Can Antibiotics Make You Fat?

 

Photo Credit: Mother Jones

'Like hospital patients, US farm animals tend to be confined to tight spaces and dosed with antibiotics. But that's where the similarities end. Hospitals dole out antibiotics to save lives. On America's factory-scale meat farms, the goal is to fatten animals for their date at the slaughterhouse.

And it turns out that antibiotics help with the fattening process. Back in the 1940s, scientists discovered that regular low doses of antibiotics increased "feed efficiency"—that is, they caused animals to put on more weight per pound of feed.'

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