Use of antibiotics in farming ‘endangering human immune system’

Physiologically it's well known that that the antibacterial peptides are part of the immune system. They were discovered as a part of the pathogen defense mechanisms of insects, found to be present also in vertebrates as well and only then, of course, exploited for chemical mimicry as pharmaca.

How anybody could believe taking that component out from the rest of the defense system, and breed pathogen resistance against it in isolation, could be anything but begging for calamity is beyond me. It boggles the mind that this has been permitted to go on, but particularly unexpected it is not at all, sadly.

That said, I wonder what their IBS rates are like. That can't be great for their gut biome.

1. New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Delhi_metallo-beta-lactama...

"NDM-1[1] is an enzyme that makes bacteria resistant to a broad range of beta-lactam antibiotics. These include the antibiotics of the carbapenem family, which are a mainstay for the treatment of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections."

2. Antibiotic usage and resistance in Mexico: an update after a decade of change. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33956642/

"Ten years ago, a review on the status of resistance in Mexico was bleak: with antibiotics freely sold over the counter and poor regulation of generic drugs, among other conditions, resistance among relevant pathogens often ranked top, either among Latin American countries, or even worldwide. "

Antibiotics-resistance is typically an expensive trait for bacteria to maintain, and without selective pressure, it'll typically be selected against. (It's why rotating antibiotics works.)

Also a pill a day, infrequently, is probably also not a big deal.

The problem arises in agricultural use when antibiotics are fed to cattle every single day, with every meal, to every head of cattle, in every ranch. That creates an environment where you're selecting for bacteria resistant to antibiotics. But even if antiobotics start being resisted, we just need to stop using them for a while and they'll become effective again. Sucks for the people infected the the bacteria though. So we can take some amount of heart in that abusing antibiotics is unlikely to end humanity, it just might create a huge humanitarian disaster at some point, which as we've seen, modern capitalism is very prepared to ~handle~ ignore.

Depending on the infection that you have, finishing the course may not always be the best option since it nukes your microbiota and selects for more resistant pathogens. It depends on the rate of mutation of each pathogen, amongst other factors.

The antibiotic course has had its day

https://www.bmj.com/content/358/bmj.j3418

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/is-the-full-course-of-an...

In the cancer field, where resistance is also very common, there are some groups exploring 'adaptive therapy' also known as 'press-pulse' therapy, where you intentionally stop treatment when symptoms go away, in order to maintain a population of the drug-sensitive cells, which will compete with the drug-resistant cells (since being resistant takes energy). It's not curative but when resistance is inevitable, could pro-long life of the patient. I wonder if this type of thing has already been tried with antibiotics.

Modifying Adaptive Therapy to Enhance Competitive Suppression

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7761372/

Press-pulse: a novel therapeutic strategy for the metabolic management of cancer

https://nutritionandmetabolism.biomedcentral.com/articles/10...

There are many countries where pharmacies don't require prescriptions for common drugs. People can stop by the pharmacy and grab some antibiotics whenever they feel like taking some.

The United States isn't totally immune. Many people go to the doctor at the first signs of a cold and demand antibiotics. Most doctors will refuse, but some of them start writing prescriptions so the patients will go away and leave a good review. Anecdotally, online local parenting groups always seem to have some group of people swapping tips about which doctors will prescribe antibiotics so they can go get the drugs they want. There are also the people who order fish antibiotics and take it themselves, too.

Antibiotic resistance is only part of the problem. Unnecessarily destroying gut bacteria is not great. Getting C. Diff. Colitis is not fun.

On the other hand, if that does hold true and it does become a common passive trait, then the world is fucked.

Antibiotics would wipe out much of the bacteria in your gut, providing space for deadly bacteria to colonize the gut. But kimchi's probiotics would repopulate the gut bacteria to reduce the chances for deadly bacteria to grow.

Does your wife eat a lot of kimchi?

Those small clinics live and die by local ajummas' word of mouth, so anything helps.

e.g.

"I went to Haeng-bok clinic and the doctor told me to just rest up but it just won't go away"

"Aigo, Unnie~ I went to Sa-rang clinic last time I caught a cold - you know the one at that intersection - and the doctor gave me all these pills. The cold was gone the next day!"

When my in-laws were visiting Australia for a couple of months and my wife’s mother got a minor cold, she started demanding we get her some antibiotics. We tried to explain that there’s no way a doctor would prescribe them for a minor sniffle, and she totally went if the deep end, acting as if she was going to die if she didn’t get them. But in the end, she survived.

Raising large quantities of animals in the rhythm necessary to feed meat daily to a large population is irrational and creates these shortcomings.

IMO animal agriculture is just another one of those topics that, if you really deep-dive, turns into a discussion of overpopulation and capitalism.

Inefficient land and resource use

Land degradation

Loss of biodiversity

Soil erosion

In the US, most of the land used for grazing is already insufficient for farming most crops. You take cows and such off of them, you're left with near-useless land.

