Now, you may never want to eat chicken again after you watch this video. 99.9% of all the chicken sold in the world comes from factory farms, where they can grow a chicken within 42 days—that’s less than six weeks. I mean a full-grown chicken. Chicken is the most genetically manipulated animal protein that you can consume. You know, in the past, long ago, a chicken would take a good amount of time to grow, and that’s a normal process. But now, they’ve sped it up by a factor of 65 times faster. So anytime you alter mother nature and grow something that fast, there are some consequences with nutrition. I mean, if you take a cow, for example, you can’t grow a cow in six weeks. It takes like one to two years. So I’m going to show you in a little bit a comparison between the nutrition in beef versus chicken, but it’s so interesting to me that people are just really against red meat and they think that white meat is better for some reason—maybe because it’s leaner, because of the fat. But that’s actually completely false. Also, these poor chickens are raised in very inhumane environments, tens of thousands of chickens in one room. They’re called free-range, right? But it’s very private. It’s not very transparent as far as what goes on when they factory-farm chickens. There’s something called ammonia burn, which from all the waste that builds up can create ulcers on their corneas and affect their joints. So overall, it’s a very unhealthy environment.
So I have a question. Maybe you’ve heard of eating raw fish, right? Sushi or maybe even a rare steak. But why don’t people ever eat raw or rare chicken meat? Right? You pull up to your fast food restaurant and ask for a chicken sandwich, but you want it on the rare side. It just doesn’t happen. Why? Because of the risks of Salmonella, Campylobacter, or E. coli. These are pathogenic microbes. Why would these pathogens be in chicken, but yet you don’t see them in other animal products? Well, it has to do with the environment that these chickens are raised in. This is not a normal thing. In fact, these microbes even grow within our body and don’t harm us unless the environment changes and becomes more stressful, and they can go from being neutral to pathogenic. So this is why when you buy a chicken from a grocery store and you’re cutting up a raw chicken and you’re using knives and a cutting board and then you put it in the oven, right? You really have to sterilize the cutting board, your hands, the utensils that you use, the knife you use, or chances are there’s a high chance you’re going to have these microbes present, and then that can create a big-time infection in you. But of course, everyone knows that you have to cook the heck out of chicken to make sure you kill the pathogens.
Second question: Why do they have to flavor chicken meat? And I’m not talking about going to Kentucky Fried Chicken. You go to a grocery store and you buy chicken breast in a package—they’re raw. Look at the back of the label. Why do they add flavorings in the ingredients? That is because if they don’t, it’s not going to taste like anything, right? Well, why is that? Because of the way they’re grown, how fast they’re grown. They’re grown so fast the chicken hasn’t had a chance to develop certain flavor chemicals.
Third question: Why do they have to add colorings to the chicken meat? That’s right, they have to give the chicken certain pigments to change the color to make it look like healthy chicken meat, or else it might look a bit gray, right? And you wouldn’t eat that. But I’m not kidding, they actually color chicken meat to make it look more appetizing. So unfortunately, you have this product that’s grown in a very short period of time, very inexpensively. They have to flavor it, they have to color it, they have to make it look like chicken. But really, is it chicken?
The real big problem with chicken, on top of that, is that chicken is very high in omega-6 fatty acids, especially compared to the omega-3 fatty acids, which makes it more inflammatory. Okay, very inflammatory. It’s like 14 to 1. We need it to be one to one, okay? But it’s fourteen to one, it’s pretty high. And there’s something else you need to know. There’s rendered ingredients. In this definition of rendered, that means you’re boiling it or you’re doing something to separate out certain parts of this product. You might be boiling off the fat or separating certain particulates out of something. So in commercial chicken feeds, okay, there are rendering products, and one is called yellow grease. Now, what is yellow grease? Well, it’s used cooking oil. It definitely sounds better than deep-fried vegetable waste oil or waste grease. They recycle deep-fried seed oils that have been fried probably for weeks or months, and then they’re going to recycle that back into the feed. So not only is the chicken consuming things like soy and corn, which are very high in omega-6, but they also have this additional thing in the feed, unfortunately, because you can kill two birds. First of all, it’s a hazard in landfills, right? So that way, why don’t we just put it into the feed for animals, which we indirectly eat?
So now you know why you can go to Costco and buy a chicken for four bucks. It’s like two dollars a pound. I mean, that blows me away. Now, I personally have about 16 chickens, and what I’m talking about is completely different than those chickens, which eat bugs all day long and worms and things like that. And I feed them fermented grains—no soy, no corn, not GMO. It’s organic feed. But the big point is I know what it takes to buy the feed, a high-quality feed, to feed these chickens. And to be able to sell a full-grown chicken for four dollars with all the different people involved—the distributor, the store, the farmer—I mean, that is incredible. Someone could actually even make a profit on that. They probably don’t make a profit, but the point is that to grow a healthy chicken, to grow healthy eggs, it does take high-quality ingredients. It takes time, it takes money, but unfortunately, people demand the cheapest food possible. And of course, you get what you pay for, and that’s what I’m going to talk about in the next slide: low nutrition.
So let’s compare beef versus chicken. I’m not even really comparing grass-fed beef, okay? Except right here. This is just conventional beef. If we compared grass-fed beef, which I will recommend a video at the end, it’s a whole different picture. But if we compare, look at B12. We’ve got 2.64 versus 0.3. That’s like comparing the RDAs: 43 versus 5. There’s more zinc, okay? There’s more iron, there’s more potassium, there’s more choline, which is good for your liver, there’s more folate. And take a look at this: the omega-6 to 3 ratio should be one to one. It’s 14 to 1, right? With beef, if you take grass-fed, it’s 2 to 1. If you take grain-fed, it’s 9 to 1. So you can see there’s much less omega-6, the inflammatory oils, when you do grass-fed versus grains because grains are very high in omega-6. Now, since we’re on the topic of animal protein and a healthy protein source, you should really check out this video on some interesting research on beef. Check it out.