I have loved eating chicken since I was a kid. Chicken nuggets, chicken noodle soup, chicken pot pie, and when I got older, chicken parmesan, chicken tikka masala, and good old buffalo wings.
Chicken is the most popular meat in the United States. Even people who “don’t eat much meat” eat chicken. The average American in 2016 ate over 90 pounds of chicken.1 That’s a huge increase from 1909, when each person ate less than 20 pounds.2
Chicken is supposed to be a lean, white meat, lower in cholesterol, sodium, and saturated fat than red meat. People eat chicken because it’s the healthier choice.
Isn’t it?
As Dr. Esselstyn put it, it’s a question of whether you want to be shot or hanged.
“Heterocyclic amines [HCAs] are clear-cut carcinogens,” Dr. Barnard told Keegan and me. “They can form in any meat as it’s cooked,3 but by far, the biggest source is chicken. We sent researchers into the top chains of fast-food and family restaurants, and took 100 food samples. We found carcinogens in every single chicken sample.4 These were independent laboratory tests.”
The WHO report had only targeted processed meat and red meat as cancer causing. Now chicken also contains carcinogens?
“Is that all chicken?” I asked, not quite believing it.
“It’s typical factory-farmed chickens,” Dr. Barnard said. “It’s also true for organic. The carcinogens are still there. And remember, this is true for other meats as well.”
The presence of carcinogenic HCAs may explain why well-cooked meat is linked to higher risks of cancers of the breast, colon, esophagus, lung, pancreas, prostate, and stomach.5
Nor are these slightly increased risks. The Long Island Breast Cancer Study Project found that women who consume more grilled, smoked, or barbecued meat over the course of their lives could have a 47 percent greater risk for breast cancer.6
I asked Dr. Milton Mills about chicken.
“If I still ate meat,” he said, “I would not eat chicken. We have genetically altered chickens to go from hatchlings to market weight in six to nine weeks. That is the equivalent of a human child growing 300 pounds in 10 years.7 Growth stimulants in the tissues of these animals make them grow at these phenomenal rates. When you ingest that tissue, you are also ingesting those growth stimulants, which may cause your cells to start growing at an unnatural rate that can cause you to develop a tumor. I think that is one of the reasons we are seeing more and more poultry linked to a variety of different cancers.”
A 2010 Harvard report showed that high chicken consumption in men with aggressive prostate cancer could increase the progression or recurrence of the cancer by 300 percent. The same study found that by eating less than a single serving of chicken or turkey a day, you can increase your risk for prostate cancer by four times. The HCA carcinogens mentioned by Dr. Barnard seem to accumulate more in poultry muscle fibers than in other types of meat.8
A similar result was shown with colon cancer. Thirty thousand people were studied over six years, and researchers found that those eating red meat at least once a week roughly doubled their risk for colon cancer. But those who ate chicken or fish at least once a week tripled their colon cancer risk.9
And then there is pancreatic cancer, one of the most deadly forms of cancer. Only 6 percent of those with the disease will survive five years after the diagnosis.10
Every 50 grams of chicken eaten daily (about ¼ of a chicken breast) will increase your risk of pancreatic cancer by 72 percent,11 as discovered by the EPIC study.
Smoking is the most thoroughly analyzed risk factor for pancreatic cancer. Smoking for 50 years doubles your risk for the disease. People working in chicken processing plants, however, have about nine times the risk for both pancreatic and liver cancer, according to a study following 30,000 poultry workers.12 They also have higher rates of cancers of the nasal cavities, mouth, throat, esophagus, and rectum. There are fears that the poultry viruses causing these cancers can be spread to the public when chicken or turkey is prepared or poorly cooked.13
EPIC researchers also found that eating chicken is related to greatly increased risk of various blood cancers. The risk grew between 56 percent and 280 percent for every 50 grams of poultry eaten daily.14
A cooked, boneless chicken breast can weigh over 380 grams.15 Fifty grams of chicken is nothing when it comes to lunch, but it can mean increasing your risk for prostate cancer by four times, an 18 percent higher risk of colorectal cancer, a 56 percent to 280 percent higher risk of blood cancers, and 72 percent higher risk of pancreatic cancer.
Over the last 30 years, esophageal cancer in this country has risen by 500 percent.16 The esophagus is the tube connecting the throat and the stomach. Meat and high-fat meals appear to be closely related to this dramatic increase.17
Red meat has been strongly connected with cancer within the esophagus, while chicken is linked to cancer where the esophagus and stomach meet.18 The fat in both types of meat triggers acid reflux, which is believed to be one of the drivers of this disease.19
But wait—isn’t chicken a low-fat food? That’s one of the reasons we eat chicken.
Well, actually . . .
The EPIC study gave poultry the distinction of being potentially the most fattening meat of all.20
“A brilliant advertising campaign has convinced us, ‘It’s white meat. It’s healthier,’” Dr. Klaper told us. “The truth is, those birds are raised to be as fat as possible at slaughter. The fatter they are, the more money the chicken producer makes. Most of them are given growth-promoting substances. These birds get so fat they can’t stand up. These birds are fatty, sick animals. Poultry flesh is one of the worst things people can eat.”
