Harvard’s Meat and Mortality Studies

I try to raise awareness on the hazards of eat animal-based products. Just last week I put together the following write-up on eating chicken. You may find it informational. Feel free to copy it and share it with friends and family :).

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Many people consider chicken as a health food: you know, ‘gotta get your lean protein.’ Considering that slaughterhouses are killing more birds in one day (25-30 million) then they did in an entire year during the 1930′s, everyone has been dupped. Here are two links comparing 100g of skinless, roasted (I gave the poultry industry the benefit of the doubt) chicken and 100g of red meat hamburger.

http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/poultry-products/694/2
http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/beef-products/6196/2

‘Lean’ protein is nothing more than a gimmic.

It doesn’t stop at the macronutrients, not by a long shot. Aside from getting fed their own fecies and rendered animal, chickens now grow over twice as fast thanks to genetics and growth stimulants (3lbs bird in six weeks compared to four months). So fast in fact that these animals can not handle the weight of their own internal organs and are rendered breathless after a few steps. So fast that large slaughterhouses must despose of an average of 500 lbs worth of dead chickens due to what is called “flip over” disease- the chickens die from a heart attack as early as one month old. Chickens life expectancy is around 10 years.

Beside the numerous amount of documentation on cockroach, fly and maggot infestation found in these plants, contamination is also a problem in the poultry industry. According to a USDA micobiologist, there are as many as 50 different opportunities for cross-contamination to occur. The largest offending point of cross-contamination is the chilling pool. Dubbed as ‘fecal soup,’ this large vat is where the recently “cleaned” birds are left to soak in a pool of chilled water that is brimming with all sorts of excrements. An interesting side note is that these corpses absorb an average of 8% of their weight of this filth. Thats right, poultry eaters around America spend more than $1 billion dollars on this bacteria soup that is sold as poultry weight every year.

What about inspection? The larger slaughterhouses can see as many as 500,000 corpses leave every day. Each inspector has roughly two seconds to inspect each body for over 12 different diseases as well as other abnormalities (by the way, as a result of popular demand in the poultry industry, feces, sores, scabs lesions and broken bones are considered “trimmable conditions” and are no longer condemnable). Federal regulations allow for the sampling of 10 corpses out of ever 15,000. That is less than .1%.

So what sort of contamination are we talking about? For starters, a reporter who interviewed 84 USDA inspectors wrote that “millions of chickens leaking yellow pus, stained by green feces, contaminated by harmful bacteria, or marred by lung and heart infections, cancerous tumors, or skin conditions are shipped for sale to consumers.” As for bacteria, an Agricultural Department study showed that over 99% of broiler chickens have tracable amounts of E. Coli bacteria, 30% of chicken consumed is infested with salmonella and 70-90% are contaminated with a pathogen called campylobacter. Look it up, campylobacter is no joke. Contaminated chicken kills as little as 1,000 and sickens as many as an estimated 80 million Americans each year.

This does not include the horrific living conditions, killing practices and environmental
damage that is a result of eating chicken.

Sources:
“Food Inc.”
“Slaughterhouse” by Gale Einsnitz
“Mad Cowboy” by Howard F. Lyman