Why The Skyrocketing Demand For Chicken Is Such A Big Problem For Us Guys With Man Boobs
Chicken can be a huge roadblock in your path to losing man boobs.
See, there’s something unique about chicken vs. all other forms of meat, that makes chicken a particularly big roadblock in your path to losing man boobs.
Here’s a clue to what’s unique about chicken:
Not only is chicken currently by far the highest consumed meat in the USA, but perhaps more importantly, look at how quickly chicken consumption has gone up since 1965.
Turkey consumption has gone up a little, pork consumption has gone down a little, beef consumption has gone down a lot, but chicken consumption has gone up MASSIVELY.
50 years ago, chicken was served only on special occasions or for Sunday dinner.
Because of the difficulties in naturally raising chickens, especially through the winter, chicken was the most expensive meat around.
Now however, chicken is everywhere, many people eat chicken every day, all year round, and it’s also the cheapest meat around.
This big change was made possible only by the help of unnatural methods using science & technology, and has resulted in a HUGE-ASS problem for all of us, a problem that is kept HIDDEN from the public, a problem that you’ll only discover when you start asking questions.
See, before the 1950s, chickens were grown on family farms. As demand went up and chicken prices began to fall, family farms started to go out of business, and COMMERCIAL farms with bigger production capabilities started to take over.
Where a family farm prior to the 1950’s could look after around 1,500 chickens, by the late 1950s, large commercial farms and packing plants could grow chickens by the tens of thousands.
This required significant changes to almost everything about a chicken’s diet and life, changes that have made chicken perhaps the most dangerous meat for your health, and the worst meat to consume for a guy with man boobs.
And the problem is likely worse in the U.S.A. than in any other country in the world, because we eat more chicken than anyone.
The total number of meat-chickens produced in the world was nearly 47 billion in 2004; of these, approximately 19% were produced in the US, 15% in China, 13% in the EU and 11% in Brazil.
The Problems With Today’s Chicken
Problem #1: Unnatural Chicken Feed Resulting In High Estrogen Levels
Being the highest consumed meat in the U.S. by far, chicken is big business.
With ever-growing demand for chicken, farmers have been finding ways to grow chickens bigger and to grow big faster, and they’ve succeeded.
Where a fully grown chicken back in 1957 weighed about 905 grams, and could feed two people, a fully grown chicken in 2005 weighed around 4,202 grams, and could feed SIX people.
But the U.S. public doesn’t want the WHOLE chicken, they want the chicken BREAST, so farmers have been finding ways to grow chickens with particularly large breasts.
And what better way to do this than to pump chickens full of estrogen?
But in the U.S. the use of steroid hormones like estrogen in poultry is only allowed in beef cattle. It’s banned in poultry, and the government imposes big fines on poultry farmers caught treating their chickens directly with estrogen.
But that doesn’t stop farmers from finding other ways of increasing estrogen levels in their chickens.
The government for example, doesn’t stop farmers from feeding chickens estrogen-containing and estrogen-boosting foods like processed GMO soy and nutrient deficient processed grains like corn.
It’s a known fact that soy and corn are the backbone of the confined poultry production model.
Regardless of HOW they’re doing it though, the important thing is that U.S. chicken was found to contain more estrogen than U.S. beef.
In a 2010 study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, scientists measured the level of two types of estrogen, Estradiol 17 Beta (E2) and Estrone (E1), in U.S. chicken fat and beef fat:
Here are the results, measured in pg/g (E2, E1):
- Chicken fat (20.7, 54.6)
- Beef fat (14.0, 7.7)
So eating commercially raised U.S. chicken is likely to cause more harm in your journey to losing man boobs than eating commercially raised hormone-treated U.S. beef.
So does this mean you should eat more beef and less chicken?
Well if all you do is eat the standard chicken and beef at your local grocery store, then yes, you’d be better off eating more beef and less chicken.
But that’s far from the ideal thing you should be doing. Keep reading and I’ll tell you, later in this very article, all about the right type of chicken that can help you reduce your estrogen levels, boost your testosterone levels, and help you both lose weight and lose your man boobs.
