Evaluation of Factors Influencing Iranian People Insight about Hormone Chicken

Introduction and purpose: Although hormones are not used in commercial chicken production in any part of the world, even in developed countries, it is believed that growth hormones are adopted during the rearing of broilers. The residuals of these hormones in chicken meat are considered as the most important contaminants of the commercial broiler meat. However, the most important resource of meat contamination is antibiotic residuals. Regarding this, the aim of the current study was to investigate the knowledge of people living in 29 cities of Iran about healthy food products through the evaluation of their insights about hormone-injected chickens. This research involved the investigation of the opinions of 3,782 individuals from different cities of Iran. To this end, in addition to hormoneinjection, chicken meat contamination with antibiotics and marketing of unpacked chicken meat were also investigated as other sources of chicken meat contamination. Most of the respondents were from moderate cities and had academic education. The results revealed that media, such as TV and radio, play no significant role in the improvement of people’s knowledge about the food healthfulness. Moreover, most of the people thinking that they had enough knowledge about food healthfulness did not know anything about the hormone-injected chickens. Only 7 (0.19%) respondents clearly claimed that hormone-injected chickens do not exist. Based on the findings, enhanced income status, academic education, and age could be regarded as the factors playing a role in the improvement of people’s knowledge about hormone-injected chickens and food healthfulness.