Important new way to protect your health -- and your life....

Today's Post: Thursday, 8-26-2010

Tuesday, Vera Tweed posted a story titled: “Avoid Antibiotics in Your Food.” And, yesterday it was one of the features in my email from NewsMax.

Why is knowing how to do this important?

Would you like to avoid things like dying maybe in days or even hours, becoming disfigured, horrible suffering, and becoming unable to get lifesaving or corrective or cosmetic surgery without dying from it?

For almost 70 years most people have been able to virtually always avoid these things. Before that, this was NOT true. Since the 1940’s we have had effective antibiotics to spare us from these things.

Avoiding antibiotics in your food can help make it much less likely antibiotics will no longer protect you from these things.

It seems that on factory farms where animals are inhumanely treated and penned up in tiny enclosures and overcrowded and even unsanitary conditions will not get sick and will even gain more saleable bodyweight if you routinely dose them on antibiotics.

Over the last 30 years this has been done on a massive scale in the United States and elsewhere.

Why is this a problem? For two reasons.

The more often antibiotics are used, the faster the bacteria adapt and the antibiotics stop working. And, Vera Tweed’s article had this:

“"According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, about 70 percent of all antibiotics in this country are used in animal feed."”

Since well over 90% of this antibiotic use would be unnecessary if the animals were better treated, this massive use of antibiotics in simply not necessary.

Continuing it will make our antibiotics stop working much faster.

But there is even worse news. If you eat animal based foods where the animals were treated this way, your chances of having YOUR body contain antibiotic resistant germs goes WAY up.

Vera Tweed’s article points out that this was recognized and acted on already in Europe. “A few years ago, the European Union banned the use of antibiotics as growth promoters.” In fact, I posted on an article about Denmark’s experience with this. They found that the costs of their meat and eggs and poultry did go up; but by only 5 percent.

My guess is that factory farms in the United States are worse run in terms of needing antibiotics than the farms were in Denmark that it would increase prices by 10 to 20 percent. But these practices have made meat cheap here so that increase would only move the prices to moderately low.

Vera Tweed notes that you can do as we recently posted on and eat plant protein foods and wild caught fish and eat meat much less often. Your health will be better anyway if you eat meat less often and eat protein foods such as beans, lentils, nuts, and wild caught fish instead at many meals.

But the thing I particularly wanted you to see was how to buy and eat meat that was NOT raised that way here in the United States.

When you DO eat meat or poultry or eggs, you CAN get them from sources that do NOT use this dangerous practice that threatens your health in all these ways.

You can buy from farms that do NOT use antibiotics at all. You can often get animal foods such as cheese that has been imported from Europe that comes from animals not routinely dosed with antibiotics.

Similarly, animals fed their natural diet and not penned up such as lamb or beef from animals fed only grass and pasture fed poultry usually come from farmers who also avoid stuffing their animals with extra antibiotics. (Their animals tend to stay well due to the better treatment. So they are less likely to need antibiotics for that reason as well.)

I’ve known for some time that Whole Foods Markets are great stores to shop at to find and buy these foods.

But Vera Tweed found out this also!:

“Whole Foods Market sells only meat, poultry and fish without antibiotics, and describes its standards for each category of food in the Products section at www.wholefoodsmarket.com . Although the chain’s meat prices are routinely higher than regular supermarkets, weekly specials and frozen fish won’t break your piggy bank.”

I’ve found that Whole Foods also sells grass fed meats and cheeses imported from Europe such as Irish Cheddar myself. But I am happy to discover they do even more to sell safe food that I did not yet know they were doing.

So, to sum up,

People eating beans and lentils for many meals are healthier than those who eat meat several times a day. Since these foods are extremely inexpensive, such people can afford safer, better quality, and more health supporting meat and poultry when they do eat them without paying more in their overall food budget.

Whole Foods and many upscale grocery stores sell such foods now.

You can also take probiotics so some of the beneficial bacteria may kill off the some of the antibiotic resistant bad bacteria.

And, you can vote in favor of following Europe’s lead and simply banning the practices that cause antibiotic overuse now in the United States and support having your political representatives do so.

Lastly, due to recent events, you may be wise to NOT save money by going outside the United States for less expensive surgery.