Photo: collectmoments on Flickr
Yesterday I read this article from AFP entitled “Americans turn to backyard chickens for food security“. It was a good article, talking about how the sale of chicks is up in Idaho and Washington states, as well as Oregon. It touched on the misconception that raising chickens for the eggs is going to be a less expensive option than store-bought eggs.
And then the article just crashed and burned at the end:
All contention aside, experts say there is little nutritional difference between homegrown and commercial eggs. Colors in the shell are different, with the bulk of commercial hens producing white-shelled eggs and backyard varieties everything from brown to light green, and pigments in the feed of backyard flocks tend to deepen the yellow of their yolks.
WHAT? What contention? What experts? Who? Why? How?
Granted, this wasn’t the focus of the article. The focus was food security. (To which I say… erm… okay. It’s a start, I guess.) But then why include this line at all if you are not going to elaborate?
Mother Earth News conducted an egg testing project in 2007. The methodology is not perfect, but at least the nutritional information about the free-range eggs come from an accredited laboratory in Portland. They compared eggs from 14 free-range flocks to the stated values in the USDA Nutrient Database and came to the conclusion that free-range eggs can contain, on average, more omega-3s, more beta carotene, more vitamin A, and less cholesterol and fat than the commercially raised eggs. (Click here for the full chart — opens as a PDF.) In 2008, they looked at vitamin D and concluded that free-range eggs also contain 4 to 6 times more vitamin D than commercial eggs.
Should they – or someone – do a better test? Yes. Sure. Let’s have it. Mother Earth News isn’t the first to find similar information, but I have yet to find somthing written by independent “experts” that claims otherwise and shows results from actual tests.
In the future, AFP, cite your sources, okay?
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