Antibiotics in meat unavoidable: Think organic!

Not that this CTV news art­icle on anti­bi­otic pres­ence in meat is a huge sur­prise, but I can­not emphas­ize enough how import­ant it is to con­sider eat­ing organic and so have to make a com­ment! You are not get­ting value for what you are pay­ing if our health is the sacrifice. 

Antibiotic usage in farms and chicken coops has been done for many years as we would in human pop­u­la­tion to pre­vent the spread of dis­ease in closed quar­ters. This makes sense, as when one is sick in a crowd, the oth­ers are also likely to get sick.

The more alarm­ing cur­rent prac­tices involve the usage of anti­bi­ot­ics as pre­ven­tion from dis­ease in healthy anim­als. This means not only are anti­bi­ot­ics then being used unne­ces­sar­ily but that bac­terial strains that would nor­mally be con­trolled with the use of anti­bi­ot­ics will become res­ist­ant. Mutation to super bac­teria. Life always finds a way. Think of Jurassic Park!

Skeptical that the use of anti­bi­ot­ics in chick­ens can­not affect your body?

A food chain story

Vitamin K2 is an import­ant vit­amin for bone health. However, as humans, we need to eat foods con­tain­ing vit­amin K2 as we can­not man­u­fac­ture this on our own. We are lucky that there are sev­eral foods that have K2, and one of them is the chicken. The chicken you ask? How?

Chicken Little

Chickens enjoy eat­ing grass, and ‘grass-​fed’ chick­ens should in fact not be an anom­aly but the norm. When chick­ens hap­pily eat grass as they should, the grass con­tains vit­amin K1, among other nutri­ents. When chicken digest grass and vit­amin K1, their little chicken cheeks actu­ally man­u­fac­ture vit­amin K2 right in their mouths. Their tis­sues then con­tain vit­amin K2. When we eat the chicken later on (sadly for the chicken), we absorb this vit­amin K2 and voila, healthy and happy bones for humans. Pretty nifty.

When we eat some­thing from another organ­ism, we don’t just take what we need, we absorb everything that organ­ism has to give. What if your little chicken had 3 doses of anti­bi­ot­ics before you ate it? What if they were har­bor­ing bac­teria that had become res­ist­ant to these anti­bi­ot­ics? What do you think will now hap­pen to your immunity, to your healthy gastrointest­inal flora? Is there a pos­sib­il­ity that the reason you are sick more often in the last few years had more to do with your food than you realize?

Downright scary.

Eat organic, or don’t eat meat at all

Is this an extreme way of think­ing? I don’t think so. “Let food be medi­cine, and medi­cine our food”, said Hippocrates, the father of medi­cine as we know it, and frankly a pretty smart guy. Despite con­cerns on price, it really is worth eat­ing organic meats for your health. You get what you pay for — qual­ity, con­scien­tious treat­ment of the anim­als, bet­ter health for you. Why take a sup­ple­ment when you can eat foods that are good for your body?

Organic Vendors

Just to list a few to get you started:

Beretta Organics

Rowe Farms

The Healthy Butcher

Cumbrae Farms