In their never-ending campaign to get people to stop eating meat, PETA has done everything from throw buckets of blood on fur coats to run ad campaigns of naked celebrities with their whiny-gineys covered in lettuce. PETA’s latest desperate attempt to spread the word involves publicly alleging at the National Buffalo Wings Festival that eating chicken wings while pregnant may reduce the size of your unborn son’s penis.
PETA’s stance was that: “Findings published by the Study for Future Families showed that eating poultry during pregnancy may lead to smaller penis size in male infants” due to a chemical found in chicken wings called phalate.
Unfortunately for them, Women’s Health magazine publicly stated that while exposure to the chemical prenatal phalate was linked to small genital size in infant boys, the study didn’t focus on chicken at all since it doesn’t have a particularly high level of the chemical in the first place.
The conductor of the actual study itself actually came forward and called PETA’s claims “tenuous”.
Even though I love nothing more than a bucket of wings on a lazy weekend night, I respect PETA’s message. I do however, think that they often shoot themselves in the foot by their methods of communicating that message. Did PETA get people talking about chicken wings? Absolutely. However they made themselves look foolish in the process, by misconstruing scientific data.
In the end, 40 tons of chicken wings were still consumed at the Festival, and nobody actually believes that eating chicken wings while pregnant will shrink your child’s penis.
In other words, PETA: It might be time to hire some new management.
[ via ] [ via ]
