Why We Should Ban Antibiotics in Animal Feed

Here is something that I missed.

I knew that antibiotics served to make animals to gain weight faster, but it never occurred to me that antibiotic residues are making the American public fat as well.

It makes sense antibiotics make cows, chickens, and pigs gain weight faster, so why shouldn't it have the same effect on humans?

This is particularly significant with pigs, because as opportunistic omnivores, they are metabolically quite similar to us:

If you walk into a farm-supply store today, you’re likely to find a bag of antibiotic powder that claims to boost the growth of poultry and livestock. That’s because decades of agricultural research has shown that antibiotics seem to flip a switch in young animals’ bodies, helping them pack on pounds. Manufacturers brag about the miraculous effects of feeding antibiotics to chicks and nursing calves. Dusty agricultural journals attest to the ways in which the drugs can act like a kind of superfood to produce cheap meat.

As an aside here, we know that this produces cheaper meat, and thanks to the Danes experiences with their antibiotic ban over the past 15 years, we know about how much money it saves, and it is less than 10¢ a pound.

It is basically negligible.

But what if that meat is us? Recently, a group of medical investigators have begun to wonder whether antibiotics might cause the same growth promotion in humans. New evidence shows that America’s obesity epidemic may be connected to our high consumption of these drugs. But before we get to those findings, it’s helpful to start at the beginning, in 1948, when the wonder drugs were new — and big was beautiful.

………

In 2002 Americans were about an inch taller and 24 pounds heavier than they were in the 1960s, and more than a third are now classified as obese. Of course, diet and lifestyle are prime culprits. But some scientists wonder whether there could be other reasons for this staggering transformation of the American body. Antibiotics might be the X factor — or one of them.

I think that it's clear that the major issue here is sources of chronic antibiotic exposure, with meat and poultry being the primary contributors, though the article downplays this:

Of course, while farm animals often eat a significant dose of antibiotics in food, the situation is different for human beings. By the time most meat reaches our table, it contains little or no antibiotics. So we receive our greatest exposure in the pills we take, rather than the food we eat. American kids are prescribed on average about one course of antibiotics every year, often for ear and chest infections. Could these intermittent high doses affect our metabolism?

This statement is at best an inaccurate generalization.

There are numerous reports about issues involving antibiotic residues in meat, and it is one of the reasons that the FDA is proposing tighter restrictions on antibiotic use on livestock.