Too much fried chicken dooming Belizeans
Food is a subject never far from the minds of most of us and tonight Ann-Marie takes a look at a popular eating habit that may be sending us to an early grave.
Ann-Marie Williams, Reporting
Walk around Belize City, any given day or night and you’ll find an enormous number of Belizeans buying fried chicken. While there is no specific date that marked the take over of Chinese fried chicken as Belize’s number one fast food, the cheap and tasty treat does not come without a price. All of that grease may slowly kill us.
Dr. Victor Lizarraga, Surgeon
“Eating fried chicken on a daily basis is not a good idea.”
According to Dr. Victor Lizarraga, fired chicken contains the double whammy of high cholesterol from both the skin of the bird and the saturated fats that it’s cooked in.
Dr. Victor Lizarraga
“We see this in the western diet. For example, in post-mortems done in children as young as five years, if you open their arteries, you can see what is called fatty streaking, especially in the main arteries of the body. This fatty streaking is due to the accumulation of cholesterol under the lining the blood vessels, and this is the beginning of a condition we call arteriosclerosis, which in layman’s term is the hardening of the arteries.
Hypertension too he says is also very common, and no longer in just the older population.
Citizen Buying Fried Chicken
“I make sure that everything’s alright with my health and so on, and I drink medicine to time and take my vitamins, and I keep in shape so I know it doesn’t really affect me to that extent.”
Or so he thinks. Lizarraga says there’s also a connection between high cholesterol and gall bladder disease, as ninety percent of the time gall stones are made up of stones of pure cholesterol.
Dr. Victor Lizarraga
“The reason why these things form is because the liver excretes into the bile a mixture of cholesterol and other chemicals, which in the proper balance, remain in solution. Whenever one of these things is in greater concentration, they start to crystallise. And this is why you have gall stones, because the content of cholesterol that is excreted into the bile is much higher, so you end up with cholesterol crystals.”
Ann-Marie Williams
“Anybody ever told you that eating fried chicken for a long time may be bad for your health?”
Citizen Buying Fried Chicken
“Not really. We buy it because it’s the fastest food. The girls get lazy in Belize now, they want to buy only fast food.”
Ministry of Health nutritionist Gilda Richardson offers Belizeans a healthy alternative.
Gilda Richardson, Nutritionist, Min. of Health
“You should eat a lot of fruit and vegetables, but if you’re poor, I can understand you don’t want to spend money, or a lot of money on fruits and vegetables because their expensive and they don’t really full the gut. But we are encouraging people who can afford it to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables because it’s not only the poor people who buy the fry chicken. You have wealthy, to do people who do buy it. Fat really gives flavour to food, so people go out and buy it, and it’s very accessible, you have a whole lot of people purchasing it. You have fried chicken places all over town in different areas. They even have special names for them.”
Citizen Buying Fried Chicken
“I buy this chicken, but I take it tonically because I already know if you can’t abuse it because it’s not good for you. Everybody says this Chinese chicken has a lot of grease.”
What also has a lot of cholesterol-laden grease, is animal produce in general.
Dr. Victor Lizarraga
“In animal produce, apart from meat itself, eggs, very high in cholesterol, milk, cheese, sausages. These are all high fat and cholesterol containing foods.”
And one way to keep check of your cholesterol is to watch what you eat. A baseline cholesterol test is also advisable once you’re thirty-five years old. Once it’s below one hundred and ten, it’s normal.
Dr. Victor Lizarraga
“A normal cholesterol level can be a little bit misleading because your blood is just a conduit, it’s just a road, what is on the road is not what is in the vessel. What you need to look at is your diet. If your diet is very high in red meat and in meats in general with no vegetables or cereals and other things that tend to lower the cholesterol intake.”
“Fry chicken is very high in fat content because of what is used to fry it with and because of the content of cholesterol especially in the skin and certain parts of the chicken. Because it’s high in fat, the net result of that is that you become obese over a period of time of eating chicken. One fry chicken won’t do it, but if you like fry chicken, more or likely it will.”
Ann-Marie Williams for News 5.
Cutting down on alcohol and smoking and increasing your exercise is also a good way to lower your cholesterol. But for a quick fix, watch the grease.
