DYING FOR YOUR SUNDAY ROAST

The true cost of our obsession with cheap chicken? The lethal bacteria that can lurk inside leads to 500,000 cases of food poisoning every year... and 100 deaths ‘Chicken in the 1950s was much better for you’

ON SATURDAY, we began a powerful new series examining the terrifying truth about British meat, from pork pumped full of antibiotics to supermarket cuts containing MRSA. Here, we reveal the insidious truth about how today’s massproduced chickens are less healthy than in the past — and can also be contaminated with deadly bacteria...

ON THE outskirts of York, an area almost twice the size of the football pitch at Wembley is about to become the latest focal point of our national obsession with cheap chicken. If planning permission is granted, work will soon begin on six hangar-like sheds each measuring 122 metres by 20 metres. Next to them, a wood-fuelled boiler, wood chip store and feed silos will also be erected.

Then it will be down to business. On day one, 288,000 baby chicks will be delivered to the site to spend the rest of their short lives locked inside the windowless sheds. Over the days and nights that follow, they will do little more than eat.

While there will be enough fatalities along the way to fill two HGV lorries, after just five weeks (that is onethird of the time it takes to grow a potato) the chickens will hit their target weight.

They will then will be rounded up and shipped off to be slaughtered and processed. After that, the sheds will be jet-washed clean and disinfected and the whole process — or ‘growing cycle’ as it is known — begins again. Thus, in the course of a single year, more than 1.5 million chickens will pass along this slick production line and on to the shelves of the nation’s supermarkets and fast-food outlets.

Why? Because the British simply cannot get enough of cheap chicken.

Last year, we consumed 35.4kg of chicken per person on average, which is twice the amount of beef eaten.

Of that, about 1.42 million tonnes, or 972 million chickens, were produced here in the UK — an increase of almost 25 per cent since the turn of the century. The remainder, some 400,000 tonnes, was imported from as far afield as Thailand and Brazil.

A whole fresh chicken can be bought for just £2.50 at Iceland — the price of a cup of coffee. And the fast-food chicken sector has doubled in value in the past decade, led by High Street favourite Nandos.

Of course, the meat’s popularity is not entirely down to its cheapness; it is also seen as a healthy option.

But is that really the case? As the Mail highlighted on Saturday, intensive farming is being blamed for the emergence of a battery of superbugs that have been passed on to humans and which are now resistant to almost all known antibiotics.

A bacteria called campylobacter, found in almost three-quarters of chicken sold in the UK, is the biggest cause of food poisoning in the UK with more than 500,000 cases a year, 80,000 GP consultations and an estimated 100 deaths.

While campylobacter is killed in the cooking process, there is a risk of contamination during preparation, and anyone handling chicken is advised to take precautions such as storing it safely and washing hands after touching raw meat.

In most instances, symptoms of campylobacter food poisoning include diarrhoea, stomach cramps and a feeling of general unwellness that will last for up to a week. While unpleasant, symptoms will generally clear up without medical intervention.

However, there can be complications, especially among the young, elderly and infirm.

Contaminated poultry is blamed for four out of five cases. The bacteria that causes the illness lives primarily in the chicken’s gut, where it usually causes little or no problems.

Poultry pick it up in their natural environment, from soil, ponds and puddles, insects and rodents. For this reason, free-range chickens are just as likely to carry the bug as intensively reared poultry.

But in high-density flocks, the bacteria spread rapidly as food is contaminated by faeces.

Evidence suggests that intensively reared chickens may absorb the bacteria into their bloodstream through damage in their gut-lining caused by stress.

In terms of transmission to humans, the key moment comes when the bird is slaughtered and packaged. During this process, the bug can be transferred from the chicken’s gut to the surface of the carcass, and even on to its packaging.

Just how widespread the bug has become is highlighted by tests carried out by the Food Standards Agency. The FSA found that 73 per cent of chickens sold in the High Street in 2014-15 were carrying campylobacter (preliminary figures suggest that the figure has fallen in the past year).

Equally worrying is the fact that 75 per cent of the bugs found were resistant to at least one antibiotic or antimicrobial. And about five per cent were resistant to a wide range of antibiotics commonly used in human medicine — meaning that, should you fall ill after eating an affected bird, it is more difficult for doctors to treat you.

The figures suggest that more than 450 million chickens sold in the UK every year are contaminated with campylobacter that is resistant to at least one important antibiotic. And 36 million would be carrying bugs resistant to a wide range of antibiotics.

Campylobacter is not the only problem. Last month, the Mail revealed a Cambridge University study that identified a problem with superbug versions of E.coli in supermarket chicken.

As we have seen, modern farming techniques have been blamed for the rise of these antibiotic-resistant strains of food-poisoning bacteria.

Where animals are reared intensively, antibiotics have in the past been routinely fed to the whole flock to prevent illnesses spreading, rather than just to sick animals. This has led to common bacteria mutating and becoming resistant to the antibiotics used to treat them.

When people fall sick after coming into contact with these bugs, doctors find it increasingly difficult to clear up the resulting infections using medicinal antibiotics.

Not that this is the only problem with modern chicken production.

Scientists have warned that by rearing chickens to be big, by feeding them a grain-only diet, and by restricting their movement, we have compromised the nutritional benefits associated with their meat.

