Antiobiotics: Just one of the Big Problems with Big Chickens

By  Martha Rosenberg

Today’s intensive, industrial chicken operations use antibiotics to prevent infection in crowded conditions and add weight on birds without feeding them more. What does that mean for the humans who eat those chickens?

 It’s not your imagination — U.S. chickens are gigantic.

In the 1920s, an average chicken weighed 2.5 pounds and took 12 weeks to reach that weight, according to a 2021 Bloomberg report.

Today’s chickens clock in at more than 6 pounds — and they reach that weight in just seven weeks.

The National Chicken Council (NCC) credits better breeding, healthier nutrition and feed, “regular veterinarian oversight and the use of vaccines to prevent disease,” for the growth explosion.

The NCC also assures consumers that hormones, steroids and genetic engineering have nothing to do with the outsized chickens produced on industrial poultry farms.

Antibiotics? That’s another story, according to the NCC, which calls them “just one of many tools farmers use to keep their flocks healthy, in order to contribute to a safe and wholesome food supply.

“[J]ust like people, animals sometimes get sick, and treating illness is a responsible part of animal care,” the NCC states on its website.

The NCC statements imply that the use of antibiotics on industrial chicken farms is a rare occurrence, limited to instances when an animal “sometimes gets sick.”

But that’s misleading — antibiotic use is integral to industrial chicken farming and factory farming in general.

Today’s intensive, industrial chicken operations use antibiotics to prevent infection in crowded conditions and add weight on birds without feeding them more, according to The Humane League.

A 2014 Reuters investigation found that after U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) enacted guidance restricting the use of antibiotics, Tyson Foods, Pilgrim’s Pride, Perdue Farms, George’s and Koch Foods were using antibiotics “more pervasively than regulators realize.”

Pilgrim’s Pride’s feed mill records showed the antibiotics bacitracin and monensin were being added “to every ration fed to a flock grown early this year,” reported Reuters.

Koch Foods, a supplier to Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants, also was caught using routine antibiotics — and denying it on the company website.

How dependent are “factory farmers” on antibiotics for their bottom line?

Without antibiotics, 175,550 more tons of feed would be needed to grow U.S. turkeys, said Michael Rybolt of the National Turkey Federation when the FDA tried to limit their use in 2008. “If we did not have the use of antimicrobials … we would have a decrease in feed efficiency so we would have a decrease in utilization of the nutrients.”

How do antibiotics, also called antimicrobials, add weight using the same amount of feed and help operators’ bottom line?

An article in the journal Gut Microbes suggests antibiotics cause “enhanced energy harvest from dietary intake, due to an alteration in microbial composition” — and also may affect “host energy regulation” and the immune system.

Antibiotics may similarly cause human weight gain, researchers speculate, as low-level exposure has become so common.

Thomas Jukes of Lederle Laboratories (since acquired by Wyeth and later by Pfizer) discovered the growth function of antibiotics in chicken in 1948, according to Maryn McKenna, author of “Big Chicken.”

Antibiotics were so much a part of early chicken production, the birds were actually soaked in them to leave a protective film in a process called acronizing, McKenna said. Some of the workers performing the acronizing, whose hands were in constant contact with the drugs came down with staph infections.

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Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/antibiotics-big-industrial-chickens/