Hello and welcome to Nutrition Facts. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Greger. Today we're going to explore smart nutrition choices based naturally on facts.

Have a history of high blood pressure in your family? How about heart disease, diabetes? There are foods we can eat that may not only help prevent many of these chronic diseases, but even stop them in their tracks.

Today we're going to talk about urinary tract health and some of the causes of urinary tract infections.

Bacteria creeping up from the rectum into the urethra, the major cause of UTIs. But where does this rectal reservoir of bladder infecting e-coli come from in the first place?

DNA fingerprinting point the blame at chicken. In fact, half of retail poultry samples tested positive for fecal contamination.

Even more since chickens are given antibiotics, the strains of e-coli found in chicken are often drug-resistant. Here's more.

Where do bladder infections come from? Back in the 70s, longitudinal studies of women over time show that the movement of rectal bacteria up into the vaginal area preceded the appearance of those same types of bacteria in their urethra before they infected the bladder.

But would be another 25 years before genetic fingerprinting techniques were able to confirm this so-called fecal perineal urethral theory, indicating that indeed it's the e-coli strains residing in the rectal flora that serve as a reservoir for urinary tract infections.

Yet it would be another 15 years, still before we tracked it back another step and figured out where that rectal reservoir of bladder infecting e-coli was coming from.

Chicken. Researchers were able to capture these extra intestinal, meaning outside of the gut, pathogenic disease causing e-coli straight from the slaughterhouse to the meat, to the urine specimens obtained from infected women.

We now have proof of a direct link between foreign animals, meat and bladder infections, solid evidence that urinary tract infections can be a zoonosis, urinary tract infections as an animal to human disease.

And UTIs were talking millions of women infected a year costing over a billion dollars.

Even worse, the detection of multi-drug resistant strains of e-coli and chicken meat resistant to some of our most powerful antibiotics.

The best way to prevent bladder infections is the same way you best prevent all types of infections by not getting infected in the first place.

It's not an all-meat equally beef and pork appear significantly less likely to harbor bladder infecting strains of a chicken.

Can't you just use a meat thermometer and cook chicken thoroughly?

Oh, have you even known for 36 years? It's not always the meat but the cross contamination.

If you give people frozen chickens, naturally contaminated with antibiotic resistant e-coli, let people prepare and cook it in their own kitchen as they normally would and poof.

The bacteria ends up in their rectum ready to cause trouble.

In fact, five different strains of antibiotic resistant e-coli jumped from the chicken to the volunteer.

And they know it was crossing contamination because the jump happened after the animal was prepared but before it was eaten.

Not only did it not matter how well the chicken was cooked, it didn't even matter if you eat any.

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