Shadrach's Ex Battery and Rescued chickens thread.

[notabitail]

My diet advice.
Relax. Sress is likely to do more damage to your health than what you eat.
Chew your food and eat food that needs to be chewed. Watching some people eat makes me wonder if those digestive enzymes even saw the food that's just gone down the throat.
Try to eat locally grown food and if that's difficult at least try to eat food grown in the country you live in. This has a massive impact on all sorts of poison levels.
Try to learn to cook with seasonal foods for where you live.
Eat a proportion of uncooked food. Cooking is good for some foods, not so good for others.
There is a very good case for eating more fibre given our most common diets these days.
Eat food rather than taking pharma supplements.
Something the British are really bad at is herb and spice use in cooking. Apparently this stuff is good for you, even in small quantities. Eat more of them.
Lots of meat cuts, for those that eat it that one used to find in a butchers shop just don't feature in the supermarkets. A lot of these cuts of meat and even fish are tossed into cat and dog food. We could go back to eating cats and dogs, might be a good taste to aquire in event of dire circumstances or find a butcher that will do these cuts for you. Don't need to go extreme on this but kidneys,liver, heart, chicken gizzard is nice, pigs trotters and many more used to be eaten by people when I was a boy.
Accept you're going to die and one doesn't get an awfull lot of choice of what one dies of, or when. A lot of it is already coded in ones genes and all the "health food" in the world isn't going to change this.
Eat less for most of us. We don't need as much food as the average person eats.
Eat some of everything that is edible.

There you go. No need to worry about the studies. Follow the above and you'll be fine.

I'll add to this:
Eat ground beef. It tastes good. That's the only reason. Beef stroganoff, spaghetti, burgers, sloppy joes, the possibilities are endless.

 

[MrsNorthie]

Do yourself a favour, stop worrying about what's done.

Wasn't it John Cleese who said "Life is a terminal disease" ? Our governments have been playing fast and loose with health for decades, and we will probably never see full depth and scope of what all has been done. All we can do is live our lives to the fullest, and take the best care we can of other living things and just try to be happy, because everything has an expiry date.

 

[MrsNorthie]

I'm not entirely in agreement about that part. I'm more of the belief that we need to relearn how to coexist with the world, the same way we have for thousands of years. It's easy to see humanity as a blight when all we've ever experienced is industrialism and climate change, but our species has been an active participant and even a keystone species in many ecosystems for hundreds of thousands of years. I think humans are naturally altruistic and compassionate, we're just in an artificial environment that incentivises competition and destruction

I agree and think if we return to a more natural way of living, through practices like regenerative farming, the damage to environment can heal. Nature is amazing.

Totally inspired by @Perris, again, and the article on food forests, I am going to fence off our property with a modified hedgerow method that will work here (and not take decades to be functional.) and turn the entire property into a food forest, with the chickens having full access to do chickening.

When we get started, I will probably start my own thread, to document the process, that way if there is anyone that is interested can follow along and learn from our trials and errors. My goal is that by the time I am able to retire, we will have an almost totally self-sufficient homestead with chickens and turkeys running around wild and feral. All I really want to do in my final years is enjoy watching the chickens and turkeys having fun in the best environment that I can create for them and not have to spend too much time in the outside world. (it is too peopley out there. ;-) )

 

[Perris]

30 different vegetables

The recommendation is 30 a week from the whole PLANT kingdom, not just vegetables

What about we should eat 30 different vegetables a week? Whoever dreamed this up obviously doesn't live where I do. Lucky if I can pick 5 vegetables that will grow in a particular season at the supermarkets and even the few proper fruit and veg shops. That knocks a bit of a hole in the various diets advice.

Whereas it is easy to source 30 different plants a week. You can even forage some of them.

Something the British are really bad at is herb and spice use in cooking. Apparently this stuff is good for you, even in small quantities. Eat more of them.

Herbs and spices are plants. To count for the '30 a week' purpose you do need more than a sprinkling of something, but it is relatively easy to break the trad British habit of adding 'a pinch' and throw in a couple of tablespoons of most herbs and spices instead - and to the benefit of the recipes often I've found. Fortunately, I was never one for 'delicate' flavours anyway; they're lost on me.

That apart, I thought your dietary advice was very sound.

 

[BDutch]

When government advice finally catches up with reality and tests everything we eat only to find that it contains toxins and micro plastics what do you think their advice will be; stop eating?

Yes they do. Stop eating what is right and buy what is wrong. My gov (RIVM) really says stop eating your own eggs and buy the eggs from the supermarket. They say these eggs are better bc they have very little PFAS.

Do yourself a favour, stop worrying about what's done.

I am worried. A bit for myself but more for future generations. More and more people are living on a toxic dump and governments do not enough to prevent the increase of toxics in our environment.

