The egg industry is attempting to improve the fatty acid lipid profile of eggs by feeding blubber from the Canadian harp seal hunt to laying hens.
Chicken’s Fate is Sealed
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Below is an approximation of this video’s audio content. To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video.
How vegan does one have to eat, though, to sufficiently lower our level of arachidonic acid intake? I mean, our body is already making some; is eating just like one egg a day going to significantly increase our blood levels? We didn’t know, until last year.
This group of Japanese researchers gave women just one egg’s worth a day, and “found that dietary arachidonic acid increased the arachidonic acid level in all fat fractions of the blood, even at a very low dietary dose.”
Now, the meat industry realizes this is a problem, and they’re currently exploring ways to genetically manipulate chickens to lower arachidonic acid levels in chicken muscle “to produce meat with health benefits.”
The egg industry appears to be getting even more desperate, feeding laying hens seal blubber. See, the annual Canadian seal hunt evidently produces 16,000 tons of blubber every year, which can be used for animal feed. And indeed, if you feed laying hens diets containing 5% seal blubber, you can drop the arachidonic acid levels in eggs to as much as 34%, making eggs significantly less harmful. Any amount, though, in chicken and eggs, is in excess of what our body needs.
Making arachidonic acid is like playing with fire. Our body makes just enough, and no more. The colonel and the clubber might want to feed us a little extra, but our own body knows best.
Please consider volunteering to help out on the site.
- Hirota S, Adachi N, Gomyo T, Kawashima H, Kiso Y, Kawabata T. Low-dose arachidonic acid intake increases erythrocytes and plasma arachidonic acid in young women. Prostaglandins Leukot Essent Fatty Acids. 2010 Aug;83(2):83-8.
- Haug A, Olesen I, Christophersen OA. Individual variation and intraclass correlation in arachidonic acid and eicosapentaenoic acid in chicken muscle. Lipids Health Dis. 2010 Apr 15;9:37.
Images thanks to MightyAtom [GNU or CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons, wallpaperstock.net, IFAW, and HSUS/Brian Skerry and HSUS/Rebecca Aldworth
Below is an approximation of this video’s audio content. To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video.
How vegan does one have to eat, though, to sufficiently lower our level of arachidonic acid intake? I mean, our body is already making some; is eating just like one egg a day going to significantly increase our blood levels? We didn’t know, until last year.
This group of Japanese researchers gave women just one egg’s worth a day, and “found that dietary arachidonic acid increased the arachidonic acid level in all fat fractions of the blood, even at a very low dietary dose.”
Now, the meat industry realizes this is a problem, and they’re currently exploring ways to genetically manipulate chickens to lower arachidonic acid levels in chicken muscle “to produce meat with health benefits.”
The egg industry appears to be getting even more desperate, feeding laying hens seal blubber. See, the annual Canadian seal hunt evidently produces 16,000 tons of blubber every year, which can be used for animal feed. And indeed, if you feed laying hens diets containing 5% seal blubber, you can drop the arachidonic acid levels in eggs to as much as 34%, making eggs significantly less harmful. Any amount, though, in chicken and eggs, is in excess of what our body needs.
Making arachidonic acid is like playing with fire. Our body makes just enough, and no more. The colonel and the clubber might want to feed us a little extra, but our own body knows best.
Please consider volunteering to help out on the site.
- Hirota S, Adachi N, Gomyo T, Kawashima H, Kiso Y, Kawabata T. Low-dose arachidonic acid intake increases erythrocytes and plasma arachidonic acid in young women. Prostaglandins Leukot Essent Fatty Acids. 2010 Aug;83(2):83-8.
- Haug A, Olesen I, Christophersen OA. Individual variation and intraclass correlation in arachidonic acid and eicosapentaenoic acid in chicken muscle. Lipids Health Dis. 2010 Apr 15;9:37.
Images thanks to MightyAtom [GNU or CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons, wallpaperstock.net, IFAW, and HSUS/Brian Skerry and HSUS/Rebecca Aldworth
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Title
Chicken’s Fate is Sealed
LicenseCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Content URLDoctor's Note
For more on the health hazards of consuming eggs, check out these videos:
Eggs & Cholesterol: Patently False & Misleading Claims
Debunking Egg Industry Myths
Who Says Eggs Aren’t Healthy or Safe?
How the Egg Board Designs Misleading Studies
Eggs & Arterial Function
Be sure to check out my accompanying blog post: Inflammation, Diet, and “Vitamin S”.
For more context, also see my associated blog posts: The Most Anti-Inflammatory Mushroom, and When a Scraped Knee May Once Again Kill.
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