What do Beef, Sperm and Icecream have in common?

international | miscellaneous | news report Thursday March 29, 2007 01:11 by DM

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Well, actually, it would be nicer if you ate less meat, more veggies, fruit, pasta, rice, pulses, etc.

The answer seems to be fertility

Beef and fertility
A rather interesting news item motivated me to write the following piece about my relationship with beef. A new http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,261915,00.html in the U.S. has reported that men born of women who ate a lot of beef during pregnancy are more likely to experience a low http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_count. But just how much beef can a pregnant woman eat in her 9 months of gestation? I'm pretty confident that my mum stuck to her Sunday ration. How about you?

What's all the beef about?

The scientists from the Center for Reproductive Epidemiology at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York tested 387 men, born between 1949 and 1983, whose partners were pregnant. The men discovered from asking their own mums about their diet decades earlier while pregnant with them, that they had eaten beef 4 times a week on average.

Fifty-one moms reported eating beef more than seven times per week during pregnancy. On average, men whose moms ate beef less often during pregnancy had a 24% higher sperm concentration than those whose mums ravished the poor young and 'aul cows like there was no tomorrow.

Moreover, 17 percent of men whose mammys ate beef more than seven times weekly during pregnancy had sperm concentrations in the "subfertile" range.

However, all men surveyed fathered children without medical treatment, according to the study.

Beef and Sunday Mass

Every Sunday afternoon, from the period of time that I first had teeth sharp enough to cut and chew beef, my mum with religiously consistent discipline, would serve me a few slices as I sat alongside my siblings. I always looked forward to it too, never thinking much about the poor cows in the next field and the fact that sooner or later they would probably end up on my dinner plate and soon there after stuck between my newly whitened post-11am Catholic mass molars!

Smothered in gravy, the tenderness and juiciness of each cutlet was skillfully sustained by my mum's culinary brain and attentiveness to the dynamics of preparing meat in the appropriate fashion. Yes, we were spoilt. My dad would have all the vegetables and spuds ready to sit on the range - all we had to do was watch a repeat of Match of the Day on telly until it was all ready to be swallowed. Yes, we were lazy assholes. But we always cleaned up everything afterwards!

Beef and Guinness

It was only when I reached my late teens that I started to think more about the food I ate. This was mainly out of concern for whether I had a sufficient amount of solid stuff in my tummy to keep me going through the day's college piss-up or a weekend get-together with local friends. I always found a guinness session to heavy a beverage-type to gulp down while also trying to accommodate the natural corporal need for food - whether it be the day of or the day after an almighty binge. Thus, many a beef dinner ended up dried out in the oven, stubbornly consumed later on that Sunday evening, my brothers and I poisoned by porter and sick as a score-load of general hospitals from the night before.

Beef and the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Ireland

On mature reflection, the one o'clock Christian Sabbath dinner plate in our home always consisted of an interesting colour pattern. Being Irish, the staple serving of three scoops of mashed potato were to be taken for granted. Situated on their left would be a large spoonful or two of peas, whilst to the right lay a dollop of mashed turnip or soft-boiled carrots. And I ate it with renewed fervour every time I say down at the table, that is, when I wasn't suffering from a self-induced ailment. I now wonder if this was some subtle form of republicanism we were being fed every day? There it was, the green representing the Catholics and Nationalists; the Orange representing the Protestants and Unionists; and the good old reliable floury rooster spuds, representing peace between the peas and the turnips/carrots, i.e. the Catholics and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_nationalism with the Protestants and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unionists_(Ireland). And beef, gorgeously roasted beef, drowning in delicious gravy, neutralising the political nature of the food layout, driving us to satiate our post-religious sermon and spiritually pure bodies and souls as we saw fit.

I've got a beef with Fox News

According to the researchers of the study I've mentioned above, residues of hormones given to beef to promote growth may be a factor in lowering men's jizz , but Fox News state it 'may not be certain.' I concur that that may certainly be the case.

However, I'm very sceptical of Fox News as it's a Rupert Murdoch mouthpiece, pro-war, and very pro-Bush. A number of years ago, Fox News reporters Steve Wilson and Jane Akre, engaged in a heated conflict about whether they could show their investigative report on the potentially damaging effects of Monsanto's milk due to its deriving from the use of bovine hormone enhancing drugs, were told by executives, "we paid $3 billion for these television stations. We will decide what the news is. The news is what we tell you it is."

Ok, it's an understatement to say that I'm not just very sceptical, I basically think they are pretty much full of shit. Their sceptical article on new research on the issue of fertility and how growth hormones used in cows may impact human health, where they provide a large amount of space to the Beef Industry in order to defend their practices, confirms for me the better option I have chose 4 years ago - to become vegetarian. Why? Well, the whole issue of the potential impacts modern factory farming practices have on our human health and the role the mainstream media play in defending corporate agri-business reminds me of the old Russian joke about the Soviet Union propaganda newpapers, Pravda(truth) and Izvestia (news).
The Russian people used to jest, "There is no news in the truth and no truth in the news."

Nevertheless, the jury would seem to be still out on the issue of whether you should ask your wife to stop munching down that slab of beef five times a week!!! - on a sidenote, you should lead by example: cows are nice creatures and should be let eat grass and low from dusk till dawn.

Beef and Icecream

Not wanting to dampen your committment to reading this protracted stream of consciousness, I thought I'd leave you with some good news. A recent Harvard study, involving 18,555 women, aged 24 to 42, who became pregnant or tried to from 1991-99, discovered the following:
3,430 reported infertility, including 2,165 who saw a doctor for it.
Of those, 438 said an ovulation problem was to blame.

"Researchers found that women who ate two or more low-fat dairy products a day were nearly twice as likely to have trouble conceiving because of lack of ovulation than women who ate less than one serving of such foods a week."

Whereas on the other hand, women who ate at least one fatty dairy food a day were 27 percent less likely to have this problem.

But ladies don't rejoice about the good news of an icecream orgy just yet, as the researchers conclusive interpretation of the new study is that: "It's not that having high fat is protective. It's that being on a diet may be bad for reproduction."

Guinness and Beef Divorce

Leaving Harvard, if I may sum up my relationship with beef and guinness. I divorced my Sunday beef dinners in February 2003, after torturously biting a lump out of Limerick prison's brutal version of what tasted heavenly in co. Offaly - I thought to myself immediately, you've just contracted Creutzfeldt-Jakob's disease! Thankfully I hadn't. Two years earlier I had divorced my appetite for guinness (ironically I even have a photo of my last pint of the black and white stuff taken in Dublin airport). Little did I know then that my volunteering trip to Haiti would be the deathknell of my beef and tricolour merged dinners. Giving up alcohol for the christian feast of lent in a roundabout way also led to my giving up meat 2 years later while in jail for stuff not related in any way to cows or fertility.

To be honest, I have ever since had a more sensitive and acute sense of the cows lying and grazing in the field next to our house, which is overlooked by our dining room, as they bellow out more pleasant lows while I stare out at them, my belly full of pasta and mixed vegetables - being digested of course, with a nice bowl of jelly and icecream.