Problem #2: Unnatural Chicken Feed Resulting In A Poor Micronutrient Profile (Another Important Cause Of Man Boobs)
When it comes to losing man boobs, the level of micronutrients in your food may be more important than how much estrogen is in your food.
That’s because the vast majority of the estrogen you consume is broken down by the liver.
On the other hand, your body needs micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals) to carry out every function in your body, including testosterone production and your liver’s deactivation of estrogen.
That’s why foods like grains, which have a low micronutrient profile, increase your estrogen levels, reduce your testosterone levels, make you fat, and make you grow man boobs.
A chicken’s normal, natural diet consists of the likes of worms, insects, grass, leafy greens, and wild berries. These are all highly micronutrient dense foods. The micronutrients a chicken eats, ends up in its meat and in its eggs.
Commercially raised chickens on the other hand, are fed soy and corn, which are seriously deficient in healthful micronutrients. Studies have hence found that commercially raised chicken have a much poorer micronutrient profile than pasture-raised chickens.
Problem #3: Artificial Selection Resulting In Unnatural Chicken Breeds – Why Organic And Free Range Is Not Enough
When I did my research on why chickens today are so much bigger than they were, I saw a bunch of articles by “experts” who claim that since farmers are not allowed to treat poultry with steroid hormones, the only reason chickens are bigger today is because of artificial selection.
This is where farmers pick out the chickens and roosters that are naturally biggest, and breed them together. These chickens will have bigger babies, they’ll find the biggest of these babies and breed them together, and on on and until several generations later and we have much bigger chickens.
These so-called “experts” claim that the oversized chickens we’re eating today are bigger and healthier than ever before.
But that’s complete bullshit.
They are bigger but not healthier.
Also, they are lying when they’re saying artificial selection is the only method farmers are using.
The demand for chicken has gone up so rapidly, and is so high right now, that there’s no way farmers can simply rely on pure artificial selection to provide for this demand.
As I explained above in Problem #1, poultry farmers use soy-based FEEDS that make their chickens bigger.
Also, they’re not just selecting for bigger chickens, they’re selecting for chickens with bigger BREASTS.
Americans are so obsessed with chicken breast and so opposed to chicken leg, that we have a SURPLUS of chicken leg that we export to other countries.
So even if all poultry farmers were doing was pure artificial selection, they’re looking for those chickens that have naturally bigger breasts, and hence likely have naturally higher levels of ESTROGEN.
And just on the side, here’s an interesting fact: these big breasted chickens are so big, that their breasts get in the way of mating. Also, the males have a reduced sex drive (maybe because of the high levels of estrogen? But also, I’m sure, for many other problems bought about by the artificial breeding process). They hence have to be artificially inseminated to get them to reproduce.
Artificial selection is an artificial process, it’s not natural to select just the biggest chickens generation after generation, this does not happen in nature, and if all you do is artificial selection, you’re likely to end up with a breed of chicken that has something wrong with it, in that it will cause you harm to eat it.
So even if the chicken’s feed wasn’t an issue, the chicken breed itself IS an issue.
If you’re eating a chicken that has been artificially selected over several decades to have bigger and bigger breasts and higher and higher levels of estrogen, then this breed of chicken is one you should avoid if you want to lose man boobs.
What I’m trying to stress to you here is that the breed itself is an issue.
Take one of these chickens that has been artificially selected for decades to have MUASSIVE breasts, put it on the healthiest most natural organic pasture-based chicken diet, and though it may be better for you than if that chicken was grain-fed, I’d still prefer to eat a breed of organic pasture-raised chicken that wasn’t artificially selected for any particular features.
That’s why just organic and free range isn’t enough.
Here’s a quote from a good humane poultry farmer that explains it:
“…we go above and beyond free range or organic standards as we only rear slow maturing natural breeds of chicken that grow for a minimum 10-12 weeks as opposed to the lifespan of the commercial chicken breeds (Ross Cobs) which live between 3-4 weeks before developing severe physical problems and defects. Current organic and free range standards do allow these commercial breeds to be used.”
Problem #4: The Use Of Antibiotics
Moving chickens off pasture and into densely populated barns created a new problem: disease.
In the 1940’s, a researcher called Thomas Jukes found a solution to what would allow chickens to flourish in confinement.
