Expecting downvotes for this: I strongly suspect that hormones in meat make Americans bigger. I am from Europe. I have met many Americans both of whose parents were born in my country. They don't look like us. My perception is that on average they are significantly bigger, and are both taller and broader than is normal in my country. I don't know if this has health implications, but I would rather not eat meat which contains growth hormones.

Well you will get downvotes if you don't actually provide any evidence beyond "he looks funny". The whole beef hormone controvosy is complete bullshit; the EU has lost cases against the US & Canada in the WTO twice now, both times for lack of scientific evidence behind their decision. The ban happened when Europe was wrestling with mad cow disease, which in no small part influenced the populance against the scientific method with regards to food saftey. This, along with the fact that MEP's had recently been elected for the first time, made the decision almost entirely populist. The EU has _never_ justified the ban scientifically.

I don't have evidence that hormones in beef affect humans. Do you have evidence that they don't? Personally I would rather not eat it without such evidence.

I just quickly googled and found this on the website of the American Public Health Association: "By contrast, the US government position is that hormone residues in beef from adult cattle pose no threat to human health. This assumption of safety, however, has remained untested by long-term epidemiologic studies and instead relies on dated research concerning the ability of estrogen (estradiol) to mutate genes. This policy fails to reflect more recent research that hormones and hormonally active chemicals may exert their toxicity instead via epigenetic changes.12,23"

Source: http://www.apha.org/advocacy/policy/policysearch/default.htm...

Do you carry a cell phone? Because a lot of people believe that carrying and using cell phones over long periods of time will cause cancer due to the long term exposure to electromagnetic radiation. There is no evidence that this is the case, however, nobody has proven that they DON'T. And not enough time has passed to really know the long term effects.

You're probably right, American teenagers are hitting puberty earlier too and growth hormones in milk and beef were the main suspects.

But also: When women have a large pool of potential mates to chose from they usually select the healthier larger males. In the USA we all speak the same language, use the same currency, can move to whatever city we want and that gives women a much larger selection of big males to mate with. While in European countries, there are language barriers, cultural barriers, and smaller populations per country. Although the population of europe is 700+ million, the population tends to stay in it's home country and intermarry with it's own kind to an extent. Meaning once all the big males in a country are married and taken, the women there start mating with medium & smaller men. That's my theory at least. American culture is also very extreme-masculine, homophobic, scared of looking weak, and obsessed with dominant macho males. It might have to do with white men's fear of strong dominating black men which are the majority in many physical sports and are over-represented in violent crimes and present in high-crime neighborhoods. So maybe it's a security thing.

http://metro.co.uk/2007/02/01/dutch-are-the-worlds-tallest-i...

I'm under the impression you're from Ireland judging by your username. Kids and adolescents that are well fed tend to grow more than those that aren't, and portion size in the US tends to be substantially greater than elsewhere, especially Europe. Also, there seems to be a greater focus on working out for aesthetic reasons in the US. All of this is, however, does appear to be changing, and moving more toward an American norm. You may also be suffering from confirmation bias! Or, you're right and something in American food is affecting growth rates, but there doesn't appear to be a lot of evidence to support this notion.

This phenomenon has been studied, but is currently thought to be because of lifestyle differences. See "The Health Toll of Immigration": http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/health/the-health-toll-of-...

Americans have been 'larger' for some time. We had trouble with AK47s after WW2, for example, because they were too small for the comparatively larger American soldiers to wield comfortably.

I don't think it's any more complicated than the fact that we eat more food for all of our lives.

I'm not a doctor, so i wouldn't claim your theory is impossible. But we americans have a horrible diet, and we eat tons of food. I can't say much about height, but breadth comes from 1300 calorie fast food lunches.

Hormones and antibiotics, perhaps. Chinese raised in America do not look the same as Chinese raised in China. They tend to be bigger, thicker, taller, and with a different skin tone. Go figure.

