STEROIDS OR GROWTH HORMONES:
The most common notion about broilers is that they are fed steroids or growth hormones resulting in their excessive and rapid growth. It is true that the growth rate of Broilers has dramatically increased since 1930s to now. In the 1930s, the weight gain rate for a Broiler was 120 days to reach slaughter weight, today it is around 35 days or so. What it means is that today's broiler chick gains enough weight in 35-40 days to be considered sufficient for slaughter (2 kg). However, contrary to popular belief this weight gain is not the result of injecting growth hormones or steroids (i.e. there is no documented evidence of it) but a result of artificial selection and genetic modification, which means selecting rapidly growing chickens to mate with rapidly growing chickens and similarly choosing other desirable traits to be passed on to the offspring of these chickens.
The broilers of today are the result of decades of artificial selection, genetic modification and other various techniques to support rapid growth (we'll discuss later how some of them are hazardous). In layman terms, broilers are a breed of chicken that eat a lot and gain a lot of weight quickly and sit around all day - kind of like the human generation of today (You are what you eat, right?). These traits make the broiler very ideal for commercial use and in fact these acquired traits became possible because of the toil and work of the commercial poultry industry to increase meat production.
We should understand that chicken of today is not injected with growth hormones, but that does not eliminate the likelihood that it was injected with growth hormones in the past. It is possible that early chickens were injected with growth hormones and with the passage of time and breeding techniques the offspring of those chickens formed particular traits of rapid growth which we witness today. However there is little to no documented evidence that can be found online of such practices. Yet, some researchers and doctors have their suspicions. See reference (1).
Question is why are we suspicious ? Firstly because it is hard to believe that such rapid and uncontrollable growth that is so dangerous for the chicken itself can be achieved simply by artificial selection in such a short span of time (1930s to now). Secondly, some of the big names involved in the early trials and experiments are generally the topic of conspiracy theories and have earned a bad name in the public because of their questionable commercial practices.
Arbor Acres of Connecticut was another big winner (In the Chicken of Tomorrow contest). Originally a family-operated fruit and vegetable farm, later a Rockefeller subsidiary, now one of the largest broiler breeding companies in the world, Arbor Acres developed the Arbor Acres White Rock from Plymouth White Rock genetic lines (2).
Since Capitalism revolves around capital - there is little concern for actual welfare and ethics, therefore something that was going to be disastrous for the chickens was advertised and promoted as beneficial:
The broiler industry’s measure of success is aptly characterized in a brochure published by the National Broiler Council, a U.S. trade group, in association with Merck, aimed at college students: “Dramatic changes have taken place within the industry. Instead of ‘scratching for their food,’ today’s pampered chickens are the products of advanced science and technology (2).
We all know and can see with our own eyes that broiler chickens are nothing even close to 'pampered', what a clear deception and deceitful use of words. In case you don't know, keep reading to learn about the awful plight of broiler chickens. Keep reading to learn what 'advanced science and technology' has done to these poor chickens. And there is no end in sight.
Geneticists have been searching for a poultry gene to reduce abdominal fat, which could then be inserted into the germ plasm of commercial broiler chicken stock. Merck filed for a European patent on a “Macro Chicken,” described on the patent application as a “transgenic fowl expressing bovine growth hormone.” The bird includes growth hormones from cattle (2).
Sometimes hormone disruptors are used legally in animal feed. Zeralenone, for example, is a mycotoxin that causes hormonal imbalance resulting in sexual problems. The human and livestock exposure to it poses health concern due to the onset of several sexual disorders. Zeralenone is found worldwide on cereal crops and it's toxicity is of considerable concern to livestock and poultry producers. But despite this we see that its related compound 'Zeranol', which is 3 to 4 times more potent as an estrogen than the related compound zearalenone is approved for use as a growth promoter in livestock under the brand name Ralgro in the United States (9). Obviously if something like this is legal in the US then we can imagine it being used in developing countries as a norm. A study done in Pakistan found significant levels of mycotoxins in chicken meat and eggs (10).
The presence and metabolism of endogenous steroid hormones in meat-producing animals has been the subject of much research over the past 40 years. While significant data are available, no comprehensive review has yet been performed. Efforts are already underway to produce more definitive data and promote communication among the scientific community on this issue, the convening of a formal European Union working party is recommended (13).
However, since the health and poultry industry maintains that broiler chickens are not directly injected with growth hormones, so let's accept it and stop being suspicious. Does that end the problem in any way ? Not at all. Even if we ignore the issue of growth hormones truth remains that due to artificial methods and techniques (ones which the industry officially accepts) these chickens have become susceptible to various diseases and health problems, and their welfare has been severely compromised.
