Willow Star Haven

Chicken Consumers Beware: This is "Need to Know"

 

 

Last month I attended the International Conference on Nutrition and the Brain in Washington, D.C., hosted by the Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM.org). The subject matter dealt with the effects of food and food borne toxins relative to neurological disorders including Alzheimer's Disease, MS and Parkinson's; my next few posts will focus on the conclusions of various presentations at the Conference.

 

For many of us in the audience, the information on the dangers of chicken consumption was both surprising and distressing. Americans currently consume more than one million chickens per hour  and research links chicken consumption with increased risk of pathologies including cancer, bacterial contamination, urinary tract infections and neurological diseases. While some bacteria is destroyed in the cooking process (and cooking chicken is itself linked to formation of chemicals that are carcinogenic), just having raw chicken in the kitchen produces cross contamination that is nearly impossible to clean off.

 

I strongly encourage readers to spend some time reviewing the data in these links and, if you find this information compelling, please pass it on to those you care about.

 

The first link from PCRM is entitled "Fecal Soup in Chicken Products" and is based on information from a USDA training video obtained through the Freedom of Information Act: Poultry Slaughter Procedures. The video reveals that the chicken slaughtering process ends with carcasses soaking in cold water—“fecal soup”—for up to one hour before being packaged for consumers. The main link offers further information including:

Five Worst Contaminants in Chicken Report (Summer 2013)   

Mild strain of bird flu contained on Arkansas poultry farm (Reuters, June 20, 2013)   

At Chicken Plants, Chemicals Blamed for Health Ailments Are Poised to Proliferate
(The Washington Post, April 25, 2013)

Please follow this link: http://www.pcrm.org/health/health-topics/fecal-soup

My next blog will be "Part 2" on this subject. It will include a link to a site that has compiled a multitude of research reports on the dangers of chicken. Stay tuned for this blog on Monday.