Michael Pollan
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 Even animals that do well on grain, such as chickens and pigs, are much healthier when they have access to green plants, and so, it turns out, are their meat and eggs.
For most of our food animals, a diet of grass means much healthier fats (more omega-3s and conjugated linoleic acid, or CLA; fewer omega-6s and saturated fat) in their meat, milk, and eggs, as well as appreciably higher levels of vitamins and antioxidants. Sometimes you can actually see the difference, as when butter is yellow or egg yolks bright orange: What you're seeing is the beta-carotene from fresh green grass. |
Jeffrey M. Smith
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 There from seven used rats (maximum duration 28 days for four of them), nine have been performed on chickens that do not go over 42 days. Four used pigs but only one test was published, which had fed an experimental maize. Two references fed cows of more than 42 days with Bt 176 maize that is not used anymore. Today there are no sub-chronic toxicity tests on rats that are obligatory. For new or pending GMOs there are only chronic toxicity tests for 90 days and not more."101
Regarding Mon 863 corn: "According to [toxicologist G.E.] Seralini, Mon 863 is new and unique; it differs from natural 2? |
Michael Pollan
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| A century ago, the typical Iowa farm raised more than a dozen different plant and animal species: cattle, chickens, corn, hogs, apples, hay, oats, potatoes, cherries, wheat, plums, grapes, and pears. Now it raises only two: corn and soybeans. This simplification of the agricultural landscape leads directly to the simplification of the diet, which is now to a remarkable extent dominated by—big surprise—corn and soybeans. |
Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe
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 Soon after the Conquest, the new settlers went about remedying this deplorable situation, importing beef cattle, milk cows, sheep, goats, pigs, and chickens, and forcing their native laborers— treated little better than slaves—to plant wheat, chickpeas, and Old World fruit trees like peaches and oranges. Cane sugar was also a novelty to Mesoamerica, and was grown on a vast scale on the private estates of the Marques del Valle (as Cortes was by now styled). |
Tori Hudson, N.D.
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 Valium oil administered to egg-laying chickens induced impaired muscle cell development, suggesting potential harm from the use of Valium in pregnancy.137 Medications such as lithium (used to treat bipolar disorder, formerly called manic depression) and tetracycline (an antibiotic) can harm the fetus; if at all possible, avoidance of these substances is recommended. Some antiseizure medications are folate antagonists and, as such, can increase the risk for fetal neural tube defects unless folic acid supplementation is implemented along with the medication. |
Dr. Edward F. Group III, DC, ND, DACBN
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| What about the toxic water the cows, pigs, fish, or chickens drink that ends up in the meat you eventually eat?
• What about the water used to grow the vegetables and fruit you enjoy each day?
• What about the water you use to wash your dishes, clothes, towels, and bedding?
• What about the water you swim in or bathe in?
All of these sources and more can expose you to toxic chemicals in water!
Drinking tap water overwhelms the intestines with toxins and prevents essential nutrients from being absorbed into the body. |
Donna Jackson Nakazawa
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 Nonorganic poultry and meats are packed with hormones and antibiotics, not to mention often full of PCBs, mercury, and other chemicals that accumulate up the food chain in the cows, pigs, lambs, and chickens we consume. Processed meats are preserved with nitrates. Patient studies show that higher intake of nitrates and nitrites is associated with a higher risk of developing type 1 diabetes. Grocery-store chicken comes to us having been raised on feed laced not only with hormones and antibiotics but chemical dyes to give the meat a more attractive hue. |
Kaayla T. Daniel, PhD, CCN
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 THE IODINE FACTOR
The first report in medical journals of enlarged thyroid glands in rats and chickens fed soybean rations appeared in the 1930s.2426 In 1961, researchers discovered that spiking the chow with iodine could prevent goiter.27 But this quick-fix solution to a serious problem turned out to be simplistic. Rats and chickens fed soybean-based chows required twice as much iodine to prevent thyroid enlargement as animals fed soy-free diets. Even then, their thyroid glands showed abnormal cell proliferation.28 When iodine is largely absent, soy can provoke malignant hyperplastic goiter. |
Andreas Moritz
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 Cancer in chickens often results from infection with the Rous Sarcoma virus. The chicken cancer virus is used as a carrier to implant the growth hormone gene into farmed fish so they will grow faster. Once the virus has infected the fish, it will likely end up on your dinner plate and also infect you. With the multitudes of genetically modified foods out there, our body will become a host for numerous viruses that normally would never be found in us.
Likewise, Leukemia virus in chicken has been used as a carrier to insert human genes into developing poultry. |
| The other ingredients of cattle feed consist of ground-up parts of animals, such as deceased chickens, pigs and horses. According to the industry, giving the cattle natural, healthy feeds would be far too costly and so unnecessary. Who really cares what the meat is made of, as long as it looks like meat?