Jukes discovered that when he added antibiotics to the feed of the chickens in his experiments, they not only developed fewer infections, they also gained more weight!
The chickens given the greatest amount of antibiotics gained the most weight. The best thing about it was that this strategy was cheap, adding less than a penny per pound of animal feed yet producing 25 to 50 percent gains in animal weight. In this way, antibiotics became the backbone and constant companion of commercial meat production.
Today, between 70 and 80 percent of all the antibiotics used in the United States are given to animals rather than humans. Often, livestock are kept on low doses of antibiotics for their entire lives, in order to promote growth and prevent disease, rather than fight a one-off infection.
Widespread use of antibiotics in both human healthcare and in farming has given rise to antibiotic-resistant super-bugs in our food and environment.
As of 2014, over fifty thousand deaths per year were caused by antibiotic-resistant infections in the U.S. and Europe.
And if that doesn’t scare you, know that regular exposure to antibiotics can make you grow man boobs.
Several antibiotics are known causes of drug-induced gynecomastia. Some act by reducing testosterone levels, while others act by reducing the removal of estrogens by your liver. Some antibiotics reduce removal of estrogens from your body by changing the composition of the gut microflora.
Now, the authorities argue that all chicken meat is “antibiotic-free”, since federal rules require the antibiotics to have cleared the animals’ systems before they can be slaughtered.
I don’t know how they think they can police something like this in the more than 9 billion chickens that are slaughtered in the U.S. every year. And even if they did get it 100% right, our bodies still have to deal with deadly strains of antibiotic resistant bacteria in these chickens, and a messed up hormone profile in the chicken bought about by lifelong antibiotic exposure through its feed.
Yet More Reasons Why You Should Not Eat Commercially Farmed And Commercially Slaughtered Chicken
When you see chicken on your dinner plate, even if it’s a piece of chicken leg, which, unlike a slab of boneless chicken breast, at least LOOKS like it came from a chicken, you might picture that the chicken lived on a farm its entire life, was then slaughtered, plucked, and sent its way to the butchers before it made its way to your plate.
But in reality, because of the huge demand for chicken, chicken rearing has become something else entirely.
It used to be that chickens were raised on family farms. But all the family farms are now gone, and commercial farms have taken over, and these folks don’t give a toss about how the chicken is treated, or how healthy the chicken is for you. All they care about is how much profit they can slice from the ever reducing price of chicken.
Chicken prices have gone so low now, that they only way commercial chicken farms can stay in business, is by cutting costs and producing as many chickens as possible.
Here are some facts about how human poultry workers are treated in slaughterhouses. While reading through the list, think to yourself how much thought and effort these people would put into looking after the health and wellbeing of the chickens they slaughter (facts taken from Wikipedia page on Poultry Farming in the USA):
- In 2010, Human Rights Watch described slaughterhouse line work in the United States as a human rights crime.
- In a report by Oxfam America, slaughterhouse workers were observed not being allowed breaks, were often required to wear diapers, and were paid below minimum wage.
- Slaughterhouses in the United States commonly illegally employ and exploit underage workers and illegal immigrants.
- American slaughterhouse workers are three times more likely to suffer serious injury than the average American worker.
- The Guardian reports that on average there are two amputations a week involving slaughterhouse workers in the United States.
- On average, one employee of Tyson Foods, the largest meat producer in America, is injured and amputates a finger or limb per month.
- The act of slaughtering animals, or of raising or transporting animals for slaughter, may engender psychological stress or trauma in the people involved.
- A 2016 study in Organization indicates, “Regression analyses of data from 10,605 Danish workers across 44 occupations suggest that slaughterhouse workers consistently experience lower physical and psychological well-being along with increased incidences of negative coping behavior.”
- In her thesis submitted to and approved by University of Colorado, Anna Dorovskikh states that slaughterhouse workers are “at risk of Perpetration-Inducted Traumatic Stress, which is a form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and results from situations where the concerning subject suffering from PTSD was a causal participant in creating the traumatic situation.
- A 2009 study by criminologist Amy Fitzgerald indicates, “slaughterhouse employment increases total arrest rates, arrests for violent crimes, arrests for rape, and arrests for other sex offenses in comparison with other industries.”
