Playing “Chicken” with Chicken

Every day, I talk to people about what they eat. Let me tell you the number one food I wish they would leave alone: chicken. People decide to give up red meat, so that leaves chicken, right? The average American is consuming 83 pounds of it per year. If you knew that today’s chicken is now a top-five source of saturated fat, would you be as enthusiastic about it? Probably not, but when we add hormonal disruption to the list of negative effects of chicken, would you start paying more attention?

Every day, I see people suffering from the ill effects of hormonal disruption: unexplained weight gain, ovarian/uterine cysts, fatigue, loss of libido, and more. When I convince these people to get off chicken and onto some foods like beans and nuts instead, they begin to feel better within a month or two. Women’s menstrual cycles begin to normalize. Weight starts coming off, and energy rises. Balancing hormones is a good reason to get off of chicken. If you won’t cut back on chicken for your hormones, would you do it to prevent getting really sick? Read on….

The best and most immediate reason to give chicken a break is that it comes loaded with drug-resistant bacteria. While the FDA has made some moves to phase out many of the antibiotics being used on animals to promote rapid growth, it’s going to be some time before the poultry industry gets its act together. In the meantime, some especially nasty strains of enterocuccus, E. coli, campylobacter, Klebsiella, salmonella, and Staphylococcus aureus were found on almost every piece of 318 chicken breasts tested by Consumer Reports recently.

Finally, Foster Farms has some explainin’ to do about the cockroach infestation that finally caused the USDA to close their plant in Livingston, California. The USDA said it had found cockroaches at the chicken plant five times since September of 2013.