SICK AND UNHEALTHY:
Disease and suffering are inherent features of the battery system in which the individual hen is obscured by gloom and by thousands of other hens in an environment deliberately designed to discourage perception, labor, and care. Forcing a physically active bird to assume a cramped and stationary position for life on wire mesh produces diseases that are complicated by abnormal reproductive demands: muscle degeneration, poor blood circulation, accumulation of flaccid fat, oviducts clogged with masses and bits of eggs that can’t be expelled, osteoporosis, and foot and leg deformities. The very filth of the de-beaking machines, vaccination equipment, and overall living conditions has generated an incurable disease in laying hens known as Swollen Head Syndrome (2).
Selection and husbandry for very fast growth means there is a genetically induced mismatch between the energy-supplying organs of the broiler and its energy-consuming organs (5). Rapid growth can lead to metabolic disorders such as sudden death syndrome (SDS) and ascites (6).
In attempts to improve or maintain fast growth, broilers are kept under a range of lighting conditions. These include continuous light (fluorescent and incandescent), continuous darkness, or under dim light; chickens kept under these light conditions develop eye abnormalities such as macrophthalmos, avian glaucoma, ocular enlargement and shallow anterior chambers (3).
In recent decades, hens’ oviducts have become infested with Salmonellae bacteria that enter the forming egg, causing food poisoning in consumers. While in the past, Salmonella infections were usually traced to dirty or cracked eggs contaminated from the outside by chicken droppings, Salmonella can now be found inside the intact egg shells (2).
Manure is everywhere in the caged layer complex. Toxic ammonia rises from the decomposing uric acid in the manure pits beneath the cages to produce a painful corneal ulcer condition in chickens known as “ammonia burn,” a keratoconjunctivitis that can lead to blindness. It facilitates chronic respiratory diseases such as infectious bronchitis, caused by an airborne virus. Studies of the effect of ammonia on eggs suggest that even at low concentrations significant quantities of ammonia can be absorbed into the egg (2).
Cannibalism: The caging and crowding of chickens produces a pecking disorder that the industry refers to as “cannibalism.” This distorted behavior is caused by the abnormal restriction of the normal span of activities in ranging species of birds in situations in which they are squeezed together and prevented from exercising their natural exploratory, food-gathering, and social impulses. It includes vent picking, feather pulling, toe picking, and head picking (2).
POOR REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH:
If you let these chickens live beyond their slaughter age, which poultry farmers have to do if they want more broilers and their eggs, (and when they're done laying eggs they too end up on your plate), then there is very high likelihood of the broilers getting overweight and unfit. So much so that often they are unable to reproduce, or because of being overweight they develop reproductive disorders.
Unfortunately, efficient growth in the broiler and reproductive fitness in the breeder are negatively related production traits (Siegel and Dunnington, 1985). Body weight gain must be limited throughout the life of breeder birds by controlling feed intake to minimize reproductive problems in the adult bird (Richards et al., 2010).
Pullets that enter the breeder house overweight tend to have excessive follicular development that can lead to oviductal prolapse, increased number of double-yolk eggs, egg yolk peritonitis (presence of egg yolk in the abdominal cavity), erratic oviposition (laying outside the normal laying time), and laying more than one egg per day (often with poor quality shells). Overweight hens may have poor fertility due to sperm transport problems in the oviduct. They also may become too large to mate successfully (Stanley, 2003).
Broilers, in general, have very poor health and all sorts of health problems surround them. This is despite the heavy vaccination shots and antibiotic doses given to them regularly:
USE OF ANTIBIOTICS and GROWING ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE:
As I said earlier, some techniques which promote rapid growth are hazardous, one such technique is the use of antibiotics. Yes, in case you're wondering antibiotics can cause weight-gain:
Ranchers and farmers have been feeding antibiotics to the animals we eat since they discovered decades ago that small doses of antibiotics administered daily would make most animals gain as much as 3 percent more weight than they otherwise would. In an industry where profits are measured in pennies per animal, such weight gain was revolutionary (4).
Although it is still unclear exactly why feeding small "sub-therapeutic" doses of antibiotics, like tetracycline, to animals makes them gain weight, there is some evidence to indicate that the antibiotics kill the flora that would normally thrive in the animals' intestines, thereby allowing the animals to utilize their food more effectively (4).
What it means is that the broiler has been fed with antibiotics in its feed since decades and is one of the factors contributing to the rapid weight-gaining breed of broiler today. And they are still being fed antibiotics regularly in their feed. Not just any antibiotics, but some of the most powerful antibiotics:
Cipro and Baytril belong to a class of drugs known as fluoroquinolone, among the most powerful antibiotics currently available. The Food and Drug Administration, doctors, and consumer groups have all urged that Baytril be removed from the market on the grounds that its use in animals may eventually compromise the power of Cipro and similar antibiotics to fight disease in humans (4).
