New Chicken Warning

[JAS9]

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I figure that "Healthy Eating" involves AVOIDING unhealthy food, right? Especially if you're in the US, these new developments are very serious and scary. Maybe everyone should stop buying chicken if they don't stop using so many antibiotics? youtu.be/RyP5Cnc-vxk(Not working as expected?)

[Zest]

Hi JAS9

Thanks for sharing this information. I was looking at information on the British Poultry (as I am based in the UK) and this link to the British Poultry Organisation seems to have a few articles about it:

britishpoultry.org.uk/bpc-r...

I haven't got much time this morning, but I'll hope to read more on the weekend.

Zest

[Hidden]

Hi Jerome, sadly its greed that drives these practices and to me the moral of this is that we the consumer have lost touch with what we are really eating and we want to take this control back which is easier said than done especially on a low income.

To me it's not just chicken its processed foods as food processing corrupts the nutritional value. ☠️

At the end of the day we literally are what we eat...

[JAS9 in reply to Hidden]

I couldn't agree more, Jerry. I've cut out all processed food from my diet, including any refined or concentrated oils, sugars, or salt. This might seem extreme, but I am serious about being healthy, and I enjoy the foods I do eat just as much as I ever enjoyed my old SAD diet.

The problems caused by processed foods are here already, but they'll be far worse unless changes happen. Our health is tied to the health of our farmland. Healing it begins with the consumers and farmers cutting out the middle-men. This video is an intelligent discussion between Dr Zach Bush and Rich Roll about all of these issues and what can be done about them. Dr Bush has been on the front-lines, yet he is optimistic - though very pragmatic - about the future.

youtu.be/X3aOQ0N74PI(Not working as expected?)

The movement to educate and enroll farmers and consumers has already begun. It's already converted a million acres back to the time-tested regenerative practices. Consumers are responding. Here's a link to one of the organizations that Dr Bush mentions: farmersfootprint.us/

[TheAwfulToad in reply to Hidden]

I don't think it actually is greed. Most farmers don't want to treat their animals like this, and the profit margins of this business model are pitiful. The problem is that the laws allow it ... which is virtually the same as making it compulsory.

In the US, where repartitioning agents like phenethanolamines are legal, they are universally used. Farmers hate them because of the side effects on the animals, but without them they would be unable to meet the demands for "low fat" meat .. which in turn is driven by misguided government healthy-eating policy. Yes, there are rebellious farmers who kick back, but they face an uphill struggle.

If governments stopped allowing farmers to treat animals like things, a whole bunch of problems would disappear overnight. Meat prices would rise somewhat while the market adjusted, but would soon correct downwards to roughly what they are now: humanely-raised meat can actually be cheaper and simpler to produce than the factory-farmed version. Unfortunately, they can't do that because the big meat processors wield enormous political power. So I suppose it is down to the rebel farmers to find a workaround.

[JAS9 in reply to TheAwfulToad]

What you and I think of as "farmers" have largely been replaced by employees of a few huge farm-owning companies that have bought up farmland and are squeezing it dry. The true farmers who are left are barely making it. Their yields are falling off a cliff because they believed Monsanto's sales pitch, and now they're discovering that the yields they were promised for "Roundup Ready" seeds are not sustainable by their dead soil.

That's where Farmer's Footprint and other organizations come in; they help the farmers that are left to recover their land and return it to a state of regeneration, which makes the soil better, healthier, more like real soil and not cement. In return, these farmers are producing better, organic food that sells for more to consumers who are waking up and voting with their wallets. The farmers, not big corporations, get paid more, the consumers get better food, and the soil lives.

In the meantime, nearly any chicken or beef or pig meat you can buy here in the US is mass-produced. The animals are being fed this mass-grown food that's killing the soil. It's become like any other industry that squeezes something good until it's drained. But unlike other industries, the results are bad food, sick people, and dead soil. To sell the food to people, they have to process it and add sugar, oils, additives, and mass market that too.

End of rant.

[TheAwfulToad in reply to JAS9]

That's what happens when you put economists in charge of running the show.

