Researchers studied the dietary habits of 80,000 people in Britain and surveyed participants on life satisfaction, mental well-being, history or presence of mental disorders, nervousness, feelings of depression, and personal self-reported health and happiness.

As subjects' daily intake of fruits and vegetables increased, so did their sense of happiness and well-being. The dose-dependent pattern peaked at seven servings per day; eating more yielded no additional mood enhancement. More…

These results demonstrate an overall association of vegetarian dietary patterns with lower mortality compared with the nonvegetarian dietary pattern," the researchers wrote in the study. "They also demonstrate some associations with lower mortality of the pesco-vegetarian, vegan and lacto-ovo-vegetarian diets specifically compared with the nonvegetarian diet.

Researchers found that compared with nonvegetarians, all vegetarians had a 12 percent lower risk of dying over this time period. Specifically, vegans had a 15 percent lower risk of death, lacto-ovo-vegetarians had a 9 percent lower risk of death… More…

The risk of hospitalisation or death from heart disease is 32% lower in vegetarians than people who eat meat and fish, according to a new study from the University of Oxford.

Heart disease is the single largest cause of death in developed countries, and is responsible for 65,000 deaths each year in the UK alone. The new findings, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, suggest that a vegetarian diet could significantly reduce people's risk of heart disease.

The researchers found that vegetarians had lower blood pressures and cholesterol levels than non-vegetarians, which is thought to be the main reason behind their reduced risk of heart disease.

Vegetarians typically had lower body mass indices (BMI) and fewer cases of diabetes as a result of their diets, although these were not found to significantly affect the results. If the results are adjusted to exclude the effects of BMI, vegetarians remain 28% less likely to develop heart disease.

The findings reinforce the idea that diet is central to prevention of heart disease, and build on previous work looking at the influence of vegetarian diets, the researchers say. More…

Health officials are seeing more food poisonings caused by a bacteria commonly linked to raw milk and poultry.

A study released Thursday said campylobacter (camp-eh-lo-BACK'-ter) cases grew by 14% over the last five years.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report was based on foodborne infections in only 10 states ? about 15% of the American population. But it is seen as a good indicator of food poisoning trends.

Until the Food Safety and Inspection Service (F.S.I.S.) of the Department of Agriculture (U.S.D.A.) can get its act together and start assuring us that chicken is safe, I'd be wary.

This is not a shutdown issue, but a "We care more about industry than we do about consumers" issue. Think that's an exaggeration? Read this mission statement: "The Food Safety and Inspection Service is the public health agency in the U.S. Department of Agriculture responsible for ensuring that the nation's commercial supply of meat, poultry, and egg products is safe, wholesome, and correctly labeled and packaged."

What part of "safe" am I misreading? More…



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Many people have decided to eat only chicken to avoid the health, environmental, worker and humane questions surrounding red meat. Yet the track record of US chicken in these areas is no better than red meat—and may be worse.

Here are some things you should really know about your chicken:

1. Extreme Salmonella
2. E. Coli
3. Arsenic
4. Antibiotics
5. Chicken Yuckets
6. Chicken From China
7. Cruelty to Animals
Details…

Never mind cigarettes; the Surgeon General should slap a warning label on chicken. Recent nationwide testing by Consumers Union, the advocacy group behind Consumer Reports, notes that of the 484 raw broilers examined, 42 percent were infected by Campylobacter jejuni, and 12 percent by Salmonella enterides.

The latest USDA research notes similar Salmonella levels. Now add in the fact that we each consume about 70 pounds of chicken a year—more than our intake of beef, pork, or turkey—and it's a wonder broilers don't come with barf bags. More…

Arsenic is bad stuff-no argument, but most of the arsenic in the American diet comes not from rice; more than three quarters comes from animal products. Beef, milk, pork, hot dogs, eggs, and chicken.

Purdue is the most contaminated. One bucket of American fast food chicken may exceed the EPA safety limit for arsenic in a glass of drinking water by 2000%.

