How Can You Tell You’re Eating Real Chicken? And Is It Safe to Eat?
May 01, 2013
Story at-a-glance
KFC recently rolled out Original Recipe boneless chicken, and is
considering eliminating on-the-bone chicken from its menu
altogether. Regardless of brand, processed chicken nuggets or
shaped boneless “wings” are far more likely to contain less meat
and more additives and fillers
Scientists have been working on bioengineering "cultured"
lab-grown meat for the past decade, and are getting closer to
perfecting the process. Normalizing the idea that chicken
doesn’t have bones will make it easier to eventually exchange
the meat used in processed nuggets and boneless wings for
bioengineered meat, without anyone noticing the difference
Recently published data from tests conducted on supermarket meat
samples reveals the presence of several disease-causing
bacteria, including the super-hardy antibiotic-resistant
versions of salmonella, Campylobacter and E. coli on virtually
all types of store bought meats
The misuse of antibiotics in livestock has become a direct
source of foodborne illness. The best way to avoid contaminated
meat is to avoid meat from animals raised in confined animal
feeding operations (CAFO’s), aka “factory farms,” and buying
organic, pastured or grass-fed meats instead. Organic standards
do not permit growth promoters such as antibiotics to be used
By Dr. Mercola
The six decades’ old fast food franchise KFC recently rolled
out Original Recipe boneless chicken in its 4,500 US locations.1
The new slogan: “No mess. No fuss. No bones about it.”
The company is so convinced boneless chicken is the way of
the future that they’re actually considering eliminating
on-the-bone chicken from its menu altogether. According to the
featured article:
“McDonald’s execs began experimenting with a range of
non-burger options: chicken pot-pies, bone-in fried chicken,
deep-fried onion chunks. None of them were successful, until
they offered customers deep fried chicken chunks. The
McNugget was born.
That was 1980, when about 80 percent to 85 percent of
chicken consumed in the US was unprocessed... Ten years
later, the numbers had almost reversed...
While the rotisserie chicken made a bit of a comeback
in the mid-‘90s, the idea of eating the whole bird was, for
the most part, a thing of the past... According to internal
KFC surveys, nearly four out of five servings of chicken in
the US today are off-the-bone, the inverse of 30 years ago.”
Why might this be “a big deal”? Well, for one, processed
chicken nuggets, regardless of brand, are far more likely to
contain all sorts of additives and fillers you’d be better off
without.
For example, I wrote about the questionable ingredients of
McDonald’s
Chicken McNuggets back in 2010. Only half of Chicken
McNuggets are actual meat. The other 50 percent includes corn
derivatives, sugars, leavening agents and completely synthetic
ingredients.
In a 2003 lawsuit against McDonald’s, Federal Judge Robert
Sweet2
even questioned "whether customers understood the risks of
eating McDonald's chicken over regular chicken." But there’s yet
another reason for my questioning the trend of going boneless,
and it’s even less savory than that...
The Future of Food: Bioengineered Meat
Few are talking about this, but scientists have been working
on bioengineering "cultured" meat for the past decade. According
to a September 2011 Huffington Post article,3
scientists at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands
claimed to be as little as 12 months away from delivering the
world’s first bioengineered synthetic hamburger.
As of this writing, the hamburger has yet to be presented,
although I doubt that means the plan has been abandoned.
The article also pointed out that London's Royal Society had
released a global food supply report, in which they called for a
synthetic meat solution to feed the world’s growing population
without causing environmental destruction.
“The only barriers? Overcoming the social stigma and
the RS scientists say it could take another decade before it
rolls out to the masses,” the article states.
Then, in February 2012, The Economist4
followed up on the research. Other Dutch scientists, led by Dr.
Mark Post at the Eindhoven University in the Netherlands,
expressed hopes of decimating animal husbandry altogether by
altering how meat for the masses is produced. The article
explains how this laboratory-created meat is created:
“Dr. Post's cultures, grown from stem cells, are
sheets 3cm long, 1.5cm wide and half a millimeter deep. To
make the world's most expensive hamburger 3,000 of them will
be needed. The stem cells themselves are extracted from
cattle muscle and then multiplied a millionfold before they
are put in Petri dishes and allowed to turn into muscle
cells.
