Could Overuse of Antibiotics Be Causing Our Obesity Epidemic?

New evidence shows that America’s obesity epidemic may be connected to our high consumption of antibiotics.

In a recent New York Times article titled “The Fat Drug,” Pagan Kennedy discusses the history of antibiotic use. Taking antibiotics have become commonplace, but are they making Americans fat?

Kennedy points out that farmers didn’t start feeding antibiotics to their livestock to make the animals healthier, but rather to make them fatter. Early research shows that chicks and piglets that were fed antibiotics gained significantly more weight than those that weren’t. By 1954, Eli Lilly & Company had created an antibiotic feed additive for farm animals as what they called an aid to digestion.

However, Kennedy says the antibiotic feed was so much more than that. Since feeding the animals antibiotics allowed them to get bulkier and also helped them to not get sick, it allowed farmers to keep their animals indoors. They stuffed them in confined, dirty conditions. Then, the factory farm was born.

Over the last decade, researchers have become more critical of antibiotics, suspecting they may be contributing to the obesity epidemic. Though it is too early to make definitive conclusions, Kennedy writes in his article that researchers should “put their minds toward reducing the unnecessary use of antibiotics. One way to do that would be to provide patients with affordable tests that give immediate feedback about what kind of infection has taken hold in their body. Such tools, like a new kind of blood test, are now in development and could help to eliminate the ‘just in case’ prescribing of antibiotics. … In the meantime, we are faced with the legacy of these drugs — the possibility that they have affected our size and shape, and made us different people.”

Image source: Tom Varco / Wikimedia Commons