In a 2005 study, Professor Michael Crawford, a visiting professor at Imperial College and director of the Institute of Brain Chemistry and Human Nutrition, found that modern chicken contained as much fat, gram for gram, as a Big Mac.

Indeed, when compared with a bird from 1940, today’s chicken had twice as much fat, a third more calories and a third less protein.

Further tests on samples of chicken purchased between 2004 and 2008 found that the fat chicken does contain is low in the fatty acid omega-3 DHA, which is essential for brain development and which chicken used to be a vital source of.

‘There is a whole load of fat in the carcass, but the amount of DHA per 100 grams of meat has fallen precipitously from the 170 milligrams that we found in the 1970s to 20 milligrams or less today,’ Professor Crawford told the Mail. This, he says, is down to changes in the birds’ diet.

‘When I was growing up, chicken had no fat in it — it was a healthy

‘Modern broilers are now as fatty as a Big Mac’ ‘I wouldn’t eat this meat even if you paid me’

meat,’ he says. ‘When my mother cooked chicken for us for Sunday lunch, she had to put some bacon on it because there was no fat on a chicken.

‘If you get a whole chicken today and put it in the oven, the oven tray will be swimming in fat by the time you finish cooking it. I wouldn’t eat chicken today even if you paid me.

‘Chickens normally muck about in the farmyard and the fields and eat slugs and snails and other insects that eat green stuff,’ he said. ‘But they don’t now. When you feed them only on cereal, you are basically feeding them only seeds.’

This means that they do not ingest the building blocks found in green matter that the chicken would convert to omega-3 DHA.

‘The claim for chicken now is that it is all very much cheaper and you can get a lot of protein,’ he adds.

‘Yes, but the cost of that is the huge amount of fat that goes with it, number one; and secondly, the fact that the omega-3 DHA content of the chicken is appalling. If you actually worked out the cost per milligram of omega-3 DHA in chicken today, it would be horrendous.

‘You’d have to eat something like three or four chickens to get the same amount of omega-3 DHA that you would have got from one in 1970. And that would go with some several thousands of calories of fat.’

The changing nutritional make-up of chicken meat also applies, to some extent, to free range and organic chickens, which are also fed primarily on grains. However, because they are more likely to have access to natural, green food sources, some studies have suggested that organic meat does have higher levels of omega-3 DHA.

Just how dramatically chicken has changed was highlighted by researchers at the University of Alberta in Canada in 2014.

For the study, scientists raised three breeds of broilers (the name given to meat chickens). One was a strain that was common in 1957, another from 1978, and a third from 2005, called the Ross 308 breed, the most popular broiler in the world. They were fed an identical diet and photographed, measured and weighed weekly for 56 days.

What they found was that the Ross 308 chicken grew to be more than four times heavier than the 1950s chicken, which tipped the scales at less than a kilo.

It was also 50 per cent more efficient at converting food to meat than its predecessor, with weightgain focused on the breast area.

Because feed accounts for approximately two-thirds of the cost of producing chicken, the resulting savings have been substantial.

The dramatic transformation of the meat chicken has been largely achieved by genetic selection.

Breeders have purposefully selected birds with high growth rates that put on meat in the most sought-after areas — the breast — to breed from. Because of the large pool of chickens (some 40 billion are slaughtered each year globally), there are plenty to choose from. What they eat has also changed dramatically. A typical broiler is now raised on a computer-controlled diet of processed grains, such as corn, mixed in with soybean meal for protein and added vitamins and minerals.

Add in economies of scale by rearing them in flocks of 250,000birds plus, and there you have a chicken ready for slaughter in little more than a month — and all for a couple of quid.

But scientists and campaigners warn that these changes have not been without consequences for the chicken and the consumer.

Animal welfare activists warn that fast-growing breeds of broiler are more likely to suffer musculoskeletal problems, such as bone deformities and other leg disorders which can lead to lameness.

A study funded by Defra (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) in 2008 looked at 51,000 birds from 176 UK broiler flocks and found that 27.6 per cent had severe walking problems while more than 3 per cent were unable to walk.

Fast growth can also exert strain on the birds’ heart and lungs, resulting in what is known as ‘sudden death syndrome’.

Other problems include contact dermatitis, where the skin on the breast, legs and feet becomes inflamed. This is caused by contact between the bird’s skin and the soiled litter on which they are raised. Intensively raised chickens, unlike free range birds, will never venture outside.

The British Poultry Council, which represents the companies and individuals who breed, hatch, rear and process the chickens that produce 90 per cent of the nation’s poultry meat, defended the industry’s record.

Spokesman Richard Griffiths said it was leading the way in antibiotic reduction, with usage having fallen by 44 per cent from 2012 to 2015, and that it would fall further this year.

He said criticisms of welfare standards were ‘unwarranted’, ‘unfair’ and ‘outdated’ and that the industry produced ‘good-quality birds and good-quality meat in good welfare standards’.

He added: ‘There is not higher mortality. The breeding programmes look at lots of different elements of bird growth, including leg health, and the majority of how well a bird grows comes down to the level of husbandry.’

Nevertheless, some may struggle to understand the continued popularity of chicken. And they may also wonder what the next 50 years has in store for the billions of chickens that will need to be produced — bigger, quicker and cheaper — to satisfy our appetite for this meat.