The bacteria that lives in all of our guts may explain why we’re fat. Farmers fatten up their livestock by feeding them antibiotics and when we eat meat and poultry, this may make US fat too.
When scientists fed young mice a steady low dose of antibiotics, they altered the composition of the bacteria in the animals’ guts. This changed the way they broke down the food they ate and made them fatter.
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80% of the antibiotics sold in the US are fed to chickens, pigs, cows and other animals that people eat, yet the farmers who raise these animals are not required to report on which drugs they use on what types of animals, and in what quantities they use them.. This lack of data makes it difficult to find out what relationship between routine antibiotic use in animals and antibiotic-resistant infections in people is. Infections from antibiotic resistant superbug bacteria kill thousands of people every year.
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This was found in samples of shrimp purchased in New York. Researchers have found evidence of antibiotics–one of them a suspected human carcinogen–in seafood imported into the United States and purchased from grocery store shelves. The antibiotic nitrofuranzone, a probable carcinogen, was found in two of the samples–one from a farm in India and the other from Thailand. Both samples were 28 and 29 times higher than the amount allowed by the FDA.
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Change IS possible: Faced with the news that a class of antibiotics previously banned by the US government for poultry production is still in use, farmers and ranchers will now need a prescription from a veterinarian before feeding antibiotics to their farm animals. The FDA finally put this rule in place after trying for over 35 years to stop this practice, which helps the animals grow larger, but leads–over time–to the growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the humans that eat this meat.
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