Combined with hefty doses of growth hormones, a diet of corn and special feeds shortens the duration of fattening up a steer for market from a normal time period of 4-5 years to a mere 16 months. Of course, the unnatural diet makes the cows sick. |
| Hops contain the female sex hormones daidzein and genistein, which are generally used to fatten calves, sheep, and chickens. Contrary to general belief, the body cannot utilize any of the numerous calories contained in whiskey or other alcoholic beverages for producing energy or increasing fat reserves. Beer contains another female hormone, an estrogen, which is also formed in a woman's ovaries. The typical beer belly and breast growth of a beer drinker is caused by these female hormones and has nothing to do with beer calories. |
| Over 70 percent of the 9 billion broiler chickens produced annually in the United States are fed roxarsone.
The meat production process is so wasteful and costly that, in order to survive, the meat industry needs hundreds of millions of dollars in tax subsidies every year. You never pay only for the meat you eat; the subsidies come out of your pocket. In 1977, the governments of Western Europe spent almost half a billion dollars purchasing farmers' overproduction of meat and additional millions to store it. This trend has not been different in the United States and is worsening each year. |
Bill Sardi
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 Proceedings National Academy Science 102: 3738-3743, 2005] For instance, in a 1994 experiment at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, chickens infected with a cancer virus developed tumors in areas of their body that had undergone wounding or scarring, while no tumors developed in infected areas that had not suffered wounds.
Women with breast cancer are 3.3 times more likely to report physical trauma to the breast in the previous five years than healthy women. |
Mike Adams
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 The solution is to buy only free range chicken, organically farmed by responsible families who allow their chickens to run free and eat bugs and weeds, just like chickens are supposed to do.
Machinery squeezes the meat out of a cow carcass
On top of everything presented here so far, meat processing factories use "Advanced Meat Recovery" equipment, or "AMR" equipment to literally squeeze every ounce of marketable meat product out of the carcass of a dead cow. |
David R. Montgomery
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 Historical accounts and changes in the abundance and variety of bones in prehistoric deposits indicate that by the time of Cook's visit Mangaians had eaten all theit pigs and dogs, and probably all their chickens too. The Mangaian diet began to change radically—and not for the better.
After most protein sources were gone, charred rat bones became prevalent in deposits excavated from prehistoric rock shelters. Eatly nineteenth-century missionary John Williams wrote that tats were a favorite staple on Mangaia. |
Gabriel Cousens, M.D.
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 When the chickens were killed, one could never find the mica, but inside was lots of sand. Somehow, from all of the mica, they were able to make calcium shells. Later experiments showed that when the mica was taken away, the eggshells became devoid of calcium, and the chickens stopped producing eggs. When the mica was added back into the diet, they began to produce eggs again. The implication is that the mica contains some silicate of potassium, which is converted to calcium by biological transmutation. |
Hyla Cass, M.D.
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 You can buy eggs from organically raised chickens that have eaten feed enriched with the omega-3 fat docosahexanoic acid (DHA) to boost your omega-3 intake by about 200 mg per egg.
EXTRACTING ENERGY FROM MACRONUTRIENTS: OXIDATION AND ANTIOXIDANTS
Once you get all that good food into your body, the work has just begun. You have to digest and absorb it, and then your cells have to transform it into: 1) building blocks for tissues; and 2) energy.
The key to energy production in the body is oxygen. Oxygen is the ultimate "essential"—a few minutes without it and, of course, we'll die. |
Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S.
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 Not unrelatedly, cumin was also believed to keep chickens from leaving their yard.) And cumin is said to symbolize greed, maybe because its strong flavor can overwhelm a dish.
Almost all the cumin we use in the United States comes from India, but cumin is found in the cuisines of Indonesia, Thailand, and Mexico as well. For the best quality, you should look for it in a specialty market, such as one that specializes in the cuisine of these cultures. The whole cumin blends nicely into dishes like sauteed vegetables, or legumes and beans. |
| Grain is not the natural diet of salmon any more than it is for cows and chickens. The result is that the fat in farm salmon is completely different from the fat in wild salmon. As a result of their grain diet, the fat of farm-raised salmon contains a much higher proportion of inflammatory omega-6s, a fat that we already consume far too much of. |
| Recently, there has been an influx in the supermarkets of omega-3 enriched eggs (for more on that, see my introductory essay on meat and poultry, page 187). chickens that roam free produce eggs that are higher in omega-3 fats, and some companies are offering eggs that have been omega-3 enriched. If you can find these omega-3 eggs, by all means get them.