Omg. These people are raising and slaughtering your chickens. And if that’s how the PEOPLE are treated, how on earth do you think the CHICKENS are treated?
Commercial chicken farming is as inhumane as is possible right now. And heck, even if I never had man boobs, had perfect health, and was born with great genes and had abs while eating pizza all day, I would never go near a commercially farmed chicken, just for the sake of all those poor chickens.
I’m not a crazy vegan who thinks no animal should ever be killed. But I do care about animal welfare, and I want to know that the animals I eat lived a good life where they were allowed to roam freely, eating a natural diet, and having lots of fun.
By eating commercial chicken (and eggs), you as an individual are supporting these abhorrent farming practices, where chickens are artificially bred to grow fast and die fast, and are kept packed in cages their whole life, without the opportunity to ever roam outside on natural pastures like they were meant to.
The Solution
Solution #1: Go Organic
Going organic eliminates a number of the above problems.
The chicken’s feed will be organic, and this is important because non-organic soy and corn are sprayed heavily with pesticide. They are also genetically modified so that they can withstand the heavy bombardment from pesticides.
Organic soy and corn are still not a great diet for the chickens, they are still nutrient deficient, but at least they are non-GMO and pesticide free.
Pesticides accumulate in an animal’s fat stores. Many pesticides used in farming today are known to reduce testosterone levels and result in male infertility.
By going organic, you also ensure fewer antibiotics are used on the chickens. Organic chickens are not routinely given antibiotics in their feed to plump them up, but they can be given antibiotics when they are “medically necessary” (and many farmers likely stretch the boundaries on what is medically necessary).
This means fewer chances of antibiotics ending up in your body and causing drug-induced gynecomastia, and less chance of you being taken out by an antibiotic resistant superbug.
Though it’s far better to have organic chicken than non-organic chicken, organic alone is not enough.
More important than organic is humanely farmed, pasture-raised chicken…
Solution #2: Pasture-Raised (Not Just “Free Range)
If you want a chicken’s meat to be packed with micronutrient goodness that helps boost your testosterone levels, lower your estrogen levels, and blast away your man boobs, then you’ll want to eat true free range chickens, more accurately known as “pasture-raised” chickens.
Pasture-raised means the chicken is allowed to roam outside on natural green pastures all day, every day. This gives a chicken access to its natural diet of worms, insects, and vegetables.
When a chicken eats micronutrient-dense foods, those micronutrients end up in its meat and in its eggs.
Scientific studies have confirmed this, with several studies showing that pasture-raised chicken meat contains more micronutrients, including vitamins and antioxidants, than indoor-raised grain-fed chickens.
In an Italian study, researchers compared the meat of 3 different types of chicken:
- Conventional indoor raised chickens
- Organic chickens (with organic feed and some outdoor access)
- “Organic-plus” chickens (with organic feed and meaningful time spent outdoors)
Organic chickens were found to have more omega-3 fatty acids in their meat compared to conventional indoor chickens.
This is great, because omega-3 fatty acids reduce inflammation, and reducing inflammation plays a big role in losing man boobs.
However, organic alone wasn’t enough to boost two other important qualities in the meat of the birds: increase in total antioxidant nutrients and decrease in risk of oxidative damage to fats in the meat. These additional benefits were only found in the organic-plus (pastured) chicken meat.
The authors of the study concluded that pasture activities were directly linked to the health quality of the meat.
Other studies have found higher levels of vitamin E, protein, vitamin A, and a higher omega 3 to 6 ratio in pasture-raised vs conventional indoor-raised chickens. And there are likely hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of other differences that science has not yet tested for.
You need these extra vitamins and antioxidants in your body to help your liver metabolize and remove excess estrogens from your body, to create testosterone, and to reduce inflammation. Reducing Inflammation further helps restore your estrogen to testosterone ratio, so you can lose your man boobs.
But you have to be careful with the term, “free range”.
Unlike with “organic”, “free range” is not properly regulated.
All the company has to do to qualify for this label is cut a door at the end of the grow house that gives the chicken “access” to go outside for more than 2 hours per day. Do you think even 10% of those birds would venture outside to a 10'x10′ concrete pad? Not a chance.
