Speak to practically any personal trainer around the world who’s trying to help their clients get leaner and healthier and you’ll undoubtedly hear them talk about the value of eating a clean, healthy and nutritious diet.
Along with the usual “eat 5 pieces of fruit and veg a day” kind of information that you’ve undoubtedly heard time and again, you’ll probably recognise the admonishment to avoid red meat because of it’s saturated fat content and instead consume lean, ‘healthy’ sources of meat protein like chicken, turkey and fish.
Sounds like good advice on the surface, right?
But is it?
Read on and you might change your mind.
Here’s a few factoids about chickens to whet your appetite:
- Current EU regulations allow up to 21 hens to be store in an area of 1 square metre – This is the equivalent space of less than 1 A4 sheet of paper per bird (More birds per sq metre are allowed in the US)
- The average UK ‘meat’ chicken grows at a rate of 60g per day – This is 2-3 times the rate of natural chicken growth
- The average meat chicken is slaughtered at around 35 days old having reached an average of 2-plus kilos – wild chickens live for up to 6 years and whilst often weighing a similar weight get there much more slowly
- Up to 35% of all pre-slaughter deaths among battery chickens is related to osteoporosis – The lack of movement with upwards of 25,000 hens per barn plus the rapid growth leads to weak muscles and weak bones.
- Egg laying hens produce up to 300 eggs per year - 12-15 eggs per year is the average in the wild
- All factory farmed chickens are fed antibiotics – sure, it keeps them alive longer in the overcrowding, but studies have directly related anti-biotic supplementation in poultry too increased and more rapid growth
- Chickens have been bred especially to produce larger than normal amounts of breast meat – practically everyone everywhere favours the breast meat for cooking and this has led to super ‘inflated’ chicken breasts perched ontop of spindly, weak and often fractured legs on sick chickens
- 17-20 Hours of light and food - Chickens are stimulated to eat, eat and eat some more by 17-20 hours of artificial sunlight and a never ending supply of food. This fattens them fast and speeds up the time to slaughter.
The long and the short of it is that most of the poultry we consume as part of our diet is sick, weak, artificially created stuff that really has no place in our diets. See, if the saying ‘you are what you eat’ is true (and I believe it is) then eating this, (excuse me) crap with the regularity we’ve been eating makes no sense at all.
Over 50 BILLION of these ‘FrankenFowl’ are being reared for consumption every year, putting sick, fat and chemical and antibiotic contaminants directly into our foods.
This would be enough but remember, we haven’t even gotten these chickens to the food producers yet. This is just the farms!
During production the chickens are often ‘bulked up’ using water, salt and sugar, thus making the chicken heavier (which is great for supermarkets when they sell it by weight), which, as you’ve no doubt seen, makes the chicken shrink quite considerably when you cook it.
Package it up into other foods with emulsifiers, preservation agents and other stuff and and you have an amazing frankenfood indeed.
And it’s going into us!
Is it any wonder then that WE are struggling to lose fat when we’re consuming so many of these highly estrogenic ‘fat factories’ every year and, for many of us, on an almost daily basis?
THIS is why if you’re serious about your health and serious about getting into great shape, you MUST seriously consider switching to organic if you want to eat chicken.
Despite what many people may tell you, there IS a difference between organic and battery farmed chicken.
The tast alone should tell you that.
Yes, I know it’s more expensive but the truth is that it’s far more expensive to continue eating food that’s damaging to your health and your metabolism. Besides, once you start eating quality nutrients you’ll find that your appetite goes down and you’ll eat a lot less of them anyway. The net result is that you’ll probably end up spending no more than you do now.
Regardless, even if your only goal is one of aesthetics and fat loss and you couldn’t give a damn about how chicken do or don’t live their lives, try eating only organic chicken and eggs for a month and see for yourself what a difference it makes.
To Your Health!
P.S – Don’t forget to leave me a comment!
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