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.
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....
https://www.livestockscience.com/article/S1871-1413(07)00572...
Chicken are fed antibiotics because it stimulates some growth hormone.
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.
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.
Do you have a source for this? Sounds very interesting if true
"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...