A lot of people don’t eat meat for all sorts of reasons. You know why: their health, the environment, they don’t want to eat animals, just doin’ the right thing for the planet. I’ve gone through times in my life where I didn’t eat meat. Now I do again. The more I learn about health care, the more certain I am that as I go forward eating meat and preparing it for my family, I can use science to guide me to do it in smarter ways.
Being smarter about how we eat meat makes sense. This includes not consuming nitrates (cancer risk) and preservatives when we don’t have to, but also choosing meat raised without unnecessary antibiotics. Smarter meat-eating involves creating a demand for meat that’s safer for us and the population. Antibiotics used to raise animals for meat production aren’t always in our best interest, health-wise.
Animal agriculture uses 4x the amount of antibiotics as human medicine, so buying meat not raised with antibiotics is without a doubt a way towards a safer world where antibiotics can be reserved for use in helping us. Antibiotics aren’t used when raising farm animals to make the meat on your kitchen counter safer — raw or undercooked meat is still a biohazard, even if raised with lots of antibiotics — you can still get an infection from meat raised with antibiotics. Antibiotics are often used to raise animals in crowded or less ideal conditions to help prevent them from getting infections. The more antibiotics we use anywhere, the the more we’ll see resistant bacteria everywhere. So reducing demand for meat/animals raised in conditions demanding more antibiotics is a good thing. Moving forward, I’m raising my hand to eat meat (whenever possible) not raised with unnecessary antibiotics.*
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