I’ve written about the practice of feeding antibiotics to our animals.   And, why that puts our overall health at risk.  After all, if we feed the same antibiotics to animals that we use for disease control, microbial resistance is bound to accelerate.   First,  because the animals will harbor microbes that get a chance to mutate and those resistant microbes can be transferred to humans via our food.  Moreover, the antibiotics we feed our animals often end up in our waterways, which provides yet another process where the microbes can develop resistance to our critical drugs.

Of course, that means when we get a disease, the microbes will be more likely than not be resistant to our potential treatment.  Which is why we have streptomycin resistant diseases, Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), and penicillin resistant pneumonia.

So, why does our agribusiness sector feed antibiotics to animals?   You might think they do so to ensure that the animals don’t become sick, since a sick animal is lost revenue.  But, you’d be wrong.

Animals are fed antibiotics because research has demonstrated that including them in animal feed means the animals gain weight faster- which provides a shorter gestation period before they can be slaughtered to be sold as beef or chicken in our supermarkets and butcher shops.  As a matter of fact, this practice of adding antibiotics to their diets is called “feed efficiency”; the ability of the antibiotics to augment animal weight gain per unit of feed.

So, it shouldn’t surprise you that we are now finding that antibiotic use in humans may be a factor in our obesity epidemic.   Drs. B S Schwartz, J Pollak, L Bailey-Davis, A G Hirsch, S E Cosgrove, C Nau, A M Kress, T A Glass and K Bandeen-Roche published their examination of  163,820 school age children (in Philadelphia) in the International Journal of Obesity.  The kids ranged in age from 3 to 18.   In a nutshell, those kids who had undergone repeated antibiotic treatment (7 or more episodes) by age 15 weighed 1.4 kg (3 pounds) more than those who hadn’t had such treatments.   Oh, and that was about 21% of all the kids in the cohort.

This is amplified by a different study examining children who were fed antibiotics at age 1 or 2; they, too, were subject to increased weight gains. These results were published in the same journal on my daughter’s birthday (2012).  Drs. L Trasande, J Blustein, M Liu, E Corwin, L M Cox and M J Blaser  noted that those children who were prescribed antibiotics for frequent ear infections (the study examined the health records of 11,532 UK kids).  In particular, the more sensitive window for this weight gain phenomenon was when the children were 6 months of age or lower.

There’s another recent study of Danish children who were subject to antibiotics in utero (before they were born).  When these children were born, they also manifested greater weights than those who hadn’t been subject to antibiotics in utero.  The children in this study ranged from age 7 to 16 when examined.   Drs.  A Mor, S Antonsen, J Kahlert, V Holsteen, S Jørgensen, J Holm-Pedersen, H T Sørensen, O Pedersen and V Ehrenstein reported these results in the International Journal of Obesity earlier this year.

Why is there a weight gain with antibiotic use?  The current theory is that the use of antibiotics affects the intestinal microbial flora populations.  In particular, there is a die-off of various microbes, so consumed food is less efficiently broken down.  And, this leads to higher caloric absorption by the body.  (Drs. I Cho, S. Yamanishi, L. Cox, B. Methe, J. Zivadil, K. Li, Z. Gao, D. Mahana, K. Raju, I. Teitler, H. Li, A. Alekseyenko, and M. Blaser reported just these results in 2012, in Nature.)

So, it’s clear that both humans and animals develop significant weight gains when they are fed antibiotics.  The good news is that we seem to be prescribing less antibiotics to kids- the numbers of prescriptions have fallen almost 20% since 2000.   But, the scripts have been unchanged for adults in general.  However, antibiotic use has skyrocketed among older adults (30% higher).

By the way.   Today is election day.  No, it’s not a major election where we choose our President or our Senators or even our Congressfolks.  But, it’s a big day for state and local officials- and they set our taxes, our policies, our gerrymandered districts. Those are all important to you, your kids, and your neighbors.  So VOTE!!!!

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