Common Sense Chicken Truths

Full disclosure: I have been stewing a bit about a comment about eggs and laying hens I read on Facebook for at least a week now. If you are a regular reader of this blog, then you know I’ve written about eggs and the misconceptions about egg farming before – in fact, my post “Can We Chat About Eggs?” is still one of my most popular posts. I will admit I get frustrated by the sheer volumes of crazy, so-called information about eggs that I’m seeing nearly every day, and it’s also quite maddening to listen to all the untrue assumptions being made.

Here’s the Facebook post:

The right side is a post that a personal trainer shared, listing what she felt was a good shopping guide to healthy food choices – and there are certainly some good choices on this list. On the right, is part of a comment I made, in response to the idea that brown eggs are somehow superior to white eggs from a nutrition and health standpoint. I disagree – and the science behind the egg disagrees. White eggs and brown eggs are nutritionally the same – unless, of course, you buy eggs where the hen’s feed has been enhanced with flaxseed or some other feed ingredient to give it enhanced nutritional values above and beyond what is already a pretty perfect source of protein, vitamins and minerals.

Someone on Facebook obviously didn’t agree and instead, claimed that chickens that lay white eggs are “cranked out of egg farms where birds are bred to lay much earlier than normal, and filled with hormones and antibiotics.”

Sigh. Here we go again.

So … in response, let me just say this:

1) The time to make an egg and lay it is equal amongst all breeds – this information comes verbatim from a poultry expert I know at the University of Nebraska. The white chicken that lays white eggs in a backyard and the white chicken that lays white eggs in a barn on a large egg farm both lay about one egg every 26 hours or so. Ditto for a brown chicken laying brown eggs. There are no super-mega-pumped-up chicken breeds that lay eggs faster than that because an egg company wants them to. Seriously.

2) There are NO hormones given to chickens in the U.S. It is illegal to feed hormones to all poultry in this country – whether you raise a small flock or have thousands of birds on a farm. No hormones. None. Nada.

3) And as I have mentioned in previous posts, antibiotics by poultry farmers are used sparingly and as just one tool in the toolbox for ensuring bird health. We’re talking FDA-approved antibiotics, with strict veterinary oversight, to treat and prevent disease.

The truth is, food choices are personal – they are for you and they are for me, too. And what kind of eggs you buy (and why you buy them) is totally your business. Do you love brown eggs and think their yolks are a deeper yellow and more flavorful? The farmers I know who raise brown hens (who lay those brown eggs) love you for that! Are you on a budget and appreciate the $1.49 cents/dozen white eggs that come from any number of egg farmers across this country? Guess what – those farmers appreciate your love of eggs, too! I just ask that you please consider some of these common sense facts – and in some cases, basic physiological chicken truths – when you are in the supermarket, looking at the many amazing egg choices you have.