I understand why added hormones could be detrimental, but why antibiotics? Wouldn’t it be better to eat an animal treated with antibiotics?
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It is not so much that it is bad for human consumption, since in almost all cases the antibiotics are flushed out before it gets to people anyway.
The far bigger issue is that it encourages bad practices which then encourage the evolution of more antibiotic resistant bacteria that can potentially infect humans and other organisms in the future.
By using antibiotics in meat, the bacteria evolves and mutates to be more resistant to antibiotics and then this bacteria can spread to people and cause diseases, which could be difficult to treat because of the mutated bacteria.
Here’s a good article about this:
https://academic.oup.com/jac/article/53/1/28/680882
They use antibiotics so that the conditions the animal lives in can be much much worse, an added bonus is it causes the chickens to grow faster and larger, sometime better than the hormones do.
If you have good farming conditions antibiotics are rarely needed. Massive use of antibiotics encourages the proliferation of antibiotic resistant bacteria which is bad if you have an infection as it is more likely to be hard or impossible to treat.
I see! Thank you!
In addition to the other responses, remember antibiotics are meant to be used for a certain time with a goal in mind. Not completing antibiotic treatment gives bacteria a better chance at developing a resistance to it. Antibiotics shouldn’t be used as a preemptive measure except in specific situations where the patient is at a higher risk of infection (like after a surgery).
In addition to the comments here about resistant bacteria, there is also the issue of using antibiotics as a preventative from getting sick because the animals are overcrowded, live in unsanitary conditions, etc. like in a lot of modern factory farms today. May or may not be bad for you to eat, but it may indicate inhumane treatment of the animals
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