Factory foods filled with disease

You may like you chicken baked, broiled, grilled or fried... but odds are you're also enjoying it with a heaping helping of contamination.

Consumers Union, the organization behind the magazine Consumer Reports, found bacterial contamination in nearly two-thirds of store-bought chickens during a recent test.

And guess what? That number's an improvement! Just two years ago, they found 80 percent of all supermarket chickens to be contaminated.

In the recent analysis, the company bought 382 fresh broiler chickens from 100 supermarkets in 22 states. And they found the number-two cause of food-borne illness, campylobacter, present in 62 percent of the chickens.

Not only that, but they also found salmonella – our leading cause of food-borne sickness – in 14 percent of the chickens.

Still feel like getting your meat from factory farms?

These numbers may shock you – but I'm not surprised in the least. It's a testament to American resilience that we're not dropping dead left and right from massive waves of food poisoning, and not just from the chickens.

I won't eat any of the contaminated garbage that emerges from these filthy factory operations, and not because I don't like meat. I'm a certified carnivore – but I only eat grass-fed beef and meat from free-range chickens from smaller farms that know how to keep things clean and safe.

More expensive, sure – but this isn't an area where you want to skimp, because once meat enters those big soiled slop-halls, anything can happen.

Just take a look at the recent news out of Texas, where a Tyson plant that makes seafood soup was cited for food contamination.

FDA inspectors found "serious violations" there... so here's what they did: They sat around for a couple of months... and then they wrote the plant a letter. I wonder if they used a quill dipped in ink and sent it via Pony Express, too.

Meanwhile, seafood soup from this place is out there on supermarket shelves right now... and the plant is still in operation, probably in the same condition – since the company has of course denied any problems there.

One more reason to avoid canned food at all cost.

Ruffling feathers and kicking cans,

William Campbell Douglass II, M.D.