What is in fast food chiken ?

What is in fast food chiken ?

Frying chicken is fairly simple, if a little messy. You dip pieces of chicken into a mix of egg and milk, roll them around in flour and spices, then cook the chicken in sizzling hot oil until the pieces are brown, crispy and delicious.
But wait! Don’t forget to add a dash of dimethylpolysiloxane, an anti-foaming agent made of silicone that is also used in Silly Putty and cosmetics.
Now add a heaping spoonful of tertiary butylhydroquinone (TBHQ), which is a chemical preservative and a form of butane (AKA lighter fluid). One gram of TBHQ can cause “nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse," according to A Consumer’s Dictionary of Food Additives. Five grams of TBHQ can kill you.
Sprinkle on thirteen other corn-derived ingredients, and you're only about twenty shy as many ingredients as a single chicken nugget from McDonald’s. And you were using pulverized chicken skin and mechanically reclaimed meat for your chicken, right?
No one in his or her right mind would cook chicken like this. Yet every day, hoards of Americans consume these ingredients in Chicken McNuggets, which McDonalds claims are “made with white meat, wrapped up in a crisp tempura batter.”
However chicken only accounts for about 50% of a Chicken McNugget. The other 50% includes a large percentage of corn derivatives, sugars, leavening agents and other completely synthetic ingredients, meaning that parts of the nugget do not come from a field or farm at all. They come from a petroleum plant. Hungry?
Scariest perhaps is the fact that this recipe is a new and improved, “healthier” Chicken McNugget launched in 2003 after a federal judge called the deep-fried poultry bites “a McFrankenstein creation of various elements not utilized by the home cook.” Also terrifying is the fact that these McFrankenuggets are overwhelmingly marketed to children who love their fun shapes and kid-friendly size.
While McDonald’s is of course the poster child for fast food ire, if you look at the nutritional information for chicken at any fast food restaurant, the ingredient list will be dozens of items longer than the egg, flour, chicken and oil recipe you might use at home.
Eating fast food is a habit, but it is one that you can break? No doubt you rarely plan to have a delicious meal at Arby’s for dinner, a lingering lunch at Carl’s Jr. or a special breakfast at the Burger King in the airport. It just happens. You are late, tired, hungry, broke, or all of the above. You have no time, and you must find something to eat before you crash. All of a sudden a bright, friendly sign beckons from the side of the road: Drive-through!
In five minutes you are happily chowing down on an inexpensive, filling meal. But don’t be fooled – the true cost of fast food does not come out of your wallet, but out of your body, your health, and your years on this earth.

A Terrible Disease in Newborns: Necrotizing Enterocolitis (NEC)

A Terrible Disease in Newborns: Necrotizing Enterocolitis (NEC)

One of the most dangerous complications in premature or sick babies is NEC, which involves the death of intestinal tissue. The exact cause of NEC is still unknown. It is hypothesized that a decrease in blood flow to the bowel prevents the bowel form producing the mucus that protects the gastrointestinal lining. NEC may also be caused by a bacterial imbalance in the intestine. According to the National Institute of Health, the following infants have a higher risk for NEC:

·         Premature babies

·         Babies fed concentrated formula

·         Babies who have received blood exchange transfusions

·         Babies in a nursery where an outbreak has occurred

NEC is a serious disease, with complications that include intestinal perforation, peritonitis, and sepsis. Standard treatments include replacing oral feedings with intravenous feedings, antibiotic treatment, and sometimes inserting a tube into the stomach to allow the escape of accumulated gas. Sometimes surgery is required to remove dead intestinal tissue.

Despite advances in neonatal intensive care over the past 20 years, the incidence of NEC in preterm neonates has not changed. Mortality of NEC remains around 25 percent, accounting for 1.4 percent of all infant deaths. Early, aggressive treatment improves your baby's chance of survival. This is clearly a disease you would NOT want your baby to have!

The Link Between Your Baby's Gut and Brain Development

The Link Between Your Baby's Gut and Brain Development

Your baby gets his or her first "inoculation" of gut flora from your birth canal during childbirth. If your flora is abnormal, your baby's flora will also be abnormal; whatever organisms live in your vagina end up coating your baby's body and lining his or her intestinal tract.

Studies show that a growing number of women have unknown vaginal infections at childbirth, which can result in the passage of abnormal microflora onto their babies. This introduction of unfriendly flora, combined with antibiotic use, can predispose a baby. GAPS can have very damaging long-term effects on a child's health, such as:

• Autism
• ADHD/ADD and learning disabilities, such as dyslexia
• Mood disorders, such as depression and bipolar disorder
• Schizophrenia
• A number of other psychological, neurological, digestive, and immunological, problems

This has profound implications for the autism epidemic. Rates of childhood autism are staggering, now 50 times higher in some areas than three decades ago. Not surprisingly, there is a matching epidemic of GAPS.

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride is a neurologist and neurosurgeon who has devoted years of her career to studying this phenomenon, and how to treat and prevent it. She believes nearly all children are born with normal, healthy brains. However, this normal brain function gets derailed by a malfunctioning digestive system, turning what should be a source of nourishment for your child into a source of toxicity.

Immigrants' health declines the longer in Canada: study

TORONTO - The longer immigrants reside in Canada, the greater their risk of developing cardiovascular disease -- and that effect is most pronounced among people of Chinese origin, a study suggests.
Doctors have long known that the longer people stay after immigrating to western countries like Canada, the less healthy they become, said principal investigator Maria Chiu, a doctoral fellow at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences.
"What we did not know was whether the degree to which this change happened was different for ethnic groups that lived in Canada."