Even if a chicken did access the concrete pad every day, it still isn’t given access to green pastures, so it won’t make any difference to the composition of its meat.
So how do you know that the chicken you buy is truly pasture-raised vs “free range” and only given access to a concrete pad 2 hours a day?
The best and only way to truly know is to visit the farm, talk to the farmer, and see for yourself how they look after their chickens.
Farmers who truly raise their animals in a human fashion, tend to be open to visitors, because they have nothing to hide, and actively want to show off with the hard work they are doing to raise their animals. They’ll often have open days when they show visitors around, and you’ll find information about what they do on their websites and on facebook pages.
I know humane farmers who don’t have the organic certification, because it’s a lot of hassle and costs them extra money, yet they go above and beyond the organic standards and really look after their animals. I would much prefer to eat their chickens than to eat chickens from some organic farmer I don’t know.
Here’s a post by a humane chicken farmer who explains why it’s impossible for their chickens to be both true pasture-raised AND organic:
https://grist.org/sustainable-farming/2011-11-18-pasture-raised-or-organic-why-we-cant-do-both/
If visiting the farm is out of the question, because you live in a busy city and the nearest pasture-raised farm is hundreds of miles away, then at the very least, you can call the farm, see how open they are, or you can visit their website or their facebook page, and see how they talk about how they raise their animals, and read the reviews from others who have visited the farm. If they don’t have a website, or they have a basic website with nothing but the words “free range chickens” written on it, nobody is talking about them, they don’t seem to be very open about showing people what they do, then I wouldn’t trust them.
Here’s a statement from a humane farm that instills confidence in their farming methods:
“Our chicken have permanent access to pasture allowing them to range freely in small groups. We use no chemicals or hormones in the farming of the land or the raising of our birds. They are provided a free range indoor grain which is GM free and have full access to natural pasture outside all day.”
Solution #3: A Slow-Growing, Natural Breed
Commercial breeds of meat chickens are crossbred hybrids that have been artificially selected for generations to make them grow unnaturally fast, grow super-big breasts, and end up with all the problems that I listed above.
There are two main global breeding companies delivering highly selected lines of fast growth rate broilers:
- Aviagen (with the Ross, Hubbard, Arbor Acres, Indian River and Peterson breeds)
- Cobb-Vantress (with the Cobb, Avian, Sasso and Hybro breeds)
These are the worst, fastest-growing commercial breed of chickens.
Beware that these commercial breeds are also used for organic and free range production.
So when you are getting your chickens from that pasture-raised farm, be sure to enquire about the breed, and avoid those Ross, Cobb, Hubbard and other breeds of chicken listed above at all costs.
Even if you took a commercial breed of chicken and gave it a full organic pasture-raised lifestyle, it would not be as healthy or humane as doing the same with a heritage breed.
Heritage breeds are more robust, they grow slower, live longer, and are healthier than commercial breeds of chicken.
According to the Livestock Conservancy:
“A heritage chicken can only be produced by a Standard-bred Chicken admitted by the American Poultry Association. A Heritage Chicken is hatched from a Heritage Egg sired by an American Poultry Association Standard-bred Chicken, whose breed was established prior to the mid-20th century, is slow growing, naturally mated with a long productive outdoor life.”
Here’s a list of heritage breeds that are unique to North America:
- Holland
- Cubalaya
- Rhode Island White
- Buckeye
- Chantecler
- Delaware
- Dominique
- Java
- Jersey Giant
- New Hampshire
- Rhode Island Red – Non-industrial
- Plymouth Rock
You’ll find a whole bunch more heritage breeds from outside North America on the following page:
https://livestockconservancy.org/index.php/heritage/internal/conservation-priority-list#Chickens
The following video will show you another reason why you want to stick with a heritage breed:
According to the video, 60% of meat from Swiss commercial hybrid chickens have antibiotic resistant bacteria. These bacteria don’t make people ill, but they can indirectly trigger infections.
A humane farmer in Thurgau, Switzerland, had his heritage breed of chicken tested. The meat and dung of his 600 birds were tested for antibiotic resistant bacteria, and not a single one of the samples were contaminated.
