EGGS, CANCER and a HEALTHY BREAKFAST

Thoroughly enjoying our Norwegian cruise
That's wine in the glass.  At $8.00 per pop.
Good thing she preferred diet Pepsi

I have written so many of these blog things that I begin to forget what I’ve “covered”.  Repetition of topics probably isn’t such a bad idea:  it will enable the reader to judge how little I knew about the subject originally, and how little I’ve learned since.  Anyway, I started out to write about mice and cancer research, but vaguely remembered that I’d done it before.  I looked back through the blog and, sure enough, there it was: “Forget dogs, the mouse is man’s best friend” (3/12/12).  Oh well,  I’ll write about chickens instead.

You almost certainly didn’t know that egg- laying hens contract ovarian cancer.  Probably because a laying hen uses her ovaries every day (if she’s a good chicken), the poor birds get ovarian cancer at a prodigious rate: 15-20% for 3-year olds, and worse the older they get.  Also, egg-laying chickens seem to have some of the same blood-markers as humans.  That being the case, a group I have been reading about has devised a study called “The egg-laying hen spontaneous OVCA Model.”  It strikes me as ingenious; quick, cheap, effective, and in the end you can eat your experiment.

I wonder, though, if I would have the guts to eat an egg produced by a chicken I knew had cancer.  Given that so many laying chickens contract OC – and darned few egg farms have clinical facilities – I would guess that a substantial portion of the eggs we consume come from sick mothers.  I intend to forget that by tomorrow morning.