> do I let my sick animals suffer so I can sell them?

This isn't what the antibiotics are for. They increase growth. We don't know why.

It is also a giant source of antibiotic resistance, which is why it should be illegal, much less the disruption of your gut microbiota from consuming antibiotics.

>This isn't what the antibiotics are for. They increase growth. We don't know why.

I think it’s more along the lines of this:

1. Cows evolved to eat low starch and high fiber grass;

2. We feed them corn and grain based diets that speed up growth but result in certain illnesses (rumen a layer of slime which traps gas they normally release and liver failure both which can lead to death);

3. Antibiotics are mixed in with corn and grain based feeds which help with both those issues (gas/bloating and liver failure).

I have never seen a study showing antibiotics lead to accelerated growth where a cow doesn’t also eat a corn/grain based feed.

More detail explanation here (not a study): https://www.google.com/amp/s/paleopersonaltrainer.wordpress....

Review says that grass feeding makes the antibiotic growth effect different, but it's not a monotonic difference: makes some antibiotics better, some worse.

https://www.livestockscience.com/article/S1871-1413(07)00572...

Both statements are true.

Chicken are fed antibiotics because it stimulates some growth hormone.

Not only that. Animals in factory farms are held in very poor conditions, overcrowded, consuming a very poor diet not designed for them by nature, and spending most of their lives stepping and sleeping on their own manure. So of course they get sick. Do people really need studies and articles to figure out the end product of these sick poor animals will be bad for people?

> Do people really need studies and articles to figure out the end product of these sick poor animals will be bad for people?

People don't, it's obvious.

Please refer to the history of the Tobacco industry in the United States to see how this strategy works. The same technique is being used with climate change by the fossil fuel industries.

For enforcable regulations to become enacted, suddenly the burden of the most rigorous scientific proof with zero possible doubt becomes mandatory. It's absurd.

We don't know why? I thought it was because your body can spend energy on fighting off infection or on other things. If antibiotics reduce the energy required to fight off infections, the "other things" gets more energy. Growth falls into this big second bucket.

It's very easy to tell just so stories like this, and there are a number of plausible ones. That doesn't make them correct. For example, we don't know how antibiotics kill bacteria. All the models such as impeding crosslinking of cell wall and the bacteria bursting from turgor pressure? All wrong. Still taught, but entirely wrong. We don't know how antibiotics work.

I am definitely in the bucket of people thinking this is how antibiotics work. Do you have some links I could read talking about how this isn't true?

I wish I did. The hints in the literature are spread far and wide among older papers, often misinterpreted as something else. A lot of it is unpublished data from my graduate work.

First, penicillin does bind to enzymes that cross link cell wall. It's getting from there to dead cells that's the problem. First, if you knock out a set of proteins called autolysins, cultures exposed to penicillin plateau in population, but the population does not decrease. That is, there is a suicide response. Second, changing the external turgor pressure, such as by adding PEG to the medium, doesn't change the rate of death. Third, if you watch a culture under a microscope when you add penicillin, all the cells in the culture stop growing long before they die. So the unbalanced growth model can't work. I have a vague memory that the kinetics don't work out either, but it's been too many years.

More interestingly, other antibiotics, such as rifampicin and chloramphenicol, which don't target anything related to cell wall, cause bacteria to stop growing when they are added to the medium. That implies that there are active mechanisms involved, not some random fact about cell wall synthesis that happens to stop when something is inhibited. Rifampicin is supposed to inhibit protein production (and does mess up ribosome activity), but there was an interesting paper that showed that a few mRNAs were translated as normal in the presence of rifampicin, even though most were messed up. And how would inhibiting protein synthesis lead to cells exploding (which they do) by a direct, physical mechanism?

I've thought about going back and writing a review article on all this stuff, but biology is a long ways in my past at this point.

> This isn't what the antibiotics are for. They increase growth. We don't know why.

Do you have a source for this? Sounds very interesting if true

The article links to another article in the fourth paragraph. The use of the word seem implies we don't exactly know why.

"That’s 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."

The above raises the question, do antibotics increase the BMI of human children long-term ? According to this article[1] the answer is yes.

[1] https://www.jhsph.edu/news/news-releases/2015/children-who-t...

This has been known for quite a while. I'm sure you could come up with quite a few sources if you really wanted to, though I'm not sure how well the phenomena has been studied (seeing as we still don't know what causes it).

An answer to your question was already in an immediate sibling subthread half an hour before you posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17162574

Seriously this trend on HN to knee jerk react with "do you have sources for xyz" needs to stop. Googling it in 5 seconds will give you plenty of sources. Do your own research.

Aviv isn't just telling you not to be lazy. The observations that someone includes when they are trying to confirm their hypothesis are scientifically meaningless. Observations are only valid when they are made with good faith effort to discredit the hypothesis. This includes the meta-observations of going out and finding studies on the internet.

