I Blame The Chickens

Are young athletes developing bigger and faster than ever before? It looks to me like they are. If so I blame the chickens. Well the hormones in the chickens really.

I met multi gold medal winning swimming star Ian Thorpe a little while back and he had massively large feet. Size 17 feet. No wonder he could swim his feet were almost twice the size of mine (size 9 1/2) and were the closest thing to fins I have seen on a man. The fact that he worked increadibly hard and spent his life in the pool training might have been a factor in his success, but I blame the chickens.

Hormones in Chickens

In the 1950s chicken farmers decided they wanted bigger, meatier, faster growing chickens. Science had the answer. Kind of like the atom bomb answer of the 40’s. Chickens were treated with very large amounts of oestrogen.

So are hormones still added to chicken to make them grow bigger?

No, absolutely not the industry says. It’s a persistent myth.

Hormones haven't been added to US chickens for over 40 years. Yet since the mid '60s, soon after the hormone ban came into effect, the size of your average shop-bought chook has gone from 1.1 kilograms to nearly 1.8 kilograms. What's going on there?

The main reason is essentially selective breeding, the use of the biggest and best chickens to grow the next generation of chickens. And they throw in a few antibiotics as well just to keep the chickens healthy.

Cause of Big Feet?

Medical scientists will tell us it might be just normal genetic variation. It might be a form of Gigantism or Acromegaly. Nothing about chickens there until you research a bit deeper and see that Gigantism is the name to a particular growth defect that occurs during childhood, from over-exposure to growth hormone and Acromegalyis a hormonal disorder involving excess growth hormone production by the pituitary gland. See it was the chickens.

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