It seems the food production industry knows something about health, wellness, and weight gain that they aren’t telling people looking to lose a few pounds. It’s obvious once you really start to think about it, but it’s been hidden, just out of sight, in the wonderful world of CAFOs.

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A CAFO is a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation and is more commonly demonized by the term ‘factory farm’. A CAFO is a place a young steer – say 5-7 months old – goes to retire, gain some weight, and be sent off to be processed. When the steer arrives, he’ll weigh about 650 pounds. He’ll have subsisted mostly on grass for the majority of his life. Over the next 3-5 months, he will undergo a radical amount of weight gain and a specialized diet, consisting of grass, durum wheat, corn, barley, oats, etc. This weight gain will hopefully double the weight of the steer as well as marble the meat to increase flavor.

A human eats a recommended diet (until recently the food pyramid, consisting of 6-11 servings from the ‘grain’ group, 3-5 servings from the vegetable group, 2-4 servings from the fruit group, 2-3 servings from the meat group, 2-3 servings of the dairy group, with sparing use of fats and sweets.

(for reference, 1 serving of ground beef – 95% lean – is 155 calories per 4 oz., and pasta has 74 calories per 2oz. So 6-11 servings of pasta is between 444 and 814 calories daily. 2-3 servings of lean ground beef is between 310 and 465 calories daily.)

So the same diet designed to fatten cows is supposed to leave human’s skinny? How is that supposed to work? When you add in human ingenuity for gluttony, the answer is “pretty badly”.

WTF? Photo credit - foodista blog