How are dietary hormones dangerous to humans?
The concern with extra hormones in the meat is things like breast cancer, things like male infertility because these hormones tend to be feminizing and increase the dose of estrogen, or estrogen-like compounds, which we're getting from other things in our environment as well. Things that are in bath and body lotions can also have estrogen-like materials. And so we're trying to decrease a woman's total inappropriate dose of estrogen because we know that there are certain types of breast cancer that are very estrogen sensitive. And so that's probably why the European Union and people that promote organic meat and dairy are saying, and I fully endorse, that the less hormone the better, because it is an inappropriate stimulation of things like breast cancer tissue. A recent study from the University of Rochester just published in 2007 showing that the more red meat mothers ate during pregnancy, twenty years later ends up with their male offspring having lower sperm counts, which is probably because of the hormones in the meat affecting the way the children were developing from in-utero onward in terms of male fertility.
