The Fat Drug
By PAGAN KENNEDY
MARCH 8, 2014
[font size=5]IF[/font] you walk into a farm-supply store today, youre likely to find a bag of antibiotic powder that claims to boost the growth of poultry and livestock. Thats 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.
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 Americas obesity epidemic may be connected to our high consumption of these drugs. But before we get to those findings, its helpful to start at the beginning, in 1948, when the wonder drugs were new and big was beautiful.
That year, a biochemist named Thomas H. Jukes marveled at a pinch of golden powder in a vial. It was a new antibiotic named Aureomycin, and Mr. Jukes and his colleagues at Lederle Laboratories suspected that it would become a blockbuster, lifesaving drug. But they hoped to find other ways to profit from the powder as well. At the time, Lederle scientists had been searching for a food additive for farm animals, and Mr. Jukes believed that Aureomycin could be it. After raising chicks on Aureomycin-laced food and on ordinary mash, he found that the antibiotics did boost the chicks growth; some of them grew to weigh twice as much as the ones in the control group.
Mr. Jukes wanted more Aureomycin, but his bosses cut him off because the drug was in such high demand to treat human illnesses. So he hit on a novel solution. He picked through the laboratorys dump to recover the slurry left over after the manufacture of the drug. He and his colleagues used those leftovers to carry on their experiments, now on pigs, sheep and cows. All of the animals gained weight. Trash, it turned out, could be transformed into meat.
You may be wondering whether it occurred to anyone back then that the powders would have the same effect on the human body. In fact, a number of scientists believed that antibiotics could stimulate growth in children. From our contemporary perspective, heres where the story gets really strange: All this growth was regarded as a good thing. It was an era that celebrated monster-size animals, fat babies and big men. In 1955, a crowd gathered in a hotel ballroom to watch as feed salesmen climbed onto a scale; the men were competing to see who could gain the most weight in four months, in imitation of the cattle and hogs that ate their antibiotic-laced food. Pfizer sponsored the competition.
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- If there's anyone wondering how it was that they could get away with openly experimenting on someone's children like this, see also:
The St Louis Experiments
Unethical Human Experimentation In The United States
Government Secret Experiments
Nazi Style Human Experimentation By U.S. Government
KT2000
(20,544 posts)started his career as a chemical engineer. He realized after a few years in the industry that the chemical revolution was really human experimentation - on all of us.
He's now one of the most successful organic farmers in the country.
Only a handful of the 80,000 chemicals in use today have been tested for safety.
KT2000
(20,544 posts)for bringing much of this information about human experimentation to the public in Congressional hearings.
I have a couple books on this subject by Leonard Cole. One book, Clouds of Secrecy, has a foreword by Senator Alan Cranston.
Politicians were made of stronger stuff in those days.
DeSwiss
(27,137 posts)...for their endocrine disrupting potential back in 1996. Then it took them over a decade just to agree on the breeds and/or types of rodents they'd use. They're just at the beginning stages of testing those 80,000+ chemicals that have unknown human impacts.
As for the ''stronger stuffed'' politicians of old.... they might have been stronger, but they weren't strong enough. Otherwise we wouldn't be in the shit we're in today, would we? Meh.
- As for the medical industry, it was conceived in sin like most things in this country that have brought us close to ruin. But of course no one sees any of this because the fear we must live in, blinds us.
As someone recently put it so eloquently: ''We. Are. Stupid.'' ~MannyGoldstein
I don't harbor many illusions on this topic. Rachel Carson warned of hormone disruption in the 60s and they crucified her. Al Gore called for human health effects testing under Clinton - never got off the ground. Testing was to begin under Bush for synergistic effects of chemicals - he stopped it. The children's environmental health studies are probably still mucked up in dispute.
The medical industry is complicit for sure. Diagnose a chemically caused condition and the insurance companies give the doc a call and the state medical association too. The honest docs who get caught up in that mess end up leaving the state and changing specialties. Patients are essentially thrown overboard.
$$$$$$
The state of fear is much worse now. I cannot imagine a hearing today that would reveal what Levin did in his.
Major Nikon
(36,814 posts)Antibiotics effect about a 5-10% weight gain in livestock. A person with 5-10% more body mass over and above normal would not be considered obese and since the growth factor due to antibiotics is due to the reduction of gut bacteria, a steady supply of antibiotics would be required to sustain that growth, as is the case with livestock.
DeSwiss
(27,137 posts)...however, they know very little about the mechanisms at-play in this scenario. They just knew back in the day that giving animals antibiotics made them fatter. They didn't know how it worked, and they still don't.
It is a good hypothesis at this stage in my view. One that I'm inclined to agree has merit sufficient to warrant further review.
Major Nikon
(36,814 posts)Antibiotics only increase weight gain in animals while they are taking the antibiotics and the result is quite small, but a small weight gain in each animal translates to significant profits once multiplied over the total inventory. That's why they do it.
DeSwiss
(27,137 posts)The results of the study were dramatic, particularly in female mice: They gained about twice as much body fat as the control-group mice who ate the same food. For the female mice, the antibiotic exposure was the switch that converted more of those extra calories in the diet to fat, while the males grew more in terms of both muscle and fat, Dr. Blaser writes. The observations are consistent with the idea that the modern high-calorie diet alone is insufficient to explain the obesity epidemic and that antibiotics could be contributing.
The research is not saying that antibiotics are causing obesity but that it may be a mechanism in the process. That exposure to higher levels of antibiotics by Americans (which we surely have been) may cause a switch to be flipped in the human endocrine system that causes the accelerated amounts of fat to be stored by our bodies.
- So as I said earlier, I still think their study's results are enough to warrant further research.
MannyGoldstein
(34,589 posts)Might that contribute?
Sweet Freedom
(3,995 posts)when those antibiotics interact with all the pesticides we ingest from our fruits and vegetables and the chemicals in our water?