Researcher and author Karen Davis writes:
Antibiotics increase the problem by disrupting the hen’s intestinal microflora and immune system. Antibiotics are given to battery hens to control the bacterial diseases that thrive in crowded confinement, and to manipulate egg production. For example, virginiamycin is said to increase feed conversion per egg laid, bacitracin to stimulate egg production, and oxytetracycline to improve eggshell quality and extend the period of high egg production and improve feed efficiency in the presence of stress and disease. The overuse of antibiotics in animal agriculture has caused the evolution of “super” Salmonellae and other toxic bacteria that resist antibiotic treatment in chickens, humans, and other animals.
According to an article in Newsweek:
For sheer overprescription, no doctor can touch the American farmer. Farm animals receive 30 times more antibiotics (mostly penicillins and tetracyclines) than people do. The drugs treat and prevent infections. But the main reason farmers like them is that they also make cows, hogs and chickens grow faster from each pound of feed. Resistant strains emerge just as they do in humans taking antibiotics—and remain in the animal’s flesh even after it winds up in the meat case. And in the eggshell, as well.
The World Health Organization is concerned enough about antibiotic resistance to suggest significantly curbing the use of antibiotics in the animals we eat. In a recent report, the WHO declared its intention to "reduce the overuse and misuse of antimicrobials in food animals for the protection of human health." Specifically, the WHO recommended that prescriptions be required for all antibiotics used to treat sick food animals, and urged efforts to "terminate or rapidly phase out antimicrobials for growth promotion if they are used for human treatment (4).
Calls to curb the use of antibiotics in agriculture are growing louder the world over, with many experts concerned that we're careening toward a global public health crisis brought on by bacteria that do not respond to antibiotics. Margaret Chan, director general of the World Health Organization, has said that if we don't change course, we could soon live in a world where "things as common as strep throat or a child's scratched knee could once again kill (7).
Every year, 2 million people in the United States get infections that are resistant to antibiotics, and at least 23,000 people die as a result. Dozens of new, virulent bacteria have emerged over the years, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, which causes more than 11,000 deaths in the United States each year, and resistant strains of E. coli that can turn a run-of-the-mill urinary tract infection into a trip to the emergency room. Last month, Consumer Reports found that 97% of the 316 chicken breasts it tested were tainted with potentially harmful bacteria, and about half harbored at least one multidrug-resistant bacteria.
By overusing the drugs, we're now fast running out of low-side-effect antibiotics that actually work. Antibiotic resistance is a global problem, but are there any antibiotics inside the meat you eat ? People who support such commercial practices will say that antibiotics stay in the animal's intestines and do not get into the bloodstream but that is obviously not true and there is evidence; controlled studies showing animal plasma, liver and muscle testing positive for antibiotics (8). Since the antibiotics remain in the meat of animals for a few days after withdrawal, animals that have reached the desired weight for slaughter need to be withdrawn from antibiotic containing feed. This is called the withdrawal time, which is 5 days for chicken, which means that in order for chicken meat to be free from antibiotics the chicken must not be fed antibiotics for 5 days before it is slaughtered. This is a standard rule, but whether it is acted upon or not depends on the country where you live and how strict its food regulation authority is. We, who live in Pakistan know how our 'authorities' work. Sadly, our poultry farmers do import all sorts of chemicalized and antiobiotic containing feed for the livestock but do not take the necessary precautions in using them.
Another greater problem of using antibiotics in animal feed is that all of it leaves the animal's system in the form of excrement which then contaminates the soil, the crops, the water supply, the oceans and the fish. It is just like spilling huge amounts of antibiotics on the ground and everywhere else.
STRESS HORMONES:
This is most important and the least research has been done on this subject. Broiler chickens have high amount of stress hormones in them and this should come as no surprise since the conditions in which the chickens live and considering how sick and ill-treated they are it is very natural for them to have chronic stress. Over the internet it is hard to find the health effects of consuming broiler chicken upon human health, but you can easily find articles relating to broiler chicken's own welfare; how sick and health-compromised and disease ridden broilers are, the pain they are in, the agony they face each day, there is no happiness in their life, no place to jump and play and neither any energy to do so. They're actually young chicks that have grown so rapidly they appear to be adults but they are not adults. They are young but they live the life of old and bed ridden. It is then very natural to ask ourselves the question that an animal which is so unhealthy and unhappy, how can eating it make us healthy and happy ?
Domesticated chickens in extremely crowded conditions show typical evidence of nonspecific stress, such as increases in adrenal gland weight, regression of lymphatic glands, and depletion of adrenal cholesterol (Siegel 1960) (11).
Birds are very sensitive to threatening stimuli such that if the bird gives up trying to find an alternative and suitable coping strategy, or if it learns that none is available, it could enter the dangerous state of hopelessness, learned helplessness and behavioral depression. Such failure to cope could eventually produce psychosomatic symptoms and eventually death through the breakdown of internal homeostatic mechanisms (12).