There are still lots of independent farmers, but they're mostly terrified of change, or believe that they're victims of the system. And to an extent they are: small farmers producing naturally-raised meat (which is inherently a small-scale operation) will face Men With Clipboards attempting to shut them down. In the US, the usual strategy is to simply refuse them an inspector at slaughtering, which means they can't sell their meat. If you produce organic vegetables, you can't sell them as such unless you've got an official stamp of approval: the word "organic" has been co-opted by government and quangos. Certification is costly to obtain and requires you to jump through various meaningless hoops.

It's easier, in other words, to do as you're told.

There are all sorts of reasons why governments favour big farms and mass-produced food, and it'll take some serious revolt on the part of consumers AND farmers to turn the tide. I'm not particularly hopeful, I'm afraid; my prediction is that we'll be back to natural farming around 2050, when phosphate mining is likely to hit a brick wall.

[NSNG-am]

I would never get my food information from this doctor at "nutrition facts". His agenda is anti meat. He says that eating an egg is like smoking 5 cigarettes. That is ridiculous. Had a 15 cigarette omelette today that was delicious.

[TheAwfulToad in reply to NSNG-am]

Michael Greger is a quack, and I'm utterly amazed he hasn't been struck off. I suspect he gets away with it because his advice is broadly congruent with official policy.

OTOH overuse of antibiotics is is a massive problem. Use of antibiotics for farm animals was theoretically restricted about 10 years ago by EU law, but the workaround is in the phrase "unnecessary use of..." in the restrictions. Since most farm animals are kept in conditions almost guaranteed to create epidemics, antibiotics are almost always necessary.

In the US, about 80% of antibiotic sales are used on livestock, often with little or no regulatory oversight.

Some of you might be interested in a short book called "The Drugs Don't Work", which is written by a real doctor.

[JerMan22 in reply to NSNG-am]

You know, I used to like eggs, but then I saw all the videos and read a few of the studies myself, and couldn't eat them anymore. Just so much cholesterol! So if there's any evidence that they aren't bad for you I would like to see it. I mean real evidence, not some egg industry-backed study that just says that adding an egg to an already-high cholesterol diet doesn't have much effect (duh).

Do you know of any?

[Penel in reply to JerMan22]

This is an article from the British Heart Foundation.

bhf.org.uk/what-we-do/news-...

Eggs seem to affect different people in different ways, seems it may depend on your gut bacteria.

[NSNG-am in reply to JerMan22]

Not worried about dietary cholesterol. Not an ancil Keyes fan.

[TheAwfulToad in reply to JerMan22]

"Eggs contain cholesterol" is not sufficient reason to believe they might be bad for you. Your body manufactures most of its own cholesterol (70-80%). Additional dietary cholesterol just causes your body to manufacture less.

At the very least, you need to show that people who eat a lot of eggs are unhealthy in some way before you demand disproof. Since eggs don't correlate in any way with ill-health, there's no hypothesis to disprove in the first place. Even scaremongering governments have stopped the rhetoric about dietary cholesterol.

[JerMan22 in reply to TheAwfulToad]

My body makes 100% of the cholesterol it needs, thank you very much, and no more. As I said, I used to like eggs, and chicken, and I am serious about looking into any actual study (not just an opinion) about cholesterol in eggs, or the health benefits of saturated fat.

In the meantime, I'll take my 100% me-made cholesterol, plant-based proteins, non-heme iron, saturated-fat-free diet over whatever dross is in chicken these days.

[TheAwfulToad in reply to JerMan22]

Of course it does - which is why it doesn't matter how much of it you eat. Cholesterol is under closed-loop control, and dietary cholesterol presents as a disturbance that downregulates whatever your body is making for itself. Any medical textbook will give you the outline of how this works. Google 'mevalonate pathway'.

To be fair, nobody quite knows how cholesterol works in detail. The basics are understood, but there are still a lot of blanks. One thing we know for certain is that dietary cholesterol cannot affect average circulating cholesterol. Various other things in your diet can affect it, but simply eating more (or less) cholesterol doesn't do anything interesting. If you don't believe me it's easy enough to get your blood lipids tested: try eating three eggs a day for a month and measure before-and-after.