Lol that's such an aggressive response, no wonder HN has such limited success

"do I let my sick animals suffer so I can sell them?"

Erm, isn't the point that they use antibiotics en masse to prevent illness? I don't think anybody ever complained about treating (serious) diseases with antibiotics, but the preventive use big scale. This is just madness, among other things in the meat industry. .

Constant feeding of low, sub-therapeutic doses of antibiotics boosts animal growth. Apparently, without antibiotics, some part of the energy in the food is consumed by the gut microbes, not the animal. Antibiotics tame down the gut microbes, so more of the energy in the feed goes to the animal. The farmer needs less feed, and the animals grow faster.

I would guess that with antibiotics, meat production can be like 20% more efficient, maybe somewhat more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_use_in_livestock#Dr...

> I would guess that with antibiotics, meat production can be like 20% more efficient, maybe somewhat more.

But at great cost. The farmer makes more short-term profit, while offloading the externality of dealing with the consequences (breeding antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria) to the future[1] or just someone else entirely[2]. Are these costs really worth it for you to get cheap cuts of meat at the grocery store, or to ensure that the farmer makes more money (or remains profitable at all[3])?

[1] Antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria make cattle farming impossible.

[2] Antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria enter the general human population generating a significant health crisis.

[3] If the livestock industry can't stay afloat without these low-dose antibiotics, then maybe they should either charge more (meat becomes a luxury item), or they should just end livestock farming altogether. The production of meat isn't as essential to the functioning of society as people think. It's definitely not worth the risk of creating a health crisis just because "the meat must flow."

> (meat becomes a luxury item)

The European Union banned antibiotic growth promoters 12 years ago [1]. However, in my experience, grocery shopping for meat in the US east coast is, if anything, more expensive than meat in Europe.

[1] https://academic.oup.com/ps/article/86/11/2466/1573697

> Antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria enter the general human population generating a significant health crisis.

From the wikipedia link above: "However, any antibiotics deemed medically important to humans by the CDC are illegal to use as growth promoters in the U.S. Only drugs that have no association with human medicine – and therefore no risk to humans – are allowed to be used for this purpose."

(I am no expert, so I don't know whats the bottom of this.)

Wait, isn't that the exact scenario that has the most danger of breeding antibiotic resistance? Constant, low doses that just suppress bacteria population but don't wipe it out.

Antibiotic resistance is becoming a huge problem recently. It sounds like farmers are slowly trading in the most effective life saving medicine we have ever discovered for a boost in margins.

Yes, its sad this train of thought is often disregarded as most of the people who I hear repeat it are anti-gmo.

Actually, the energy theory it likely incorrect. The more likely candidate for the connection between antibiotics and weight gain is the disruption they cause to the microbiome. This causes a metabolic disruption that impedes the breakdown of starches in the gut, and causes them to be converted to fat.

This is not just in cattle, by the way. It's also in humans. Antibiotic over-prescription has been linked to obesity and fatty liver disease. See, for example: https://www.nature.com/articles/pr2014157

"Erm, isn't the point that they use antibiotics en masse to prevent illness?"

Another great way to prevent illness would be to actually provide suitable conditions for the animals to live. Their current conditions are abhorrent.

I agree with the other commenters about the use of antibiotics to raise larger animals as opposed to healthier ones.

Farmers are under strong economic pressures to reduce sickness in their animals. And as mentioned be others, baseline antibiotics use is not about reducing sickness. Animal welfare is a valid and important concern, but the best place to focus is on places where the farmer's incentives are not well aligned.

But that’s not what they’re used for. Because antibiotics affect the gut flora of the animals, they tend to get fatter faster. Which is good for a farmer trying to make as much money in as little time as possible.

This is what they’re mostly used for, sadly.

I thought this thread about how farms operate was pretty interesting:

https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/973765381017034753

Of course I don't really have the context to evaluate it.

Wow, that was a super interesting perspective. Thanks for the share.

Are these submarine articles?

There are lots of "Natural" beef / poultry / pork which are Anti-Biotics free ( Or claiming they are when they are not ) that are selling at a premium. Being pushed especially by the big companies, Cargill / Tyson ( IBP ) and National Beef.

I do agree it is a tough call though. Beef Industry has a huge lead time compare to Pork and Poultry. Making it not as easy / clear cut.

I found that instead of using antibionics, using probiotics on a sick animal works even better. I had a sick animal that I didn't think would make it and loaded their food with pro-biotics and she eventually powered through it. Maybe the solution is just the right bacteria vs the wrong ones. This might be a middle ground farmers might like because they can brew their own bacteria pretty easily (I use rotten milk and a bucket) and actually save money

Why is the article FUD?