The Swiss researcher in the video looked into the origin of the resistant bacteria and found it at the beginning of the breeding line. The bacteria are passed on through the generations, it goes from the parents through the egg, to the chicks.
The researcher said, “This shows that if I move away from the established structures of the poultry production pyramid, and use other breeds, where fewer antibiotics were used at the top of the pyramid, I end up with a much better situation lower down.”
So commercial breeds are not just messed up genetically, they're also infected from birth with antibiotic resistant super-bugs.
Since heritage breeds grow slower and are slaughtered much later in their life, they are as much as 5x more expensive than commercial breeds.
Here’s a great solution to the cost problem: if healthy chicken costs 5x as much, then eat healthy chicken 5x less often. Your expenses will be the same, you’ll avoid all the excess estrogen and micronutrient-depleted flesh from commercial chickens, and you’ll occasionally eat something healthy that will help greatly in your journey to losing man boobs.
The Swiss farmer puts it perfectly in the video:
“What’s better for the family: not eating as much poultry meat as is currently the case, but when they do eat it, knowing that the meat is healthy? If they choose cheap meat they don’t know that it might contain up to 60% antibiotic-resistant bacteria”.
So when you’re looking for the ideal farm to get your chicken from, make sure the farm is open about what breed of bird they use. Here are those words again, from a human chicken farmer's website that I mentioned above:
“…we go above and beyond free range or organic standards as we only rear slow maturing natural breeds of chicken that grow for a minimum 10-12 weeks as opposed to the lifespan of the commercial chicken breeds (Ross Cobs) which live between 3-4 weeks before developing severe physical problems and defects. Current organic and free range standards do allow these commercial breeds to be used.”
Here are two websites that can help you find small local non-commercial humane farms in your area:
Should You Eat Chicken Breast Or Chicken Leg? Skinless Or Boneless?
This obsession with skinless chicken breast is totally messed up.
It’s based on the false allegation that all fat, especially saturated fat, is bad for you, so you should eat as little fat as possible.
I wrote about this in detail here:
https://chestsculpting.com/the-one-nutrient-to-avoid-and-why-the-anti-fat-movement-is-a-sham/
People on low fat diets have low testosterone levels. We need cholesterol from saturated fat to form testosterone, and we need testosterone to lose man boobs, have strength & vigor, form muscle, have good health, and have sexual vigor as men.
A whole bunch of vitamins, including vitamins A, D, E, and K, are fat soluble. They’re found in the fat of the animal, and we can’t absorb them into our bodies without eating fat.
So on a low fat diet we become testosterone and vitamin deficient.
You should eat the WHOLE animal.
Eat the breast with the skin on, eat the leg, thigh, and butt-cheeks with the skin on.
Eat the feet, eat the liver, gizzards, head, brain, heart, kidneys, bite into the bones and suck out the marrow.
Each part of the animal has a different nutrient profile, and our bodies are designed by nature to benefit from the WHOLE animal.
Coincidentally, just this morning I was reading a chapter in a book called “Orthomolecular Medicine for Everyone” by an Abram Hoffer. I don’t know yet if the specific vitamin therapy in this book would help guys with man boobs, I’m reading it for other reasons, but Dr Hoffer actually talks in his book about eating the whole animal.
Under a chapter titled, “What Kind Of Food Have We Been Adapted To?” He talks about how our healthy ancestors back in the days before agriculture (more than 10,000 years ago, i.e. in the Paleolithic era, though he doesn’t call it that) didn’t need to take vitamin supplements because their diets were more micronutrient dense.
“Whole-Animals in their native state eat whole foods. Deer graze on leaves and berries, wolves eat other animals, and bears eat fish, animals, insects, and vegetation. Our ancestors seldom luxuriated in too much food. Scarcity is a great motivation to not waste food. They ate all the edible portions of animals, even cracking bones to get at the marrow. They ate whole grains when they could get them. The advantage of Whole Foods is that they contain all the nutrients needed to keep life going. But whether there was an initial advantage or not, we have been locked into a system that demands we eat foods that we have adapted to – and we have adapted to Whole Foods.”
