Why eating too much chicken might not help your diet this festive season

When it comes to diet, especially around  festivities, many health-conscious Kenyans have come to the conclusion that protein is king. Specifically: chicken. Consumers have been put off red meat by its associated health and environmental concerns. This has led to consumers increasingly eating more chicken instead.

 Every year, around 52 billion chickens are slaughtered globally for meat. The global appetite for chicken is growing so large that health and environmental experts say we’re creating an excess protein problem, with damaging consequences for our planet and no additional health benefits for us.

 “There is this perception that protein is good for your health, but I am not sure where that has come from,” says Modi Mwatsama, director of global health at the UK Health Forum. “It’s certainly a good marketing ploy.”

Protein is a key part of a healthy diet – but the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommends a daily intake of 50g of protein for adults, not the 75g some people are estimated to be eating. Already people are eating more protein than needed, on average, there are concerns about the health impact of our growing appetite for chicken, according to Mwatsama.

Rather than upping our chicken consumption, Mwatsama advises people to switch to healthier sources of protein with low or no saturated fats, such as pulses, beans, lentils, chickpeas and buckwheat, which also provide a good source of fibre. Other than this, chicken is associated with harmful bacteria which could lead to ill health. Top on the list being Salmonella and E.coli.

Salmonella and E.coli

Salmonella is a “naturally occurring bacteria,” and hence allowed in food—but we are supposed to cook chicken and other products to at least 74°C to kill it and other microbial freeloaders. The contamination stems from “fecal material on carcasses, poor sanitary dressing practices, insanitary food contact surfaces, insanitary nonfood contact surfaces, and direct product contamination.

Meanwhile, 87 per cent of chicken carcasses test positive for E. coli before they are sent to stores, reports Salon and E. coli is considered more dangerous than salmonella.  Last year, researchers writing in Emerging Infectious Diseases reported that E. coli in chicken is genetically closer to human E. coli than E. coli in beef and pork samples and could put people at risk for urinary tract infections when they are exposed to it because of its similarity.

Cruelty to Animals

Chemicals, cost cutting and outsourcing labour take a toll on the birds whose lives and deaths are increasingly inhumane. Chickens were once slaughtered at 14 weeks when they weighed about two pounds but by 2001, they were being slaughtered at seven weeks when they weighed between four and six pounds.

Today they are even bigger and their lives shorter. In fact, chickens are now grown so quickly, if humans grew as fast, we’d weigh 349 pounds by our second birthday. As a result, chickens have constant bone disease, live in chronic pain and perish from eerie, factory-farm related diseases.

www.alternet.org and theguardian.com