Trying to eat healthier?
Then I’d venture to guess chicken is one of your go-to protein sources.
One of the healthiest diets around — the Mediterranean diet — encourages people to get most of their protein from lean sources like chicken and fish. So, chicken finds its way onto the plates of health-conscious people.
The problem is, chicken isn’t just a healthy source of lean protein. It’s a breeding ground for bacteria.
You probably know that you have to be extra careful when handling raw chicken — even more cautious than when you handle other types of meat.
Part of the reason is that dangerous bacteria like Salmonella, Campylobacter and E. coli are present in chicken while they’re alive, and stick around even after the bird is processed for sale in a supermarket.
If chicken is cooked at a high enough temperature, that should be enough to ensure your chicken is safe to eat.
However, it appears that even if you think you’re cooking your chicken thoroughly and don’t end up with food poisoning, these dangerous bacteria can still find their way into your body and cause an extremely uncomfortable, and often resistant, health problem…
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E.coli: The cause of resistant and recurrent urinary tract infections
A few years ago, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had a nagging suspicion about the poultry on our plates.
They thought it could be bringing dangerous bacteria into our bodies that eventually end up in the urinary tract and potentially the bladder, too.
They first began piecing together the connection between chicken and urinary tract infections (UTIs) after noticing that, in previous research, antibiotic-resistant UTIs were typically caused by a particular strain of E. coli related to the E. coli found in chicken.
“When we compared the fingerprints of the E. coli from the poultry and the human UTI cases, we found there’s an overlap of some genotypes,” said study author Dr. Lee Riley, a professor of infectious disease at Berkeley’s School of Public Health.
Since those findings in 2017, the treatment of UTIs has become complicated. Today, many of the E. coli strains behind UTIs have become resistant to multiple drugs, including fluoroquinolones like ciprofloxacin and levofloxacin.
A 2024 study found that patients with recurrent UTIs had higher rates of resistance and noted that resistance increases with subsequent infections.
It’s an uncomfortable and dangerous situation… one that could put your life in jeopardy. An untreated UTI, after all, can spread to your kidneys and even your bloodstream.
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How E. coli infects the urinary tract, and how to avoid it
It’s not a pleasant conversation, but we need to address how E. coli from chicken can make it into someone’s urinary tract.
They suspect that people who end up with these infections are either eating chicken that hasn’t been handled correctly in the kitchen or cooked thoroughly enough to kill the bacteria.
Of course, washing hands is paramount before cooking or handling food, but washing them after handling raw meat is just as important. When cooking chicken, ensure the meat has no pink tint (use a food thermometer to verify the chicken’s internal temperature is at least 165°F).
Still, how does the E. coli make it to the urinary tract?
Anatomy is the reason women are more prone to UTIs — though men have plenty of ways to end up with painful UTIs, too. But in women, the urethra, which carries urine from the bladder to exit the body, is typically shorter — and it’s in very close proximity to the anus.
This is the reason women grow up hearing the mantra “wipe front to back.” If you don’t wipe front to back, and you’ve ingested E. coli, it’s possible to bring the bacteria up from the anus to the urethra, where they can invade the urinary tract.
Prevention is the best medicine when it comes to antibiotic-resistant infections. Cranberry juice, already popular as a remedy, recently had its credibility backed by science. That’s why it’s included in this three-part system my friend Dr. Adria Schmedhorst shared, that could help you keep the threat of recurrent UTIs at bay.
Read full article here