…Abram Hoffer, Orthomolecular Medicine For Everyone
Another important point Dr Hoffer made, was that our ancestors’ diet was variable:
“Variable—Our ancestors’ diet depended on time of day and season as well as on geography. They were wanderers who followed their food supply, as did the !Kung tribes in the Kalahari Desert until recently. When we eat a large variety of foods, we are less apt to become allergic to any one food. This variability also increases the nutritional quality of the diet, since one food’s surplus of some nutrients can compensate for another food’s deficiencies. The Native American formerly ate a much larger variety of foods than we or they do today.”
…Abram Hoffer, Orthomolecular Medicine For Everyone
Your diet should be varied based on what’s available in your LOCAL environment at that time of year.
So we might complain that pasture-raised chicken is expensive, but when we realize that we’re not supposed to have a chicken-based diet every day, all year round, the price of chicken becomes less of a big deal.
Commercial chicken is cheap today, it’s the cheapest meat around, but this is a byproduct of artificial intervention. The government heavily subsidizes (using taxpayer’s money) the crappy soy and corn used for commercial chicken feed. We’ve artificially engineered chickens that grow abnormally fast, and we raise and slaughter these chicken on a mass scale in totally unnatural ways.
If it wasn’t for all this artificial intervention, chicken would be expensive as hell!
A natural heritage chicken is a small, lean creature, and as Rocky Balboa showed us, a chicken is hard as hell to catch:
I doubt that little fella was a Ross or Cobb chicken.
Even before MONEY was a thing, chicken was expensive. Our Paleolithic ancestor would easily have spent over an hour catching, slaughtering, plucking, cutting, and cooking that thing, and all he’d get out of it would be a single meal for a single person.
He’d much rather have caught and slaughtered a cow, which could probably feed an entire family for a full week.
Why YOU Should Care About Animal Welfare
When you care for your health, you’ll have a positive impact on animal welfare.
When you care for animal welfare, you’ll have a positive impact on your health.
The two go hand in hand.
Why?
Because the happiest animals are those that are allowed to live their natural lives, free from human interference. And the healthiest animals for us to eat are those that have lived a natural life.
For most of my life I’ve eaten meat without ever questioning where the meat came from.
Then one day my brother Shaun showed me a video about animal cruelty that bought tears to my eyes.
I shed a few more tears while doing the research to write this article.
Since I lost my man boobs, I’ve allowed myself to eat commercially raised chickens again, since the pasture-raised stuff is so expensive and hard to come by. But after knowing what I know now, I’m going to stick to humanely-raised chickens as much as I possibly can, even if it means chicken becomes a rare treat.
Here are some of the horrific facts on animal cruelty I discovered while writing this article:
Sudden Death & Slow Death
Artificial selection for very fast growth means there is a genetic mismatch between the energy-supplying organs of the chicken and its energy-consuming organs. This often leads to disorders like sudden death syndrome (SDS) and ascites.
With SDS, fast-growing chickens that seem to be in good condition, suddenly die from acute heart failure. The birds suddenly start to flap their wings, lose their balance, sometimes cry out and fall on their backs or sides and die, usually all within a minute.
If you read around online, you’ll see it’s a common thing a lot of chicken owners talk about when they raise Ross or Cobb chickens, two of the worst types of artificially engineered chickens – they expect to find a portion of them dead for no apparent reason.
With ascites, the bird has an enlarged heart, malfunctioning liver and lungs with reduced oxygen levels, and a build-up of large amounts of fluid in its abdomen. Unlike with SDS, the bird suffers for a long time before it dies.
Crippling Leg Pain & Inability To Walk
Picture a six-year-old child weighing 286lb, or more than 20 stone. According to a senior research scientist, that's the reality of life for broiler chickens that are bred to grow to an unnatural 9.3 lb in just 8 weeks.
Because of their large size and disproportionately large breasts, commercial breeds of chicken end up with various painful deformities in their legs.
Due to pain and difficulty with walking, many of these birds spend more time lying and sleeping. This problem is so widespread, that studies using pain killing drugs have found that the MAJORITY of commercial meat chickens find walking painful (since they walk better when taking pain-killers).
By sitting and lying all day, the birds end up with dermatitis, just like when bed bound human patients develop painful pressure sores. Commercial meat chickens commonly develop hock burns, breast blisters and foot pad lesions.
