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“Almost one-quarter of all pesticides used in the United States are applied to cotton , ... and 3 million tons of cottonseed is fed to beef and dairy cattle.” And further: “Toxins, such as pesticides and drug residues concentrate in animal fat. According to the EPA, 90 to 95 percent of all particle residues are found in meat and dairy products.” The latter point sheds light on another reason why women are more vulnerable than men to hormone disrupters including synthesized hormones and particle residues which can mimic them. While men are certainly not invulnerable, they typically carry 12 to 15 percent of their body weight in the form of fat, whereas women average a bit over 21 percent. Therefore, wom- en have relatively more body fat to provide havens for hormone disrupting chemicals, so proportionally more can accumulate. Also, breasts and ovaries have particularly high fat concentrations, which increases the chance of such troubles in those organs. After this brief discussion of hormones, its worth mentioning another possible consequence of administering antibiotics to livestock. Roughly half of all antibiotics used in the U.S. are administered to animals raised for food or the production of food. Some scientists emphasize that certain kinds of anti- biotics can themselves be hormone disrupters by mimicking natural hormones and lodging in the body’s hormone receptor cells by giving them false mes- sages, just as synthetic hormones can. (As just a few examples: messages concerning such vital matters as long-term cell development, quick responses to stimuli, instructions to genes, sex, and reproduction, metabolism, mental processes, and not the least, the growth and maintenance of every organ of the body.) Yet another aspect of livestock raising is the common practice of feed- ing animal byproducts to cattle. A problem lies in the fact that, since the byproducts consist of the otherwise unwanted innards of many animals mixed together, one simply does not know just what they may contain with respect to possible contaminants, bacterial or mineral (the latter might include, for ex- ample, heavy metals such as lead and mercury). Also a considerable propor- tion of the weight put on by livestock through consumption of animal byprod- ucts is typically in the form of fat. “Most animal feed contains rendered fat (fat salvaged from fast-food restaurants and animal houses, often laced with melted plastics, etc.), and is a source of disrupting chemicals dissolved into the fat.” Cattle, and for that matter all hoofed grazing animals, are by nature vegetarians. Animal by-products, even if uncontaminated, are hardly natural foods for cattle. 180