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Chicken No Antibiotics

What Type of Chicken Should You Buy? (Organic, No Antibiotics, Regular, etc…) You Might be Surprised at What they Mean!

Chicken No Antibiotics

When you go to the grocery store to buy chicken, you’ve probably noticed that lately you’re getting more and more options.

Instead of just choosing what brand you want to buy, now you have choices such as organic chicken, antibiotic free chicken, free range chicken, non-GMO chicken, and more.

And to make matters worse, the prices are all over the place! Of course “regular” chicken it the least expensive, and then each other option seems to be more expensive than the last!

Even at my local (non Super) Target they now have multiple options for chicken.

In fact, the picture is of chicken I bought just this week!

So the question is, which chicken should you buy? Should you be spending more money on the “healthier” chicken so that you’ll be eating something that’s better for you? Or should you save your money since they don’t mean much?

The truth is, it’s up to you! There are people out there that only want to buy organic and non-GMO everything, others that only buy the “regular”, and others who are somewhere in the middle.

So the best thing to do is find out what all of the options are, and then see what fits you and your family. If it’s different than what your friends or family are doing, so what? You need to do what’s best for you and your family.

Now let’s go over some of the different kinds of chicken to see what sounds best for you.

I have to admit, after all of the research I did, I was really surprised at what all of the labels meant.

Let’s start with the labels that don’t really mean anything:

  • Natural – like with any other industry, saying it’s “natural” doesn’t mean a thing. For chicken, it means that it can’t have any artificial ingredients. Well, since you’re buying a chicken, you don’t need to worry about that. It’s chicken. There are no artificial ingredients. So ignore this.
  • No Hormones – This means that the chickens were never given any growth hormones. That sounds great, right? And what you’d want to make sure you buy? Great then! No matter which chicken you buy, it’s hormone free. No chickens raised in the US can be given hormones legally. This goes for steroids as well.  So again, you can ignore this.

Now let’s get to the options that really do make a difference in the chicken you can buy:

  • Organic – Organic chicken is only fed with vegetarian organic non-GMO food. This means that their food was grown without the use of pesticides or artificial fertilizer. That sounds great. Here’s the part where it starts to get a bit fuzzy. They are not allowed to be given antibiotics starting on the second day of life. So the day they after they come out of their shell, they can be given antibiotics. Also, they must be given access to the outdoors – but there is no amount of time they have to actually BE outdoors. They just have to have access to the outdoors if they want to go outside.
  • No Antibiotics This means that the chickens have never been given antibiotics during their lifetime. Not even on the first day.
  • Non-GMO – To be non-GMO, the chicken’s vegetarian feed must be less than 0.9% GMO.
  • Free Range – A chicken is free range if it has access to the outside. Once again, there is no amount of time that they have to actually BE outside. They just have to have access to the outdoors so that they can b outside if they want to.

That’s a lot of information. After going through it, and maybe reading some of the articles at the bottom of this post, you can figure out what is best for you and your family. There is no right or wrong. As you can plainly see, none of the options are perfect, and there is definitely a price difference between all of them.

What do I do? Up until recently, I’ve been buying regular chicken. I didn’t really think too much about it.

Recently though, I started seeing more and more chicken sold with “no antibiotics” on the label, and so I started buying that.

The price is usually very similar to chicken, and at most a little bit more expensive. It’s easy to find almost anywhere (like I said earlier, I got the chicken above at Target) and I am nervous about having foods with too much antibiotics for multiple reasons. First, I’m allergic to one antibiotic, and second I’ve read a lot about what too much antibiotics in your system can do (causes way too many issues, plus you can become resistant to them) so personally, for my family when I have the option, I’ll buy antibiotic free chicken.

But I won’t go too far with it. If I’m out at a restaurant or at someone’s house, I will still eat the chicken without asking what type it is.

I have to admit I am really shocked that organic chicken can still be given antibiotics on the first day though!  I didn’t expect that at all, and it makes me glad I haven’t been spending the extra money for it.

That’s me though. You could be completely different. That’s why I love that we’re all individuals. You can take the same information and come up with a completely different conclusion based on the needs of your family.

Either way, I really hope this helps! I know it can be confusing with so many labels out there.

If you’ve tried your local grocery store and can’t find anything but regular chicken, here are a few other places you can try: (you may be surprised!)

  • Peapod by Stop & Shop has a lot of organic and antibiotic free chicken. If you order it online, see the site as you’ll get money off your first order. They’re in many states and if you want to order online you can pick it up or get it delivered.
  • Target has organic chicken as well as antibiotic free chicken. You can check online to see which stores near you have it, but you can’t purchase it online.
  • Walmart definitely isn’t the first (or second, or third…) place I’d think of for organic meat, but they have quite a few choices of organic chicken at their stores as well.

Enjoy,
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P.S. If you’d like to read more about this, here are some great articles I found. Hopefully they’ll give you even more information about the different types of chicken you can buy.

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