PFAS are in fact several types of Fluoride chemicals that got the name forever chemicals. The result of getting to much PFAS is that our immune systems are compromised. More specifically, vaccinations no longer work well and we get sick more easily.
The different types of PFAS (PFOS, PFOA, GenX) seem to have different effects in the human body.

I’ve found different warnings from the Dutch and the Belgian health institutes, and I have been reading lots is unknown. But I do know it’s not healthy to live near chemical and heavy industries all over the world.

Sources:

Dutch RIVM:
What are the health risks that can arise from exposure to PFAS?

PFAS are associated with various health effects. They can have an effect on the immune system, on cholesterol in the blood, have effects on the liver and cause kidney and testicular cancer. Whether PFAS actually have health effects depends, among other things, on how much PFAS people ingest over time.

Flanders government:
Health risks of PFAS

The effects vary depending on the type of PFAS studied, but are mainly:

• restriction or disruption of immunity
• disruption of hormone balance
• disruption of liver function.

PFAS accumulate in the human body and break down extremely slowly. These factors also determine the toxicity of PFAS.

Try to eat locally grown food

I totally agree with most of the things you say/claim. But be careful with your own locally grown food if your garden flourishes on toxic waste.

 

[BDutch]

I think humans are naturally altruistic and compassionate,

I’d wish all humans were like that. But many/most are not. And there are very few altruistic humans SEO in big companies, stock trader, minister or president.

 

[Vulpes vulpes]

I’d wish all humans were like that. But many/most are not. And there are very few altruistic humans SEO in big companies, stock trader, minister or president.

Not to be too off topic, but the reason I think kindness is human nature is because helping each other is how we evolved to survive. Studies show that even infants show signs of distress when they see someone (even a stranger!) who's upset or sad, and exhibit relief when said person is happy again. I agree with your second point though, people who desire power are rarely the ones that deserve it. In my opinion, we act like jerks because we're forced to live in an industrial society made by jerks that rewards us for being jerks

 

[Perris]

I’ve found different warnings from the Dutch and the Belgian health institutes, and I have been reading lots is unknown

Indeed a lot is unknown. Global overview from 2023 here
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10380748/#sec8-ijms-24-11707

It is natural to fear the unknown and the new. And bad news always grabs more attention. But already some bugs have been found that eat these chemicals; see e.g. this, also from 2023
https://e360.yale.edu/digest/bacteria-break-down-pfas-forever-chemicals
and this from January this year
https://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases/2025/01/bacteria-found-to-eat-forever-chemicals.html

But I do know it’s not healthy to live near chemical and heavy industries all over the world

I think we can all agree with that. The dose is the poison with most things, and living near a mine or chemical plant more or less ensures a massive dose to the local vicinity. There is a reason for the NIMBY mindset; it's an evolved instinct among survivors.

 

[Perris]

Addendum to the last: compare PFAS-eating bacteria to "Traditional remediation involves excavating the contaminated soil and disposing of it in another location" (https://www.eea.europa.eu/highlights/soil-contamination-widespread-in-europe) - which doesn't fix anything, just shifts the problem to someone else's back yard! NIMBYism at state scale.

 

[RoyalChick]

Everything one eats has micro plastics in it. The water you drink and water the vegetables with has micro plastics in it, organic or not. I doubt there is anything grown that we can eat that doesn't.
When government advice finally catches up with reality and tests everything we eat only to find that it contains toxins and micro plastics what do you think their advice will be; stop eating?
I'm not suggesting this is a good thing, or even a thing we shouldn't be trying to do something about, not for us necessarily but for all the other creatures in the world we are poisoning. Rather than worry about us (the sooner the planet rids itself of us the better) it's the rest of the planets occupants and of course the planet itself.
So much complete nonsense is getting written about diet in particular. Every newspaper hack it seems trots out some reviewed study on one or other aspect of diet. What about we should eat 30 different vegetables a week? Whoever dreamed this up obviously doesn't live where I do. Lucky if I can pick 5 vegetables that will grow in a particular season at the supermarkets and even the few proper fruit and veg shops. That knocks a bit of a hole in the various diets advice.
Oh, but we can import a wider variety. What about the non immediate costs of these imports. The pollutants in food isn't just confined to a few countries!
Do yourself a favour, stop worrying about what's done.

True. But I think @BDutch is talking about PFAS which are not micro-plastics. They are colloquially called ‘forever chemicals’ because they have chemical bonds that are incredibly strong and don’t break down.
They are also ubiquitous as they have been used in household products for decades. Many were banned in the early 2000s and some studies suggest that the levels in human blood have been reducing since then. I think however the vast majority of all living creatures have PFAS in their bodies.