Choosing chicken over other meats, as Dr. Pamela Popper puts it in her book Food over Medicine, is like “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”21
A single serving of chicken today can have over 200 calories from fat alone. One hundred years ago, that same single serving of chicken might have only had about 16 fat calories.22
Contrary to what most of us believe, a skinless chicken thigh can contain more fat—including saturated fat—than over two dozen different cuts of lean beef.23
“Everybody thinks chicken is the greatest health food,” Dr. Davis told us, “but the EPIC study showed that the number one food causing weight gain was chicken—the food that my obese patients are eating tons of because they think it’s good for them. In any serving of chicken, there are more calories from fat than there are from protein.”
People also choose chicken over red meat believing it has less cholesterol and sodium. The American Heart Association, after all, tells us to “Eat More Chicken, Fish and Beans,” because “red meats (beef, pork and lamb) have more cholesterol and saturated (bad) fat than chicken.”24
However . . .
“The number one dietary source of cholesterol in America is chicken,” Dr. Joel Kahn told Keegan and me. “Chicken is the top dietary source of cholesterol because of the sheer volume of chicken that is eaten. And it has nearly as much cholesterol per gram as red beef.”
People think trimming the fat will help reduce cholesterol, but cholesterol is mainly found in lean sections of meat, including poultry.25
We asked Dr. Kim Williams about cholesterol in chicken. Dr. Williams is the immediate-past president of the American College of Cardiology, a 47,000-member organization, as well as the chief of cardiology at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.
“The amount of cholesterol in a chicken breast is more than you would find in a pork chop the same size,” Dr. Williams, an African American gentleman with crinkly eyes and a trim beard, told us in his office. “Even if it’s no skin, not fried.”
According to the University of Wisconsin–Madison, 100 grams of lean, boneless pork contain 62 mg of cholesterol. The same amount of lean boneless, skinless chicken contains 84 mg of cholesterol.26
The story is the same with beef. A 3.5-ounce serving of chicken leg contains 134 mg of cholesterol, while the same serving size of sirloin steak has 89 mg, and beef ribs have 94 mg. Three and a half ounces of chicken breast contain 85 mg of cholesterol, slightly lower than the steak and ribs, but still carrying more cholesterol than beef brisket, at 63 mg.27
And as Dr. Kahn emphasized, the marginally lower amount of cholesterol in chicken is irrelevant when you factor in the enormous amounts of chicken we eat.
How about the low-sodium reputation of poultry, then, another major reason people choose it over other meats?
It’s an excellent idea to reduce your salt intake. Extra salt in your bloodstream is directly related to high blood pressure, which is a major factor in heart disease, stroke, kidney disease, osteoporosis, stomach cancer, and other diseases.28 Salt is formed from sodium and chloride. And the number one source of sodium in the American diet, for adults between ages 20 and 50, is . . .
Chicken.29
More than beef, sausage, bacon, cheese, and pizza.
“The poultry industry injects chicken carcasses with salt water,” Dr. Greger told Keegan and me.
Uh, why?
“Because it adds water weight. It can increase the weight as much as 20 percent. You buy meat by the pound, so the meat industry can make 20 percent more profit for almost nothing. And it can still be labeled, ‘100% natural.’”
Some chickens sold in supermarkets are so swollen with salt water they contain 840 mg of sodium per serving.30 A McDonald’s cheeseburger, by comparison, contains 680 mg of sodium.31
Chicken is also linked to accelerated aging symptoms like tissue stiffness; inflammation; cataract formation; macular degeneration; and bone, heart, kidney, and liver damage32 (chicken is the top source of aging toxins,33 formed chiefly when foods rich in protein and fat are subjected to high heat34).
And then there is the simple fact that chicken is a filthy food.
About 90 percent of the nation’s retail chicken is contaminated with fecal matter. Yes, that includes the kind you buy at your clean, local supermarket. This is according to the FDA, which concluded that 90 percent of chicken parts, 91 percent of ground turkey, 88 percent of ground beef, and 80 percent of pork chops have fecal contamination.35
Eating that fecal contamination leads to dangerous, sometimes life-threatening infections like Salmonella poisoning,36 the leading cause of death from a food-borne illness.37 And chickens, rather than their eggs, are the number one source of Salmonella poisoning.38
This is the very reason, conventional wisdom wags its finger, why chicken needs to be properly handled and cooked. But what constitutes “proper” handling of chicken?
A team of researchers worked with 60 different families, asking each to cook a raw chicken. The researchers examined the homes afterwards, and discovered the kitchens were swarming with bacteria from chicken feces—on counters, refrigerator and oven handles, silverware, sink faucets, and doorknobs.
The researchers repeated the experiment, instructing the families to wash the contaminated surfaces with soap and hot water afterward. It made no difference.
At last, the families were told to use bleach. The research team still found, though to a far lesser degree, Salmonella and Campylobacter from fecal contamination on kitchen surfaces like the counter, cupboards, and utensils.39
As Dr. Greger writes in How Not to Die, “The reason most people have more fecal bacteria in their kitchen sinks than their toilet seats40 is likely because they prepare their chickens in the kitchen, not the bathroom.”41