Coffee is the ultimate health drink; chicken is the
ultimate health food.
Well, maybe chicken is not the ultimate health food – a
good case can be made for beans, nuts, some berries – but chicken is a great
food to eat a lot of for several reasons.
First, chicken contains lots of nutrients.
After all, it’s where those great eggs come from.
Second, if you’re a meat-eater (and if you aren’t, nothing
I write about chicken matters anyway), if you eat lots of chicken, you’re much
less likely to eat lots of red meat and there’s no doubt that eating lots of
red meat and other meat foods like hot dogs is tied to extra health risks.
Third, it’s very hard to screw up a chicken dish, although
my wife once made avocado/salsa chicken which our entire family – including the
cook – judged to be inedible.
But that was a once off. Never again.
So – chicken is great and no wonder it’s linked to lots of
positive health benefits, the latest being a report in the American Journal of Epidemiology which found that among 20000 women,
those ate the most chicken as a teenager had the lowest risk later in life of
being diagnosed with a colonic polyp, one of those pre-cancerous lesions that
very often goes on to become cancerous.
I guess the headline should read: Chicken lickin’ cancer.
