrawn in the United States in 1979. But six anabolic hormones are commonly and legally used in cattle in the United States, for which the Food and Drug Administration has defined an "acceptable daily intake." For cattle to qualify as organic, their mothers must have been raised on organic feed for at least the last third of the gestation period, according to the Organic Trade Association. They may not be given antibiotics or growth hormones.

Beef described as "Natural" comes from cattle raised under natural conditions, fed on natural feeds, grass, hay or grains and free of injected hormone stimulants. These feeds may not necessarily be grown organically. Neither method allows for feed additives of animal parts. Western diets are higher in red meat consumption than Asian diets, where meat is more commonly used for flavoring rather than protein supply. We, too, can afford to cut back on our consumption. Then we should be able to afford the higher cost of organically raised or natural beef and eat it less frequently as a real treat.

To make a burger, buy a well-marbled cut of beef or steak in a whole piece and ask the butcher to put it through the grinder once only. Commonly, ground beef has gone twice through the machine, which is what turns it into mush. Or take it home and chop it yourself. All you need is two very sharp knives and you set to the piece like a Samurai warrior, with one in each hand. This way you won't destroy the texture of the meat. Then season it lightly and broil it. When the meat is this good, you don't need to add anything else.

TORTOLLA, Virgin Islands, March 28

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