How poison ends up on your dinner table

For four years, my husband and I owned a chicken wing restaurant. At our peak, we sold thousands of chicken wings a day!  It was about a year into the grind that I gave up meat completely. I was over raw chicken & friers; my first child was turning 1 (which is when it's recommended to start feeding meat to children) and my neighbor lent me the book Skinny Bitch.  http://www.skinnybitch.net/ The timing of all three of these things reinforced my long-standing disgust of raw meat. 

Now don't get me wrong, I don't think meat, in general, is bad. I don't promote vegetarianism as a religion and I certainly have had some meat over the past four years. (I have a soft spot for bacon, but now my choice is organic, uncured and it's so freakin' tasty!!) It's undeniable that processed meat is very bad for the human body, and it's certainly believable that organic meat would be best. So, eat what you want and I'll eat what I want. :)

Anyway, here's some information on what is really in that factory chicken...

-CHC

How poison ends up on your dinner table

W.C. Douglass, M.D.

It might take a tough man to make a tender bird. But it takes a mad scientist to create the "chicken" on your dinner plate these days. 

In fact, a recent series of tests finds enough drugs to stock a pharmacy hidden inside your chicken -- including Prozac, antibiotics, antihistamines, acetaminophen, and (as if that's not enough) a side of arsenic. 

Yum! 

In one study, researchers tested a poultry byproduct called feather-meal made (obviously) of feathers. That might sound strange, but toxins, drugs and everything else fed to a chicken end up in those feathers. 

That means if it's in the feathers, it's in the meat -- and they found everything short of Col. Sanders' goatee in the feathers. 

First and foremost, they found traces of banned antibiotics such as ciprofloxacin. Poultry farms aren't supposed to use these drugs, but to hell with the rules. They have chickens to grow, and antibiotics plump those birds up fast and easy. 

Just one problem: Along with fatter chickens, the overuse of antibiotics has created a frightening new class of drug-resistant superbugs. So while they get more meat to sell, we get incurable infections. 

The researchers also found caffeine, which stimulates chickens so they stay awake and eat more. But since caffeinated stressed-out chickens have tough meat, the birds need something else to bring them down. 

That would explain the Benadryl and acetaminophen also found in the feather-meal. They're basically tenderizers. That would also explain the PROZAC (!!!!) found in samples of feather-meal from China. 

I'd say that's what you get for buying chicken from China -- but clearly, we have nothing to crow about since the rest of those drug-laced samples were all-American. 

Meanwhile, a second new study finds arsenic in the feather-meal. This is no accident; poultry farmers feed low levels of the poison to their chickens to give the meat that pink glow consumers love so much. 

All this is bad news for chicken-lovers, of course, but don't flip the bird into the trash just yet. Just go organic. 

It'll cost you a wing and a leg, but it'll be worth it.