When they have done so, they are encouraged to
exercise and build up their strength by being given their
own gym equipment (pieces of Velcro to which they can anchor
themselves in order to stretch and relax spontaneously). The
fatty cells of adipose tissue, needed for juiciness, are
grown separately and then combined with the muscle cells
before the whole thing is cooked.
Producing meat in Petri dishes is not commercially
viable, but Dr. Post hopes to scale things up—first by
growing the cells on small spheres floating in tanks and
ultimately by using scaffolds made of biodegradable polymer
tubes, which would both add the third dimension needed for a
juicy steak and provide a way of delivering nutrients and
oxygen to the steak's interior.”
Sure, companies like KFC may have a point when they say
they’re just changing their meals to meet the needs of the
“chicken nugget generation.” But a side effect of getting used
to the idea that chicken meat doesn’t have bones is that, at any
point, the meat used in these processed nuggets could be
exchanged for bioengineered meat, and no one would be the
wiser...
I sincerely doubt bioengineered meat would be advertised,
since it’s hardly a selling point—at least in the beginning.
What the potential health ramifications might be from eating
such meats are completely unknown, but it’s clearly not going to
be identical to meat from an animal.
More Data Ties Human Illness to Farm Antibiotics
Seeing how commercially available bioengineered meat is still
a ways away from being a reality you have to contend with, let’s
bring the focus back to something more relevant to the present
day, namely antibiotics in CAFO meats. Animals are often fed
antibiotics at low doses for disease prevention and growth
promotion. These agricultural uses account for about 80
percent of all antibiotic use in the US,5
so it's a MAJOR source of human antibiotic consumption.
According to a recent NPR report,6
data published by a joint government program7
from tests conducted on supermarket meat samples collected in
2011 by the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System,
reveals the presence of several disease-causing bacteria,
including the super-hardy antibiotic-resistant versions of
salmonella, Campylobacter and E. coli.
According to NPR:8
“The implications were significant — that the
bacteria had become resistant to antibiotics back at the
farm because farmers were overusing them. The findings,
released through the joint program of the Food and Drug
Administration, the Department of Agriculture and the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, got little
attention when they were published in February. But this
week, the Environmental Working Group, which opposes some of
the livestock industry's use of antibiotics, analyzed the
government data and highlighted some of their startling
implications in a report.”
The report9
in question, aptly named “Superbugs Invade American
Supermarkets,” points out that many of the meats tested
contained “startlingly high levels” of antibiotic-resistant
bacteria on:
81 percent of ground turkey
69 percent of pork chops
55 percent of ground beef
39 percent of chicken breasts, wings and thighs
Want Safer Meat? Buy Organic Pastured/Grass-Fed
Writing for the New York Times,10
David A. Kessler, former commissioner of the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) from 1990 to 1997, also recently sounded
warning bells over the rise of antibiotic-resistant pathogens in
livestock, urging the FDA to take the matter seriously. So far,
the agency has only restricted on class of antibiotics,
cephalosporin, from routine use in livestock.11
“While the FDA can see what kinds of
antibiotic-resistant bacteria are coming out of livestock
facilities, the agency doesn’t know enough about the
antibiotics that are being fed to these animals,” he
writes. “This is a major public health problem, because
giving healthy livestock these drugs breeds superbugs that
can infect people. We need to know more about the use of
antibiotics in the production of our meat and poultry. The
results could be a matter of life and death.”
The misuse of antibiotics in livestock has now become “a
direct source of foodborne illness,” EWG points out. Worse yet,
because animals are given these antibiotics continuously, in low
doses, pathogens are becoming increasingly resistant to the
drugs, which means they no longer work to treat human disease
either. The end result is that people are dying from infections
that were once easily treatable.
Despite this, organic foods, which are by law
produced without such pathogen-promoting methods, are the ones
being consistently targeted “for safety reasons.” The truth of
the matter is, conventionally grown mass-produced foods pose the
greatest danger to your health, in multiple ways, and
are the ones to be avoided if you’re at all concerned about food
safety.
“To be safe, consumers should treat all meat as if it
may be contaminated, mainly by cooking thoroughly and using
safe shopping and kitchen practices (see EWG's downloadable
Tips to Avoiding Superbugs in Meat),”12EWG suggests.13
One of the best ways to avoid contaminated meat is to avoid
meat from animals raised in confined animal feeding operations
(CAFOs), aka “factory farms,” and buying organic, pastured or
grass-fed meats instead. Growth promoters such as antibiotics
are not permitted in organic animal farming, and
organically-raised animals are also healthier as a result of
being pastured, so overall you’re getting far “cleaner,”
healthier meat.