As for the "saturated fat causes high cholesterol which causes heart disease" idea, that was dreamed up 70 years ago long before we really knew what cholesterol was for or how it was managed. It was put forward by a guy who has since been outed for scientific fraud. The hypothesis was tested, and disproved, over and over. In fact it's probably the most reliably disproven hypothesis in nutrition, because governments have spent so much money on trying to prove that it's true, and ended up with egg on their faces.

It's up to you what you eat, of course, and I agree that factory-farmed chicken leaves a lot to be desired, but most of what passes for nutrition advice these days is an unpalatable mixture of superstition and ignorance. If you don't want to support the factory system, keep some chickens in your backyard. You can 'rescue' factory culls via online organisations. They're really amusing animals and you'll have a regular supply of guaranteed good eggs.

[JAS9 in reply to TheAwfulToad]

See, this is exactly my point: you can say that eating cholesterol doesn't - can't - absolutely positutely WILL NOT raise serum cholesterol. Then I find this: youtu.be/vBtfzd43t8o(Not working as expected?)

Who do I believe? Why?

[TheAwfulToad in reply to JAS9]

>> Why?

Because you want to?

There are few things more headache-inducing than listening to non-scientists hold forth on science. The guy has no idea what the first graph shows: technically, it's an impulse response (note the timescale on the X-axis), which is a simple method for characterizing the performance of a control system but is never used as such by diet researchers. It tells you nothing at all about the steady-state level of blood cholesterol. Of course the line goes up and then down again to the setpoint. That's how any critically-damped control system behaves (in fact, slightly underdamped, judging by the ripple as it settles). Intuitively, the loop has to be able to observe an increase in order to calculate an error signal that it can correct. The presenter thinks this is all fraudulent, because all he can see is a wiggly line, not the math and physics that made it happen.

Not that it matters anyway. TC isn't even useful as a diagnostic risk marker for CVD, so how can it be the proximate cause? Why are we still obsessing over it?

[JAS9 in reply to TheAwfulToad]

So what you're saying is that because the cholesterol goes back down it's fine? What about "A heavy meal can increase your cardiovascular risk by 4 times within 2 hours"? Or the damage done while the cholesterol is high? Oxidative stress?

I feel that I must investigate myself by looking at more studies and other whatnottery. Good luck to me! Thank you for your input.

[TheAwfulToad in reply to JAS9]

It's more than fine. It shows that your cholesterol synthesis pathway is behaving exactly the way the textbooks say it does.

I'm just looking into the second study (around the 3:40 mark). That fact that this study is 25 years old raises red flags for me. There are legitimate reasons for referring to old studies, but when doing so one should follow up on papers that subsequently referenced it, because they may have been unable to reproduce the result, or may have contradicted it.

[JerMan22 in reply to TheAwfulToad]

Yeah, I don't get it either. It seems very foggy to me. This whole cholesterol thing is confusing and I'm also trying to get a grasp of it. I won't believe anything that I can't verify though.

I seem to have this same discussion over and over with various people. I try not to let it get heated, because in the end we all get to turn off the computer and eat whatever WE decide to eat. Right now, Mic the Vegan is sounding rational to me (no offense meant, Mr Toad) but tomorrow I could wake up with an epiphany and have a complete change of mind. Yes - I'm actually that far gone.

Is this like the tobaco companies saying that all they had to do was confuse people enough and they'll keep on smoking? Or is there some wierd conspiracy between all the health organizations designed to drive the egg industry out of business?

Arg.

[Activity2004 Administrator in reply to JerMan22]

Perfectly said, JerMan22 . Everyone has a right to their own opinions/comments about different topics to a point. Not everyone is going to agree with everyone or everything, but they have to be considerate of the other people’s feelings and beliefs. No one wants to upset anyone else.😀👍

[GERALDDAVID]

I hear food inspectors are not working because of the gov`t shutdown. who knows what we will be eating?

[G1nny]

I don’t eat chicken here in the USA. I eat no meat but occasional catfish every other month. I do use the free range organic chicken broth in some recipes. I used to eat meat from my parents farm. It was all grass fed and no medications. Unfortunately I had to sell the farm 10 years after my father died. No meat for me just my own chicken eggs raised here at my house.