You're not serious, are you? Cows are fed corn feed to bulk them for slaughter weight sooner. If the cow ended up not being slaughtered it would end up dying due to disease. Antibiotics keep it alive in order to get it to our plates. The whole american food industry is ...ked. I dread the day we start producing GMO'd rice. - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1112115/

All cows that aren't slaughtered end up dying from disease or old age. Antibiotics prevent the spread of disease and aren't harmful in and of themselves, but their overuse can lead to resistant bacteria. And I'm not sure why you'd have a problem with genetically modified rice if it would increase the food supply safely. ll of these things have been relatively well studied and there appears to be no evidence to support any indication that this these practices are harmful to humans.

There are so many people that take a fearful view without evidence, but such fears are scientifically unfounded.

Also, movies and TV aren't necessarily great sources of information. They're entertainment first and foremost, and to put it charitably, not always especially factually accurate.

> no evidence to support any indication that this these practices are harmful to human

You haven't heard of BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or Mad Cow Disease)?

http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvrd/bse/

The likely cause of that disease was farmers feeding cows other cows (in the form of meal).

Lots of strange stuff happens in the name of making a profit.

It's well known why you shouldn't feed a species to itself; they will be susceptible to the same pathogens, and the pathogens will accumulate from one generation to the next.

Why are you making the leap from this to unrelated practices?

That practice was legal in the US up until 2009 and while that one is now gone, there are plenty of other whacky practices used in its place.

As a replacement the next wacky idea was to feed cows with chicken manure mixed in hay.

The only problem is cows can still be fed to chickens and the cows then eat the chicken crap, so exactly has changed?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-greger-md/mad-cow-dise...

Where am I meant to make the logical leap to "this is a bad thing"? Keeping a cow healthy prior to it being slaughtered seems like a good thing, as far as I can tell, and I don't know of any great evils coming from corn feed, other than the increased land and water cost. The use of antibiotics is something I have my own concerns on, but I fail to see what it has to do with GMO rice and feeding cows corn.

Ah, but they sound harmful!

They don't taste good.

What doesn't "taste good"? Almost all modern food is Genetically Modified at some level, all meat has hormones as well so not sure specifically what constitues tasting good with that.

Are you saying hormones make things taste bad? Have you blind A-B tested that assumption? Same for "GM" food? Also what exactly is constituted as GM? Is Corn a GM food or still "natural" because we just used selective pressure and chose what populations of maize was able to continue to the next iteration?

To be honest the Sturm und Drang over GM foods while seeminly well meaning seems to belie similarities to the climate change deniers. If humans do it it somehow is implicitly bad, but almost all modern food isn't "natural", assuming we define natural as without impact from humanity. (yes the link is tenuous, but its similar to zombie stories being tales of human hubris gone awry, and alien invasions being worries of the unknown. GM being our hubris, climate change being fear of the unknown or inability to be able to control our future)

If the arguments against GM for example are against terminator genes, sure valid, but even if those genes spread, I doubt they'll get selected for too long in the wild.

In addition, without the option of GM foods, how does everyone propose we feed an ever increasing population of humans without impacting the environment any more than we already have? I personally foresee insects and other alternative protein sources as an inevitability. What is being proposed as alternatives that will scale to the sizes we need? I'm honestly curious here despite how the tone of my post might come off but anti GM foods in general strikes me as the same strain of anti-science as anti-climate change. Sure be conservative with changes, but most GM is pretty mundane.

This is a pure anecdotal data point, but as someone who travels a lot: American meat is bland. I don't know if it is hormones, climate, food stock, herding conditions, or what, but it's definitely true in my experience.

It's not only about GM food, but about the taste of food in general. I come from a small country where the food is not produced by huge farms, but by the people in their tiny or small farms. The lack of money and technologies makes them use the same technologies like 100 years ago (except tractors). The downside is that they depend on weather, and the crop per hectare is not so big like in highly agriculture-industrialized countries. But the food tastes very different. Now I live in a huge country, where the small farmers won't be able to produce all the food that is needed and it took me a year to get used to the taste of the local vegetables and meat. I don't know and I don't care if GM is bad or good for my health, the same about hormones in meat. I just want my food to taste good.