Not too long ago, a rumour surfaced that claimed chicken wings were to blame for causing cysts, particularly ovarian cysts in women. One such gynecologist was rumoured as having informed his patient that the reason for her recurring cysts was linked to her love of chicken wings. The email urged women to cease from consuming chicken wings:

I advise the people out there to watch their diets and to lower their frequency of consuming chicken wings! People who receive this email, please forward it to your friends and loved ones. I am sure no one wants to see him or her suffer!

You see, the truth is in this modern day and age, chickens are injected with steroids to accelerate their growth so that the needs of this society can be met. This need is none other then the need for food. Chickens that are injected with steroids are usually given the shot at the neck or the wings. Therefore, it is in this places that the highest concentration of steroids exist.

These steroids have terrifying effects on the body as it accelerates growth. It has an even more dangerous effect in the presence of female hormones, this leads to women being more prone to the growth of a cyst in the womb.

The email cited the use of steroids in chicken as the cause of these cancer-causing properties, particularly because the wing was the site where these steroids was injected.

This fraudulent email has since become an urban legend and some women are still afraid to eat chicken wings. We can debunk this myth in one simple, truthful sentence:

The use of steroids and hormones in chickens has been banned in Canada since the 1960s.

Sources:
About.com: http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_chicken_wings.htm
Snopes.com: http://www.snopes.com/horrors/food/wingcyst.asp

Most of us are familiar with the urban legend that has plagued KFC over the years about the chicken with six wings 9 legs, no feathers, no beak and enormous breasts, so genetically modified that they can hardly walk. The variations on this theme are seemingly endless.

This so-called Frankenchicken started as a random email simply titled, Boycott KFC.

Some of the emails claim that these findings were a result of a study conducted by the University of New Hampshire. Under those circumstances, why wouldn’t you believe it? The university reacted by publishing a rebuttal on its website. Colette Janson-Sand, Associate Professor of Nutrition at the University of New Hampshire, said that her department fielded a flock of phone calls about the “chicken that isn’t chicken” rumour – a few of which she described as “hysterical.”

Besides the fact that these genetic modifications are beyond the scope of modern science, if you start to question the claims in the email, you’ll begin to see how preposterous it really is. The email claims that KFC is not really chicken at all but a “genetically manipulated organism” that is so unlike a chicken that the government has forbidden KFC to use chicken in their name – hence the name change from Kentucky Fried Chicken to KFC in 1991.

The reality is that KFC – like any other chicken restaurant in Canada – does not raise its own chickens. Farmers do – not mad scientists, but farmers. And those farmers raise normal sized, two legged, two winged, fully beaked, hormone-free, fully feathered chickens.

And KFC changed its name because in 1990, the Commonwealth of Kentucky in the United States was so debt-ridden that it decided to trademark the name ‘Kentucky’, so that anyone using the word in a name would have to pay licensing fees. KFC refused, as did a number of other companies, like the Kentucky Derby.

Nobody knows why these rumours start and why they hold true for so long. Maybe they serve the purpose of keeping consumers on their toes and making sure we do our job properly, by raising healthy chickens in good conditions.

Sources:

http://www.snopes.com/horrors/food/kfc.asp
http://www.snopes.com/lost/kfc.asp
http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/fooddrink/a/kfc_chicken.htm