Full disclosure: I frequently eat my eggs raw. I throw them in a smoothie (a la Rocky!) or I add them whole to vegetable juice and drink them down. |
| Organic" doesn't guarantee much when it comes to animal products—certainly not the quality of life I like to imagine it does—but by buying organic meats and poultries, or eggs that have been "omega-3 enriched," or eggs from chickens that have been fed organic feed whose manufacturers at least made a stab at trying to reproduce the nutrients found in the chicken's natural diet, I'm hoping to get something better than I might otherwise find. If I had access to a small sustainable local farm, believe me, I'd just get my stuff there. |
| It was fueled by a fervent wish to consume the healthy products of the small, sustainable farm where fruits and vegetables and cows and pigs and chickens and horses lived in an interdependent atmosphere of pastoral tranquility, where food—
The 4 rr\ Ua-iIthiact Ac nn Carth whether animal or vegetable—was grown (or raised) the "old-fashioned" way. |
Devra Davis
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 At the time, diethylstilbestrol (DES), which was the first synthetic estrogen ever created, was added to animal feed to fatten cows, pigs and chickens for the German nation. The problem was that young boys who worked in the factory that made DES developed painful, swollen breasts.
Today we might wonder how such a product could have been considered appropriate for general use even then. DES was easily made from coal tar and had not been patented because it was first produced in the laboratory by publicly funded British researchers. |
Peggy O'Mara
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 Using a fresh batch of virulent cholera culture, he then inoculated two groups of chickens: a group of previously uninoculated chickens and the original group that had remained unaffected by the aged culture inoculation. Nearly all the previously inoculated chickens remained healthy, while the new chickens developed chicken cholera. Pasteur described this age-dependent weakening process as "attenuation." Quickly realizing the potential of his discovery, Pasteur honored Jenner by naming his chicken-immunizing agent "vaccine," though it had nothing to do with cows. |
| Toussaint had already isolated a bacterium (now called Pasteurella multocida) in the fluids of chickens with chicken cholera but could not culture the organism. Pasteur found a way to culture the organism and, on feeding chickens a single drop of it, induced cholera.
In the summer of 1879, Pasteur and his assistants went on vacation, leaving a batch of chicken cholera culture in the laboratory refrigerator. Upon his return several months later, Pasteur inoculated healthy chickens with the aged culture. To his surprise, the aged culture did not produce disease in the chickens. |
| Using a fresh batch of virulent cholera culture, he then inoculated two groups of chickens: a group of previously uninoculated chickens and the original group that had remained unaffected by the aged culture inoculation. Nearly all the previously inoculated chickens remained healthy, while the new chickens developed chicken cholera. Pasteur described this age-dependent weakening process as "attenuation." Quickly realizing the potential of his discovery, Pasteur honored Jenner by naming his chicken-immunizing agent "vaccine," though it had nothing to do with cows. |
Bottom Line Health
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| But these very real diseases seem abstract when compared to the scary-looking chickens we regularly see on TV.
Our own brains make us easy prey to such distortions. Elizabeth Phelps, PhD, a psychologist and neuroscientist at New York University in New York City, has examined how the brain responds to envisioned threats. Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, she discovered that the brain's fear center, known as the amygdala, can be activated in response to dangers that a person merely observes. |
David R. Montgomery
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| Looking for outcrops of ancient lakebeds we drove through villages full of chickens, yaks, and pigs. All around the towns, low silt walls ttapped soil in fields of barley, peas, and yellow flowers with seeds rich in canola oil.
After a few days it became obvious that corralling dirt was only part of the secret behind ren centuries of farming the lakebed. Following an unsupervised daily rhythm, Tibetan livestock head out to the fields during rhe day, fend for themselves, and come home at night. |
Jeffrey M. Smith
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| And gene fragments from feed were also found in muscle, liver, spleen, and kidney tissues in chickens.12 And when humans were fed rabbit meat, fragments of rabbit DNA were found in the bloodstream.13
A test tube simulation of human digestion indicated that transgenes may survive in the stomach and small intestine for up to four hours.14 A human feeding study was conducted on seven subjects who used ileostomy bags—their lower intestines had been removed and digestive material passed from the small intestine into an attached bag. They were fed a meal of GM soy burgers and a soy milkshake. |
Bradley J. Willcox, M.D., D. Craig Willcox, Ph.D., Makoto Suzuki, M.D.
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 They come from uncaged chickens that are given heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids in their feed. They pass those healthy eating habits along to you in the form of a great-tasting and healthier egg. Healthy, fit chickens produce a bright orange yolk with a deep taste, in contrast to broiler chickens' eggs, with their lifeless, pale yellow yolk. The pumpkin is packed with nutrition too—its bright orange color tells us it's loaded with the antioxidant beta-carotene. Colorful and healrhy—a winning combination! |
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