Using population and health data, Chiu and her co-authors looked at the prevalence of risk factors for heart disease and stroke among immigrants who had lived in Ontario for 15 years or longer, compared to those who had resided in the province for less than 15 years.
They found that longer-term residents exhibited increased risk factors for cardiovascular disease -- among them Type 2 diabetes, obesity, smoking and high blood pressure -- compared with more recent ethnically matched immigrants.
"And it didn't matter whether you were white, Chinese, South Asian or black, this trend was seen across all the major ethnic groups living in Canada," Chiu said Monday. "We also noticed that the degree to which cardiovascular health declined was different across different ethnic groups."
Canadians of Chinese descent showed the worst decline in heart health over time, she said, followed by whites, blacks and South Asians.
Diabetes appears to be the primary reason: the disease was almost twice as common among long-term residents of Chinese and Caucasian descent than among more recent immigrants of the same ethnic backgrounds.
"This is likely driven by higher rates of obesity in these groups," said Chiu, noting that those living in Canada for 15 years or more had a 30 to 40 per cent higher obesity rate compared to their shorter-stay counterparts.
"Chinese are gaining more weight and developing more diabetes the longer they live here, more than any other ethnic group," she said. "It's no secret that the western diet is not the healthiest, and it's been found that the longer people stay in the western culture, the more likely they are to pick up bad habits, such as eating more frequently at fast-food restaurants, eating food high in fat and added sugars, and eating between meals.
"These bad habits are likely picked up by all the ethnic groups, but our study suggests that the Chinese and white groups are likely to adopt these bad habits to a greater degree than the other groups."
The study, published Tuesday in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology, also found smoking was a prominent risk factor for blacks and South Asians who had been in Canada 15 years or more -- and the difference was most evident among females.
"So South Asian and black females who were born in Canada or lived in Canada for at least 15 years were three to four times more likely to smoke than their recent immigrant counterparts," said Chiu, calling it a surprising finding since Ontario and the rest of the country have strict anti-smoking laws.
"We would have expected a decrease. But obviously there is vulnerability in the female population of people of South Asian and black descent that we really need to target our anti-smoking messages to, a little more effectively."
Higher psychosocial stress was also found among South Asian females who had been in the country at least 15 years, and although the researchers don't know the reasons behind it, stress rates correlated with increased tobacco use within this group.
While having a different genetic makeup can explain in part why some ethnicities are more prone to certain diseases, environment is also known to play a role. The question for researchers has long been which is it: one or the other or a combination of both?
"What makes this study interesting is that we compared similar genetic makeup, meaning Chinese versus Chinese who lived here longer versus those who were recent immigrants and we looked at how they differed," Chiu said. "So you're looking at people with similar genetic makeup and the only thing that's different between them is how long they've stayed here in a western culture.
"So this study further emphasizes that we can't blame all the risks of cardiovascular disease on genetics. We can't use that excuse that, 'Oh, we have bad genes, we can't help but get heart disease."'
She said the findings suggest that better strategies are needed to educate immigrants about trying to avoid adopting unhealthy dietary and other lifestyle habits in their new country that put them at an elevated risk of potentially deadly heart disease and stroke.
"Prevention is better than cure ... we need to protect the health of new immigrants from the get-go."
Some organizations, including the Heart and Stroke Foundation, have launched initiatives aimed specifically at ethnic populations.
"Having a better understanding of how length of time living in Canada impacts cardiovascular risk factors will help us to develop tailored prevention strategies to ensure the long-term heart health of all Canadians," said Vincent Bowman, director of research for the foundation's Ontario division.
Such programs are critical now -- more than 250,000 immigrants settle in Canada each year -- and for the country's future, said Chiu.
"Immigrants represent a large and growing segment of our Canadian population and we know that by 2031, immigrants are going to be responsible for the net growth of the Canadian population. So there's a need to better understand how we can preserve the healthy lifestyles of people who recently immigrate to Canada and how we can reduce the negative influences for the future."

Fat is BAD for You

Fat is BAD for You

Conventional medical "wisdom" continues barking that consumption of saturated animal fats is bad for you and causes heart disease. Most medical "experts" believes this to be true. But a hundred years ago, fewer than one in one hundred Americans were obese, and coronary heart disease was unknown and we had FAR more fat intake then we do today.

The demonization of saturated fat began in 1953, when Dr. Ancel Keys published a paper comparing saturated fat intake and heart disease mortality. His theory turned out to be flimsy, to say the least, but the misguided ousting of saturated fat has continued ever since. Fortunately, the truth is finally starting to come out, as medical scientists have finally begun to question Keys' findings. The truth is, it's the trans fat found in margarine, vegetable shortening, and partially hydrogenated vegetable oils that is the true villain, causing a multitude of health problems.
Coconut oil also fell into the "bad for your heart health" as a result of the saturated fat disparagement. This is most unfortunate as it is one of the healthiest fats on the planet. It is mostly medium chain triglycerides with over half of those belonging to lauric acid, which is an essential fat to regulate your immune system, and is also very prevalent in breast milk. It can curb hunger and help provide lasting energy.
I personally consume about one quart of coconut oil a week. It is the ideal fat to use when you are using intermittent fasting and seeking to replace calories from grains and sugar, and excessive protein.