Blindness, Eye Pain, And Headaches
To boost growth, chickens are kept under a range of lighting conditions, including continuous light, continuous darkness, or under dim light.
As a result, they develop eye abnormalities that often lead to visual disturbances, blindness, eye pain, and headaches.
Gasping For Breath, Paralysis, Dehydration, Depression, Inflamed Lungs & Eyes
The litter in tightly-packed broiler pens can become highly polluted from the nitrogenous feces of the birds and produce ammonia.
Ammonia has been shown to increase a bird’s susceptibility to Newcastle disease, which is a viral fever (not helped by antibiotics) with difficulty breathing and gasping for breath, paralysis and twisting of the neck, dehydration from diarrhea, and depression.
When the concentration of ammonia gets high enough, it causes inflammation of the lining of their lungs and of the outer layer of their eyes.
Starved & Dehydrated Before Being Slaughtered
When the chickens are ready for slaughter, they are packed live into crates for transport to the slaughterhouse. They are usually deprived of food and water for several hours before catching until slaughter – why waste money on feeding them when they’re about to be slaughtered?
The process of catching, loading, transport and unloading causes serious stress, injury and even death to a large number of chickens.
In the EU in 2005, where animal welfare standards are much better than ours here in the US, up to 35 million broilers died during the process of catching, packing and transport. Around 40% were thought to have died from heat stress or suffocation due to crowding on the transporter.
Watching Dozens Of Others Hung Upside Down, Electrified, Then, Slaughtered, And Knowing That You're Next
Slaughter is done by hanging the birds fully conscious by their feet upside-down in shackles on a moving chain, stunning them by automatically immersing them in an electrified water bath and exsanguination by cutting their throats.
Some research indicates that chickens might be more intelligent than previously thought, which raises questions about how they are treated. When they are hung upside down watching other chickens being electrified and slaughtered, they’re likely intelligent enough to know that they are next.
Chickens raised for meat are usually slaughtered at approximately 1 to 1.5 months of age. They become sexually reproductive at 5 to 6 months of age. So you are basically slaughtering a pre-adolescent child.
The Chickens' Parents: Starved Their Whole Lives And Beaks Chopped Off
The bird's parents on the other hand called “broiler-breeders”, must live to maturity and beyond so they can be used for breeding. By living longer, these poor birds have to put up with additional problems.
See, meat chickens have been artificially selected to be ravenously hungry all the time. They are given unrestricted access to food, so they can get big as fast as possible.
Broiler-breeders have the same ravenous hunger, but they have to be feed-restricted (starved) to prevent them from developing the life-threatening problems of becoming overweight.
Broiler breeders fed on commercial rations eat only a quarter to half as much as they would with free access to food, which means they are suffering 24/7 with agonizing hunger.
After a certain age, chickens in close confinement start to develop aggressive behavior like cannibalism and feather pecking. Broiler breeders hence are often beak trimmed, which can lead to acute or chronic pain.
So please. If not for your health and losing your man boobs, do it for the sake of these poor birds. Avoid commercially raised chicken – the standard stuff at your local butcher’s or at the supermarket. Find a farm that humanely raises heritage breeds of chicken, and eat only their chickens.
Not only will it help you in your path to losing your man boobs, but it will give you a clear conscience too.
Remember, chicken is by far the most abused and adulterated meat there is in the USA and in most wealthy countries.
Where chicken SHOULD, in nature, be one of the LEAST consumed meats, it has become the MOST consumed meat BY FAR. That in itself demonstrates the shear EXTENT of adulteration.
The further a food is from its natural state, the more damage it does to your health, and chicken is by far more removed from its natural state than any other meat in developed countries.
You would be better off eating commercial beef, lamb, mutton, goat, pork, turkey, any other meat, than eating commercial chicken.
I hope that explains it.
If you eat a lot of commercial chicken, I hope my article makes you change your ways.
I hope my article saves some chickens.
I hope my article improves your health, improves your life, and helps you in your path to losing your man boobs.
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Please leave a quick review of the article. What did you think about the article? How did it help you? This will help me get the word out so more people will learn about the reality of chicken farming, and have a better chance at both getting rid of their man boobs, and saving all those billions of chickens from living such an inhuman life.
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