Organic, Cage-Free, Free-Range, or Pasture-Raised?
When it comes to chicken, there are a number of designations
floating around, such as “organic,” “free-range,” “pastured” and
“cage-free.” But while you may think these are interchangeable,
they’re actually not. In many ways these labels are little more
than creative advertising.
The definitions of "free-range" are such that the commercial
egg industry can run industrial farm egg laying facilities and
still call them "free-range" eggs, despite the fact
that the birds' foraging conditions are far from what you'd call
natural. For example, regulations on the use of the term
"free-range" do not specify the amount of time the hens must
spend outdoors or the amount of outdoor space each hen must have
access to. Nor do they indicate that the hen must have access to
a pasture diet.
True free-range hens (and
eggs), now increasingly referred to as “pasture-raised,” are
from hens that roam freely outdoors on a pasture where they can
forage for their natural diet, which includes seeds, green
plants, insects, and worms.
Large commercial egg facilities typically house tens of
thousands of hens and can even go up to hundreds of thousands of
hens. Obviously they cannot allow all of them to forage freely.
They can still be called “cage-free” or “free-range” though, if
they’re not confined to an individual cage. But these labels say
nothing about the conditions they ARE raised in, which are still
deplorable. So, while flimsy definitions of "free range" and
“cage-free” allow such facilities to sell their products as free
range, please beware that a hen that is let outside into a
barren lot for mere minutes a day, and is fed a diet of corn,
soy, cottonseed meals and synthetic additives is NOT a
free-range hen, and simply will not produce the same quality
meat and/or eggs as its foraging counterpart.
Certified organic poultry is also the only poultry product
that is 100 percent guaranteed to be antibiotic-free.14
So to summarize, what you’re really looking for is chicken
and eggs that are both certified organic and true
pasture-raised. Barring organic certification, which is
cost-prohibitive for many small farmers, you could just make
sure the farmer raises his chickens according to organic,
free-range standards, allowing his flock to forage freely for
their natural diet, and aren’t fed antibiotics, corn and soy.
Last year, I visited Joel Salatin at his
Polyface farm in Virginia. He's truly one of the pioneers in
sustainable agriculture, and you can take a virtual tour through
his pasture-raised chicken farm operation in the following
video.
Shopping Guidelines for Real, Health-Promoting Food
It is very difficult to control the quality of your food if
you’re eating in a restaurant, which is why I recommend that you
prepare the vast majority of your food yourself. If you’re going
to occasionally dine out, you would be best served to avoid fast
food places. Reclaiming your kitchen is part and parcel of
healthful living, so you know exactly what you're putting in
your body. Whether you are grocery shopping or looking for
dining options, the table that follows lists criteria to look
for in identifying high-quality, health-promoting foods. If the
food meets these criteria, it is most likely a wise choice and
would fall under the designation of "real food."
Grown without pesticides and chemical fertilizers
(organic foods fit this description, but so do some
non-organic foods)
Not genetically modified
Contains no added growth hormones, antibiotics, or other
drugs
Does not contain any artificial ingredients, including
chemical preservatives
Fresh (keep in mind that if you have to choose between
wilted organic produce or fresh conventional produce,
the latter may be the better option)
Grown with the
laws of nature in mind (meaning animals are fed
their native diets, not a mix of grains and animal
byproducts, and have free access to the outdoors)
Grown in a sustainable way (using minimal amounts of
water, protecting the soil from burnout, and turning
animal wastes into natural fertilizers instead of
environmental pollutants)
If you're "hooked" on fast food and other processed foods,
please review my article about how to wean yourself off
fast food in seven easy steps. If you're currently
sustaining yourself on fast food and processed foods, this is
probably the most positive life change you could ever make.
And if you have children, remember that feeding your children
home cooked meals can have far reaching benefits, extending even
to your future grandchildren. Yes, that's right! It is now well
known that dietary changes can prompt epigenetic DNA changes
that can be passed on to future generations. For instance,
pregnant rats fed a
fatty junk food diet had daughters and granddaughters with a
greater risk of breast cancer. Making wise food decisions can
literally "override" genetic predispositions for disease.