DR. WALKER

WHY FARM RAISED CHICKEN IS KILLING YOU?

One would think that if they would die at the hands of an animal, it would be a ferocious tiger or some mad grizzly. But a chicken? Almost no one would bet their last dollar on that. Incredulously, that has been the case for almost 3 decades now; farm raised chicken is killing us!

For starters, they vastly out number us. It is estimated that between 50 – 60 billion chickens are consumed each year around the world, and about 18 – 20 billion them in US alone. ¹ Considering the global population of 7.5 billion, chicken eaters in the US consume about 3 chickens for every person on the planet. This statistic seems harmless until you consider the amount of pressure on the land, capital and the birds to make this possible.

Our chicken may be killing us, but to be fair, we started it. To help our insatiable lust for chicken, we have devised ways by means of genetics, precision feeding and drug abuse to reduce the life span of these birds to 5 – 9 weeks maximum. ² We are literally preying on the meat of big baby birds. This “Need-for-Speed” farming of chicken now mean that they develop the muscle at the expense of other systems, including their bone structure and immune systems.

Chicken eaters have dodged one bullet, because unlike cattle, the use of hormones for chicken farming has been banned in the US and many other places since the 1950s. But did you know about the antibiotics? To make up for their poor immune systems, farm raised chicken is fed the gamut of antibiotics through their feed. Note that even with humans, doctors are careful on the abuse of antibiotics because bacteria easily adapt to them and become resistant. It turns out that we are not being careful enough, as an estimated 60% of all antibiotics produced annually go into animal husbandry. ³ This is not good news, especially with scientists reporting traces of antibiotics persisting in poultry products. ⁴

The danger with these antimicrobials is that entirely new ones have not been developed over the past decades, while the same old bacteria continue to develop genes that withstand these drugs. In one mechanism, you have these antibiotics in farm raised chicken being passed on to consumers, and hence, indirectly resulting in antibiotic abuse lending to their resistance. Additionally, resistant bacteria in some under-cooked chicken products take matters into their own hands, and pass on resistant genes to pathogenic bacteria already present in our guts.3 There are studies that even report that some of these bacteria can resist a combination of these antibiotics. ⁵ Rather perplexing, and even more problematic is that the more we consume, the faster the rate of resistance; and there no pending pause in how much chicken we are eating. It sometimes appear that farm raised chickens are giving us the middle feather for consuming them for such a long time.

Antibiotics however are not the only culprit. Unfortunately, even chicken products labeled “Raised Without Antibiotics”, may have other medications such as drugs for intestinal worms and external parasites involved in the cultivation, and sometimes, remaining on in their bodies during consumption.

Until recently, some birds lived in cages unable to scratch, walk or move their wings for almost the entire duration of their lives. Their 5 -9 weeks of life are just a series of one manipulation after the other, all with the goal of hoarding up the most muscle for their owner’s eating pleasure. Sometimes, conditions were so dire that they could end up consuming recycled parts of their fallen compatriots such as feathers, blood and intestines, en route to their own demise.

The environment is not spared in this “Live-Quick-and-Die-Fast” process. The number of birds churned out speak volumes about feed, water and medicine requirements, as well as waste disposal with respect to manure and bones. True that there are efforts to recycle these wastes, but 20 billion birds a year, certainly require some planned handling. Manure from the chicken are normally sent to farms, and that continues the ripple of woes considering that they contain heavy metal, hormone and antibiotic residues. ⁶

A typical farm can contain 2 to 4 barns, each barn containing 25,000 chickens. Often, these chicks are genetically modified to grow faster so they end up with bone malformation, heart defects and organ developmental issues. Additional because there is no room for them to move or rest there is untold stress in the meat we are consuming. This lack of movement also lends to chickens getting fatter quickly. Some study estimates, that a normal chicken, a few years ago, contained about 2 grams of animal fat. That same chick now contains about 23 grams of animal fat per serving. These birds are being raised at a considerable impact to the environment and to our waistline.

Clearly, chickens raised under these conditions do little to help you manage or control your weight with untold impacts on the environment. If you must keep chicken in your diet then it behooves you to find a local farmer that you can trust, unless your aim is to consume a genetically modified franken-chick.