Chemical runoff from pesticides and fertilizers

Not exclusive to livestock and their feed, feels weird to attribute it to just them.

Widely-available meat in the Western world is a Pandora's Box; it's just not going away. It's better to find ways to make it more efficient than to go all pissed-off-vegan and want to ban meat everywhere in favor of ultra-processed replacement monstrosities. You'll win more people to your side too.

Furthermore, attacking the end-consumer does absolutely nothing. It's like banning plastic bags/straws, It just makes liberal lawmakers feel good about themselves. You want to really change our diets? Go after the billions in subsidies handed out to farmers for growing corn/soybeans/dairy and such in order to stay competitive against cheaper products overseas. Good luck.

While bacteria evolution can't be reversed, stopping antibiotics in animals can help lower the number of resistant bacteria. Good care practices can reduce the need for antibiotics.

I also eat meat occasionally, maybe once per week?

1 - https://www.aicr.org/cancer-prevention/recommendations/limit...

I wonder if it's genetic, but my parents don't go to the doctor so I don't know anything about their health.

I don't supplement, but eat the vegan equivalent of the standard American diet.

https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false...

Money now is more important than any future consequences.

Furthermore, note that in this case, the point is that the trait also confers resistance to the same type of molecule occurring naturally as part of the innate immune system of animals, meaning that for bacterial species with a large pathogenic component to their lifestyle the resistance retains a fitness advantage in their niche.

Their paper on energy is also a fun read.

A food we've evolved with can have a negative impact on us because the evolutionary trade-off is to optimize for reproductive age. Something like high cholesterol, for example, didn't stop our ancestors from siring children in their teens and 20s.

On the other hand, foods we started eating recently including novel foods don't have this antagonist pleiotropic effect.

But we did evolve with meat.

Inuits would like a word with you.

I'm sensing a lack of empathy in this comment.

Calling people stupid or attaching any label to them will only hinder your attempt to sway their minds.

Portraying black and white thinking (splitting), when we know the world is shades of grey, also hinders your ability to change minds.

It's great that you found benefits to moving to a non-meat diet. This helps others see what they could benefit from. Continue from here.

I have heard this repeated from so many vegans / animal activists at this point, including my own sister. Where did you get it from? Who is the original author? I am seriously asking.

An argument involving only my individual health (I am into fitness stuff) plus effect on the environment - repeated enough times - would sway me.

To be completely honest: I do not appreciate being told that I am an immoral human being for X (X = eating meat).

Been told that too many times already during my lifetime. It is a cultural constant. That formula is just too tiresome to hear yet again at this point.

From an altruistic perspective yeah, do not touch meat, but it does have health benefits that I have not been able to replicate with vegetarian alternatives.

Also a throwaway to say "eating meat is bad?" that isn't a crazy controversial stance haha.

I will continue eating meat, I believe it is *good* for both individual health and collective health. In fact the amount of vegans I've met in life who didn't look like they were suffering from some illness has been very rare, only solidifying my position on this.

I'm comfortable with meat prices going up if it resolves the antibiotics issue, but I'm unconvinced by the moral arguments you disguise as health arguments.

I'll get hate for my comment too, but the answer is less people.

Resource consumption (for multiple resources) and freedom are competing interests. You have to trade freedom to restrict resource consumption. But even if you do that for this topic (meat). You have to look at the secondary effects and still need to do that for other topics to make any impact.

For example, if you do away with meat, you would also have to do away with egg, milk, etc products. In some cases these products are used in things like formula, vaccines, etc. Every alternative has some trade-off too. Some may be better, some may be worse. If you're still producing eggs or milk for these other purposes, then you still have meat as a byproduct. You'll also end up with people raising their own, which is less efficient and possibly worse for the environment if done on a mass scale. Certainly worse for health impacts is done illicitly in high density areas.

I do agree that there are many people who are disconnected from their meat source, among other things (eg people who think hunting is cruel but happily eat mass produced meat, or want their almonds/almond milk). I'm not sure licensing will really fix that. Either it had to come with a wide restriction to local only production to remove many environmental issues and force people to see production issues more visibly, or we slowly reduce population so we can maintain our desired lifestyles.

My estimate is that we will see restrictions in historical freedoms and economic pressures on everyday activities. This will led to some natural reduction in population. But it will be precarious because there will be people who don't agree with the restrictions or nations willing to fight for resources.

Edit: If you're going to disagree, please say why. Specifically, why is it not true that reducing resource consumption to truly sustainable levels won't require lifestyle restriction or a population decline? And not just that some unknown future tech will save us from out current situation.

Which pandemic was caused by people eating meat?

Much of what you said is true, but some of it is a stretch, and taken altogether it seems like an exaggeration.

I'd assume a lot of people think the same way. It could be considered somewhat arrogant to demand everyone to give up their personal pleasures for something you believe in.

