Australian consumers can rest easy knowing that Australian chicken meat is free of added hormones, and has been for many years. Over a decade’s worth of residue monitoring of chicken meat by the National Residue Survey confirmed this to be the case.
A key reason for people thinking hormones could be in chicken may be that the chickens sold these days in supermarkets, butcher shops and chicken shops are much bigger than what they may recall them to have been 20, 30 or 40 years ago, and it may be easy to conclude that this must be the result of some unnatural intervention. The actual reason for this increased growth rate and size is the ongoing extensive selective breeding programs that have been adopted by the industry over the past 60 years.
