You Are What You Eat Has Eaten

Does it make sense to you that if you eat a pound of fat, that some of that fat is going to incorporate itself into your body? It’s not a secret that most of our meat and poultry products are pumped full of growth inducing chemicals, including antibiotics that have been shown to induce increased growth in livestock. That is good for selling by the pound, but is it good for those who consume these super meats?

Medical scientists have begun to research whether antibiotics cause the same growth promotion in humans. New evidence shows that our obesity epidemic may be connected to our high consumption of these drugs, through our consumption of these foods.

In the 1950s, this same formula of antibiotics was believed to stimulate growth in children. Experiments conducted on humans fed a steady diet of antibiotics to school children in Guatemala for more than a year, using 75 mg of chlortetracycline (the chemical name for Adriamycin - often found in the enhanced animal products) and the average yearly gain in weight for the supplemented group was 6.5 pounds while a control group averaged 1.9 pounds in yearly weight gain.

The Hormel Company did its own research by cutting baby piglets out of their mothers’ bellies and raising them in isolation, pumping them with food and antibiotics. No surprise, the pigs got fatter. In 1954, Eli Lilly & Company had created an antibiotic feed additive for farm animals and in addition to becoming meatier the animals now could subsist in filthy conditions. This is all too common in our food production today, with the exception of certified organic meats.

It used to be accepted that bigger is better, but recent scrutiny of antibiotics has increased. Overuse of the drugs has led to the rise of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria like salmonella in factory farms and staph infections in hospitals. Scientists have also begun to suspect that it may prove consequential on the obesity epidemic.

In 2002 Americans were about an inch taller and 24 pounds heavier than they were in the 1960s, and a third are now classified as obese. More food for thought.