How did it get there? The poultry industry fed it to them More…

Roxarsone, known by its brand name 3-Nitro, kills intestinal parasites, promotes growth and makes meat look pinker. It contains organic arsenic, which is far less toxic than its inorganic counterpart. For decades, it was believed that animals simply excreted organic arsenic. But evidence is emerging that it may also be converted into its carcinogenic cousin in the body of the chicken.

The study, which measured inorganic arsenic levels in chicken, found roxarsone in about half the samples. The researchers said they tested meat samples that were gathered from December 2010 to June 2011 ? before the sale of roxarsone was suspended ? because they wanted to examine whether the drug led to increased levels of inorganic arsenic. More…

Last week, researchers from New Zealand published a paper that showed that kids raised on livestock farms had an elevated risk of developing blood cancers like leukemia and lymphoma later in life.

The team found that subjects whose parents were livestock farmers were 22 percent more likely than those whose parents weren't farmers to develop blood cancer as adults. The finding was especially pronounced among children of poultry farmers, whose blood cancer rate was three times that of their non-farm-kid peers. More…

Use of aresenic in chicken feed to kill parasites, killing humans

Scientists confirmed what grandmothers have known for centuries - chicken soup is good for colds. Chicken soup-like grandma used to make-contains several ingredients that affect the body's immune system. Dr. Stephen Rennard and a team at the University of Nebraska Medical Center found anti-inflammatory properties that helps explain why it soothes sore throats and eases the misery of colds and flu.

But "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature!" To make huge profits Tyson pioneered the factory production of chickens, raising them by the thousands in overcrowded conditions, feeding them recycled "rendered" feed processed from cancerous chickens, road kill, chicken manure, offal and a witches' brew of odious chemicals and drugs. It is not surprising these chickens were unhealthy.

Profits went down because chicken raised in such unnatural conditions are so seriously infested with parasites they barely grow. In the 1970s the poultry industry began adding arsenic-based chemicals to chicken feed. Roxarsone is commonly mixed with feed to control intestinal parasites and promote growth in both poultry and hogs. More…

Would you like your chicken traditional, crispy, or extra-cancerous?

It sounds like a bad dream at KFC, but unfortunately, it's true: Consuming conventional, nonorganic chicken meat can increase your risk for cancer.

This is due to the way factory-farmed chickens are raised and fed, including with arsenic, a known carcinogen. The arsenic is part of a growth-promoting ingredient called roxarsone, produced by a subsidiary of Pfizer. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, roxarsone helped prevent a parasitic disease in chickens known as coccidiosis. More…

Lauren Hodge, a Dallastown Area High School student from York Township recently won top honors in her age group at the Google Science Fair in California. Her science fair project looked into whether certain marinades reduce the amount of cancer-causing compounds created by the grilling of meat, specifically chicken.

Lauren's research was inspired by a lawsuit against seven major fast food companies in which samples of grilled chicken were found to contain cancer-causing mutagens and carcinogens. These chemicals form when proteins combine with sugars after heat is applied. More…

Too much of either one may clog your arteries.

That's according to a study published on line Monday in the journal Atherosclerosis, which examined the effects of egg-yolk consumption on the thickening of arterial walls.

Plaque buildup increased according to age after age 40 in a fairly steady fashion. But among the 20 percent of participants who reported eating the most egg yolks - three or more per week - [emphasis ours] carotid plaque increased "exponentially," according to the study. The buildup equaled about two-thirds of that seen among the heaviest smokers in the group. More…

Where to begin? Let's start with the obvious egg facts. Eggs have zero dietary fiber, and about 70 percent of their calories are from fat—a big portion of which is saturated. They are also loaded with cholesterol—about 213 milligrams for an average-sized egg. For reference, people with diabetes, cardiovascular disease, or high cholesterol should consume fewer than 200 milligrams of cholesterol each day. (Uh oh.) And, humans have no biological need to consume any cholesterol at all; we make more than enough in our own bodies. More…

Plaque buildup increased according to age after age 40 in a fairly steady fashion. But among the 20 percent of participants who reported eating the most egg yolks—three or more per week—carotid plaque increased "exponentially," according to the study. More…

Q. What's wrong with hot dogs?

A. Nitrite additives in hotdogs form carcinogens.

Three different studies have come out in the past year, finding that the consumption of hot dogs can be a risk factor for childhood cancer.

