I know, an over dramatic title, how else could I get anyone to read this right. What I’d like to do here is just bring to your attention (if you are not aware already) about the role antibiotics play in helping us stay sick, to a point. Don’t get me wrong, we have come in leaps and bounds when it comes to medical healthcare, and I am not bashing that system in any shape or form.
In the last few months here in the UK, there has been a huge media campaign to stop people going to their doctors and getting a prescription for antibiotics. Of course just because you have a runny nose doesn’t mean you need antibiotics. My concern isn’t just this; yes this campaign is part of my problem, though it’s more that people are not being given the full picture. We are being told that in a short time we will be immune to the point that people could potentially die from very minor infections, such as if you had and infection in a tooth which your dentist can easily sort with the help of antibiotics but now it doesn’t work and the infection could spread.
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Over the last few decades our meat consumption has been on the rise. To keep up with demand companies are resorting to ways of farming so they can bring meat to the masses. Unfortunately this doesn’t always mean it’s the best thing for us. Most people understand that there are huge farms that rear hundreds of livestock; the problem here is that the animals are living in such unhygienic and unhealthy conditions they end up becoming sick and ill. One of the ways they get around this is they end up pumping the animals with antibiotics to fight off any of the germs. There are dozens of other “practices” they use in the process of keeping the animals “healthy” but that’s not what this post is about I am afraid.
When the general public is buying and eating their store bought meat from the supermarket, they are not being told that the meat is contaminated and pumped with antibiotics (and other things). With years of consumption people can become immune to them. We are being told that we go to our doctors too much for antibiotics and this is the main reason why. When the reality is that it’s in our food.
I mean if everyone stopped being given antibiotics by their doctors this could be a short-term solution but doesn’t solve the big problem to people becoming immune to them eventually. Local farmers (as far as I know) don’t do this, though they wont have enough livestock to feed millions of people. In my opinion having better farming conditions OR people will have to start eating less meat, and as food companies and advertisers wont let this happen having better farming conditions should be the way forward (how, who knows)
This is just a short post (more of a soapbox moment) this week as it has been on my mind for a while; I do have a little rant when I talk to friends about this subject. This is not an anti-meat post in the slightest, think of it more as an anti-I want people to be healthy and not die post. I have always advised clients who eat meat to think about going to their local farm shop and buy their meat from there, or even having a day or two where they don’t eat meat. You can speak to the farmers and find out how the animals are kept and so on, the double plus is you are also helping out local business owners too.
Have a good one.
“Antibiotics are compounds produced by bacteria and fungi which are capable of killing, or inhibiting, competing microbial species. This phenomenon has long been known; it may explain why the ancient Egyptians had the practice of applying a poultice of mouldy bread to infected wounds. But it was not until 1928 that penicillin, the first true antibiotic, was discovered by Alexander Fleming, Professor of Bacteriology at St. Mary’s Hospital in London”.
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