We could solve all world's problems by collectively killing ourselves, but obviously we don't want to do that. Giving up things is somewhere on the spectrum between giving up our life and not giving up anything. Who gets to decide where the line is for everyone?

Burning fossil fuels is bad for the environment. A cow eating grass and dying is not.

The part of meat production that's bad for the environment is the machinery used to transport and process the meat. Grain, legumes, and vegetable farming also use machinery for transportation and processing. Outside of that, animals and plants are all part of a carbon-neutral cycle, so long as the plants aren't fertilized with Haber-Bosch excrement.

>it's bad for individual health

This is nearly 100% certainly wrong.

We can say with nearly 100% certainty that a human being cannot thrive without regularly eating meat, or at least dairy or eggs. This is evidenced by human beings having eaten meat for millions of years. Eating meat is Lindy. Million-year-old Lindy things, especially biological things like diet, are robust, resilient, antifragile.

Diet is a solved problem. It was solved over millions of years of humans, their predecessors, and their extinct offshoots trying and testing various foods/diets. The ones who survived ate and continue to eat meat. Guess what happened to the other ones.

>I don't know what the solution is, because as soon as you mention eating less meat people laugh at you or get super defensive

Less is pretty relative, and there is no solution, because there is no problem. It's understandable people are going to get defensive when you attack their means to life.

Just eat how your ancestors ate. For a Northern European, that means a lot of milk and meat. If you're Mediterranean, follow the Greek Orthodox tradition - periodic meat and vegetable eating. If you're an Eskimo, eat a bunch of fish.

That's not a solution.

My grandmother's generation (, Chinese) has extensive experience with slaughtering animals. That generation still likes and craves meat.

You might have people who chicken out in the short term, but in a couple of years getting a butcher license will become normalized and you're back at square 1.

I definitely wouldn't be able to kill an animal with a knife, unless I was starving.

I do agree that part of the problem is that the eating of animals has become so abstracted away (i.e. chicken tenders) that most people aren't even truly aware of what it is they're doing. I like the knife + license idea.

Also, this really doesn't work at all: My fantasy solution is everyone needs to go get a meat consumption license by going to a farm and killing an animal with a knife in their hands every, say, 10 years.

Humans used to do that for hundreds of thousands of years.

If you are worried about carbon emissions, just tax them directly and use that money to offset them. If meat then becomes uneconomical, then I guess that's that and people will reduce their consumption accordingly. Though honestly I suspect that if we did that we'll magically find new ways to farm meat that will be less carbon intensive (which is just another reason to do it).

> it's bad for individual health

Eating more meat has actually been great for my individual health, since it has a low glycemic index and high satiation per calorie. Thanks to all the weight I've lost my blood pressure and cholesterol have both really improved. It would've been almost impossible for me without meat.

> it's bad for collective health (breeding drug resistance and causing pandemics)

That sounds like a case for banning antibiotics in agriculture, not for not eating meat.

> and all that is before we even talk about the mass scale of needless suffering inflicted on other sentient beings.

I don't mean to sound offensive here, but I suspect that this is the only reason people that care about this actually care about, since every other reason brought out just ends up feeling like an excuse brought forth to strengthen this position even though the solution doesn't actually require forgoing meat.

> My fantasy solution is everyone needs to go get a meat consumption license by going to a farm and killing an animal with a knife in their hands every, say, 10 years. If you can't do it, then you have no business participating in consuming it. Bonus points if you're a regular hunter.

At the very least you'd have to make an exception for people who are too old/weak/disabled to do it themselves. Also a problem for Kashrut since an animal killed that way would not be Kosher. I believe it would not be Halal either.

I'd do it if I could use a gun or a captive bolt pistol, but I've been knocked over by large animals before and I assume they would get more aggressive if they think you are trying to kill them. A farm animal can't pull the trigger of a gun, but they could push a knife back on you. I have body armor and a helmet so I would be wearing them.

Also, just from an animal cruelty standpoint. Making an amateur kill a live animal, with a knife? That is just incredibly cruel and unethical. I don't think that idea is compatible with the philosophy you espoused earlier.

I've been to a camp that made us do that for dinner. It was messy and prolonged the animal's suffering. Some of our more religious fellows also refused to eat it, since the culling wasn't done properly in accordance to their beliefs.

The graph you posted seems very reasonable compared to the world population. That's around 10 chickens a person per year, and chickens are one of the most efficient farmed animals per gram of protein.

The USDA recommends 65g of protein for me per day per https://www.nal.usda.gov/human-nutrition-and-food-safety/dri... . That's around 200g of cooked chicken, which I'd obviously split into multiple meals and mix with other foods. And other foods don't come close in amount of protein, I'd have to replace vegetables or other things with eggs/yogurt which is not obviously a good move.

Edit: A 1.4kg chicken yields 600g cooked meat, so that's a chicken every 3 days. That's around 100 chickens a year for me, personally.