Peters et al. studied the relationship between the intake of certain foods and the risk of leukemia in children from birth to age 10 in Los Angeles County between 1980 and 1987. The study found that children eating more than 12 hot dogs per month have nine times the normal risk of developing childhood leukemia. A strong risk for childhood leukemia also existed for those children whose fathers' intake of hot dogs was 12 or more per month.

Researchers Sarusua and Savitz studied childhood cancer cases in Denver and found that children born to mothers who consumed hot dogs one or more times per week during pregnancy has approximately double the risk of developing brain tumors. Children who ate hot dogs one or more times per week were also at higher risk of brain cancer.

Bunin et al, also found that maternal consumption of hot dogs during pregnancy was associated with an excess risk of childhood brain tumors.
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Two other reports in the same issue of Cancer Causes and Control also suggest that children born to mothers who eat at least one hot dog per week during pregnancy have double the normal risk of developing brain tumors, as do children whose fathers ate hot dogs before conception. More…

The World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) has completed a detailed review of more than 7,000 clinical studies covering links between diet and cancer.1 Bottom line: Processed meats are too dangerous for human consumption. Consumers should stop buying and eating all processed meat products for the rest of their lives.

Processed meats include bacon, sausage, hot dogs, sandwich meat, packaged ham, pepperoni, salami and virtually all red meat used in frozen prepared meals. They are usually manufactured with a carcinogenic ingredient known as sodium nitrite.2 This is used as a color fixer by meat companies to turn packaged meats a bright red color so they look fresh. Unfortunately, sodium nitrite also results in the formation of cancer-causing nitrosamines in the human body. And this leads to a sharp increase in cancer risk for those who eat them. More…

It's not that we are trying to pick on meat (I'm a meat-eater, in moderation), but the recent studies linking carnivorous habits to health problems seem to be piling up. We've had Salami Suicide and Death By Bacon. Now, there's a study that links red meat consumption to an increased risk of Type 2 diabetes.

The researchers tracked what happens after people changed their meat-eating habits, using data from the Health Professionals Follow-up Study and the Nurses' Health Study, which include about 100,000 people. Diet was assessed by food frequency questionnaires.

"Some people [in the study] increased their red meat consumption and other people decreased their consumption," says Dr. Frank Hu of the Harvard School of Public Health, one of the co-authors of the paper, which appears in JAMA Internal Medicine.

The study found that among those who started eating more red meat, about 3.5 servings more per week, the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes during four years of follow-up increased by almost 50 percent, which Hu describes as "a really large increase." More…

Sausages, ham, bacon and other processed meats appear to increase the risk of dying young, a study of half a million people across Europe suggests.

One in every 17 people followed in the study died. However, those eating more than 160g of processed meat a day - roughly two sausage and a slice of bacon - were 44% more likely to die over a typical follow up time of 12.7 years than those eating about 20g. More…

Over the years, eating too many burgers, steaks pork chops or other red meat products has been linked to heart disease, diabetes and some cancers. In particular, processed red meat, such as bacon, hot dogs or bologna, has especially strong links to chronic diseases.

But the latest research brings even more dire news for hardcore carnivores. In addition to increasing the odds people will get sick, red meat--whether it is processed or not can actually increase the risk of premature death overall. More…

Saturated fats are hard for the body to digest and it responds by pumping more bile into the gut. This changes the gut environment and leads to a change in the bacteria growing there, the researchers said. More…

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Americans eat more meat than any other population in the world; about one-sixth of the total, though we're less than one-twentieth of the population.

But that's changing…

Considering the fairly steady climb in meat consumption over the last half-century, you might say the numbers are plummeting. The department of agriculture projects that our meat and poultry consumption will fall again this year, to about 12.2 percent less in 2012 than it was in 2007. Beef consumption has been in decline for about 20 years; the drop in chicken is even more dramatic, over the last five years or so; pork also has been steadily slipping for about five years.