It is hard to cite studies showing the relation between stress levels of animals and stress hormones being present in the carcass as there is little research in this area. However, there are studies which show how stress affects the meat quality; Broiler chickens at marketing age may be challenged by many acute stressors, such as heat stress, feed withdrawal, catching, crating, transport, and stunning (Ali et al., 1999; Sams, 1999). Preslaughter stress may cause undesirable changes in meat quality via altered pre- or postslaughter muscle metabolism, or both (14).
Stress hormones cause significantly lower protein and carbohydrate digestibility (15). It also makes the chicken vulnerable to diseases and infections.
It is known that during stress blood is deviated from organs such as the G.I.T (by activation of a adrenoceptors) though catecholamines in the blood and so decreases the absorbance of metabolites from the intestines. Catecholamines also decrease peristaltic contraction of the avian intestines by relaxing the smooth muscle (through activation of a2 and b adrenoceptors) and contracting the sphincters (through the activation of a adrenoceptors) (14). Gastrointestinal ulceration is one of the consequence of long term exposure to high levels of corticosteroids during stress (chronic stress) and definitely harms the efficiency of the GIT (16).
It remains to be investigated whether the effects of stress and presence of stress hormones in the chicken has an impact on us or not. What we know is that hormones are present in the bloodstream and can work orally and there can be many complex ways in which they may affect us. For example, the primary stress hormone present in birds is Corticosterone, in humans it is associated with brain function and memory.
Even the fear of being slaughtered causes the chicken to release stress hormones and affects meat quality. Therefore, nature would rather like you to slaughter chicken in the best possible manner causing it the least fear, doing so while it's calm and unaware, lying on the ground... it is not only for the chicken's good but for our own benefit. Ah, nature made this chicken to grow up under it's mother's arms, sleep in the warmth of her wings, explore the lands for its sustenance, play with its siblings and friends, utilize its energies; build and burn calories, see the light of the sun and darkness of the night, breath fresh air, have humans as its caretakers so that it could love them back, and after having lived a full life be slaughtered to return the favor in the form of good and pure food. This is what nature wanted, This is how nature would have it. Alas, look at what we did instead.
WHAT TO DO ?It is important to know that the presence of antibiotics and hormones in meat is not a problem specific to broiler chicken but it is also a problem with other industrial meats be it mutton or beef. This is the outcome of preferring profits over health and well-being and as such we can see it in many other areas. However, in Pakistan the beef and mutton market is less industrialized compared to poultry. Chicken is cheap and it constitutes a major portion of our food. Chicken is not bad, but the industrialized chicken meat is. So if we can then we should try to eat real chicken, i.e. the local or desi chicken, as it is more nutritious and tastier compared to broiler chicken. Lots of people raise desi chickens in their houses and enjoy desi eggs, which again are much better than broiler eggs. This practice should be appreciated and people should raise their level of awareness so that the demand for desi chicken and eggs rises thus making them easily available for all.
References:
1. Natural sex steroids and their xenobiotic analogs in animal production http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10408399709527771
2. "Prisoned Chicken Poisoned Eggs" by Karen Davis
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broiler
4. PBS, Antibiotic Debate Overview http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/meat/safe/overview.html
5. Turner, J.; Garcés L. and Smith, W. (2005). "The Welfare of Broiler Chickens in the European Union" (PDF). Compassion in World Farming Trust. Retrieved November 16, 2014.u
6. Bessei, W. (2006). "Welfare of broilers: A review". World's Poultry Science Journal. 62: 455–466. doi:10.1079/WPS2005108
7. http://www.prevention.com/health/healthy-living/truth-about-antibiotics-your-meat
8. http://www-staro.vef.unizg.hr/vetarhiv/papers/70-4/alhendi.pdf
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeranol
10. http://ssu.ac.ir/cms/fileadmin/user_upload/Mtahghighat/tfood/asil-article/g-p/Natural-incidence-of-aflatoxins-ochratoxin-A-and-zearalenone-in-chicken-meat-and-eggs_2014_Food-Control.pdf
11. http://www.charlieandpeggy.com/stresssiegel.pdf
12. http://www.isrvma.org/ImageToArticle/Files/Vol%2055%203%20HANDLING%20AND%20TRANSPORTATION%20OF%20BROILERS.doc
13. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02652030802627160
14. http://ps.oxfordjournals.org/content/87/8/1609.full#xref-ref-17-1
15. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.418.7655&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Physiological stress in broilers: Ramifications on nutrient digestibility and responses http://japr.oxfordjournals.org/content/18/2/338.full
https://naldc.nal.usda.gov/download/23665/PDF
16. Elrom, K.: Stress in Broilers due to pre-slaughter handling and transportation. D.V.M. thesis. University of Veterinary Medicine in Kosice, The Slovak Republic. 1999
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