Many of us enjoy a good steak or a juicy hamburger and realize the nutritional benefits derived from eating beef but there are countless products that we use in in our daily lives that are derived from cattle that we never think about. Dan Hale is a professor and Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Meat Specialist.
“I take students on tours of retail grocery stores and I say go find beef in this grocery store and every single aisle that they could walk into at any local grocery store they could find an item that came from livestock. Whether it’s shoe polish that came from a beef animal or beef cattle or it was the gelatin that was in a cosmetic.”
Hale says the Pharmacy at your grocery store is full of cattle by-products.
“There are things like Vitamin B-12 and Vitamin B-6 and Vitamin-A and Vitamin-K and Iron and Zinc and Phosphorus and Potassium, it goes on and on. Many of those supplements contain products from cattle and from livestock.”
Hale says it’s amazing how important livestock are to the medical field. In many countries, it takes twenty-six pancreases to keep a diabetic alive for a year.
“Whether it’s biomedical research that they do from fetal calf serum to produce antibodies that might be of use for somebody that has some specific disease or virus or whether it’s just a compound that a person needs because they don’t produce it in their own body. Very often that comes from livestock itself. It keeps those people alive.”
Hale points out that you can’t get all these benefits from something produced in a lab and is marketed as “meat”.
“In reality we can produce a myoblast which is a precursor to a muscle cell and we can make something that looks like meat if we put it on a scaffold and build a steak or whatever, but it’s amazing to see what animals actually do. They actually naturally have that whole system built into them and at the same time they produce glands and blood and hides that we use for leather goods, so many different things that we use.”
Everything in cattle except the “moo” is used to produce something that we use every day.
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via source KBTX | Important By-Products Derived From Cattle
For more information regarding news from the Department of Animal Science, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Texas A&M University, please contact Maggie Berger at maggielberger@tamu.edu or (979) 845-1542.