What’s in a Burger?
Cleveland Clinic pathologists dissect fast food burgers to see what’s inside.
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What’s in a Burger?,
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Transcript
Besides hormones, what else is in a burger? Published in the Annals of Diagnostic Pathology, anatomic pathologists at the Cleveland Clinic recently dissected burgers to see what was inside. “Fast food hamburgers: what are we really eating?” We eat 5 billion burgers a year and most consumers presume that the hamburgers they eat is composed primarily of meat, but what, did they actually find? They analyzed burgers from 8 different fast food joints and found them to contain the same tissues observed in hot dogs—that’s probably not a good sign. They found blood vessels… nerves… cartilage… and swarms of these little parasites, in burgers from a quarter of the fast food restaurants they sampled. No brains found, though, that’s good. But so how much was actually meat?
What percentage of a fast food burger is actually muscle flesh, as opposed to all these other tissues and parasites and fillers and everything?... Meat content in the hamburgers ranged… from 2% to 14.8%.
2% meat? They’re practically vegetarian!
Part of that other 85 to 98% that wasn’t meat: ammonia. Thanks to some excellent investigative reporting, we learned last year that a company developed a novel technique for killing all the fecal bacteria: injecting beef with ammonia. The meat industry loved it so much, it became a multi-billion dollar industry and and made it’s way into the majority of hamburger sold nationwide. McDonald’s, Burger King, and millions of pounds every year given to our kids at school.
This is what the process looks like. It produces what one USDA microbiologist called pink slime, saying he doesn’t even consider the stuff to be meat. And when the USDA says something isn’t meat….
Not even good enough, for prisoners in Georgia—they sent it back, because the meatloaf stank like window cleaner. Why would they feed this to schoolchildren? School lunch officials said they ultimately agreed to use the treated meat because it shaved about 3 cents off the cost of making a pound of ground beef. Three cents.
To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring watch the above video. This is just an approximation of the audio contributed by veganmontreal.
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Doctor's Note
Please feel free to post any ask-the-doctor type questions here in the comments section and I’d be happy to try to answer them. And check out the other videos on meat. Also, there are 1,449 other subjects covered in the rest of my videos--please feel free to explore them as well!
For some context, please check out my associated blog post: Vitamin B12: how much, how often?
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Michael Greger M.D.
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Jan Arlen
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