There is an increasing belief that broiler chicken is bad for you because it is given growth hormones to grow faster. Then, when you eat that chicken, you consume those hormones too which adversely affects your health. How true is this? Should you stop eating broiler chicken to protect your body and health?
Are chickens given growth hormones?
No, they are not. Growth hormone injections are very expensive and if being administered, need to be given several times a day. Growth hormones are given to cattle in the West, but India has banned the use of growth hormones.
But, can they not be mixed with the chicken feed that the broiler chicken are fed?
No, it cannot be mixed. There are two types of hormones – protein hormones and steroid hormones. When you or an animal or bird consumes a protein hormone, it is broken down by the organism’s digestive system, making it ineffective. The growth hormone is a protein hormone, so it must be injected into the bloodstream and cannot be taken orally through feed or as tablets. This is also why insulin has to be injected into the blood for diabetes patients and it cannot be taken as tablets, since insulin is also a protein hormone.
Suppose someone still injects growth hormones into the broiler chicken. If you consume that injected chicken, your digestive system will still completely break down those growth hormones, because again, the growth hormone is a protein hormone. Even if we imagine an extreme scenario where by some unfortunate miracle, the injected growth hormones make it past your stomach and small intestine without being broken down and managed to get into your bloodstream, it still won’t affect our human bodies. This is because hormones are highly species-specific. So, avian or chicken growth hormones cannot affect human bodies. To affect our bodies, we need human-specific growth hormones, those of any other species won’t work on us.
Issues that need attention
Need for sustainable and affordable protein
India is a protein-undernourished country on average, and as economic growth pulls people out of poverty, meat consumption will necessarily go up, and plant-based diets or small-scale meat production will not be able to meet this demand. If we do make technological breakthroughs in sustainable and affordable high-quality protein in the near to medium term, that will be amazing.
Antibiotic Residues in Meat
Industrial meat production globally has several problems – the misuse of antibiotics (which honestly should be a bigger worry than growth hormones) which is resulting in the evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. PLEASE NOTE: antibiotic residues in meat WILL NOT AFFECT YOU DIRECTLY, but overuse by farms results in drug-resistant superbugs that affect society. Also – you won’t get the bug from the meat because cooking kills bacteria!
Industrial Farming and Climate Change
American/Brazilian beef is a far bigger problem than Indian poultry, a fact that activists often do not highlight enough. India is NOT the West in how its food systems work. Per capita, animal protein consumption in India is 10 times smaller, and most of it is dairy!
Regulation and Public Awareness
The relative inability of the Indian state to regulate bad behavior on the part of companies in general – requires the public to be better informed in terms of what they should demand from the companies that make our food. So I am not surprised that people are quick to believe in any kind of conspiracy theory about what companies are doing to our meat.
All that said, hormones are the last thing you should be worried about.
