Chicken Talk

I eat meat quite often, but usually in small portions and always with more vegetable dishes. As long as I keep the portions small, I don't have a problem. It's only once in a while, when it just so happens that I eat out almost everyday that particular week, or when it isn't easy to get vegetable dishes, or whatever, that I 'overdose' on my quota of meat.

When I do 'overdose' I can always expect to get sick not long after that. Coughing, sore throat, excess phelgm... It's my body's way of getting rid of the excess acidity that eating meat causes.

It's really not fun getting sick at all, especially since I can't sing with sore throat and coughs, so I try my best never to exceed my limits when it comes to eating meat, or when I do, I make sure I go through a detox program before I get too sick.

However, it never occurred to me that it might not be just about eating too much meat, but that it might also be about *what kind* of meat I eat.

Most of the time when we eat meat, and I'm pretty sure I can speak for almost everyone, it's usually chicken, because chicken is the cheapest and the most accessible (and it's halal to everyone). Pretty much 70% of the time I eat meat, it's usually chicken. The other 20% is fish, and 10% is a various assortment of pork, beef, lamb, etc (I don't like seafood though, seriously).

So everytime I 'overdose' on my quota of meat, it's mostly chicken that I ate. And then I get sick. *Everytime.*

But very recently, on one particular week, I had a few 'celebration' dinners with bf and various friends. So on that week, I had lamb one night, beef another, fish and pork another.... It was a *lot* of meat, and it just so happened I didn't eat any chicken. There weren't much vegetables on the menu either, by the way.

I completely expected to get sick, and was preparing to go through the detox programs, but I never did. I waited, and waited, and waited, and I didn't get sick. No sore throat, no coughing, no excess phelgm.

I wondered why.

Hmm....maybe my immune system has become stronger, I thought to myself. Or did I drink more water than usual this week? What did I do right?

I got my answer a few days later. My dad told me about one of his friends who stopped eating chicken, just chicken, and then started feeling healthier and not getting sick all the time. She was still eating other kinds of meat, but just eliminating chicken from her diet made her feel so much better already. My father wanted to try not eating chicken at all for a while, and see if we find any similar results.

Then it hit me that I didn't eat chicken at all that week when I ate a lot of meat. I told him there might be something to this theory, and we should definitely try it out.

So we tried it out, and our friends and clients did too, everyone of us boycotting chicken.

It isn't easy to do because sometimes the only thing on the menu has chicken in it, but when we have a choice, we never choose the chicken. So it seems so far that everyone has noticed some improvement on their general health, but it's still too soon to tell the long-term effects of cutting off chicken from our diets.

I believe that it isn't the chicken meat itself that causes problems, since white meat is supposed to be much healthier than red meat like lamb or beef. The problem with chicken is that they are *cultivated* by the millions to feed all of us.

It is the most widely eaten meat, and let's face it, most people eat more meat than vegetables, so there is a very *high* demand for chicken meat. Hence, the millions of chickens needed to feed us everyday, and the need for them to grow fast, or whatever. I honestly don't know what they do to the chickens, or how they do it, but I do know that whatever they are doing isn't good for us.

It's known that whatever chemicals are in our food gets into our system too when we eat them, and it goes for everything that goes into our mouths. Vegetables sprayed with pesticides are harmful if we don't wash them well before cooking and eating them, animals killed in slaughterhouses give us doses of agression because we're eating their chemical adrenaline when we eat their meat too, cows infected with mad cow disease and pigs infected with JE infect us too if we eat them...

So it should be common sense that chickens injected with steriods/hormones/whatever, would affect our general health as well, and we all know that the chickens that we eat are no where near completely natural. Not even some of the so-called 'kampung chicken' are really completely natural.

Anyway, the bottom line is, if you suffer from coughs, flus, sore throats, weak lungs or whatever, stay away from chicken for a few weeks, and see if that doesn't make you feel better. It's definitely easier and cheaper to try, than going to the doctor every few weeks, and you'd feel much better too at the end of it.