How to avoid antibiotics in your food that create life-threatening superbugs

The 30 hidden drugs you could be taking every day without knowing it

They are lurking in the foods you eat every day. Hidden drugs that sneak into the food supply. Even a simple glass of milk could put you at real risk.

And these inconspicuous drugs result in thousands of deaths every year.

The FDA has known for decades. True to form, it hobbled into action way back in 1973, and has shuffled along ever since while the risk to us continued to get worse and worse.

Now it’s reached epidemic proportions.

And since it’s clear the FDA won’t do anything, it’s important you know how you can protect yourself — with this simple change that will keep this invisible threat off your plate.

Send in the clowns

It looks innocent enough. A good old-fashioned burger. But every time you eat meat you could be taking in small amounts of antibiotics. Because around 80 percent of all antibiotics sold in the U.S. are now fed to livestock.

It’s done mostly to fatten animals up faster. (Of course, all those extra drug sales also help fatten the pockets of Big Pharma faster too.)

But here’s the danger: When farm animals are continually given small doses of antibiotics, it creates those drug-resistant super bugs I’ve warned you about.

That means if you come down with an infection, the antibiotics you need might not work anymore. And for serious infections, the risk can be deadly.

And the death toll keeps rising every year.

A report out from the CDC last September revealed over two million adults and kids in the U.S. are infected by antibiotic-resistant bacteria every year. And those infections end up killing about 23,000 of them.

If 23,000 people dying each year can’t bring the FDA into action, what will?

Aside from leaving thousands of people to die from infections, these antibiotic-resistant bacteria make countless people sick.

Two years ago tests done by the Consumers Union found two-thirds of supermarket chickens to be “heavily contaminated” with bacteria, lots of which were “drug resistant.”

And the kind of bacteria found were E.coli, the “most common” cause of “routine urinary tract infections” said the group.

Things have gotten pretty bad when lemon chicken can give you a UTI.

Of those 30 drugs being fed to farm animals, 12 have never even had any safety data submitted to the FDA. And for the other 18, well, they were considered “high risk” over three decades ago!

Finally last December, the FDA came up with a “plan of action.” Perhaps they thought no one would notice it wasn’t so much a plan as a giant loophole for industry.

Its big idea was to ask drug makers and agribusiness companies to voluntarily stop promoting or using antibiotics to fatten farm animals. And if they don’t — well that’s that!

The good news is you don’t have to wait for their voluntary compliance or become a vegetarian forcing down Tofurkey to keep yourself safe. You can still enjoy that burger, steak or chicken dinner.

But here’s the catch: the meat you buy has to be certified organic.

Getting organic meat and poultry is the only way you’ll know that every bite you take isn’t also giving you a dose of antibiotics.

You might not think that buying organic chicken could be a matter of life and death. But one day, it just might be.

Sources:
“Antibiotics in animals tied to risk of human infection” Sabrina Tavernise, January 27, 2014, The New York Times, nytimes.com

“What the FDA knew (and hid) about antibiotics in animal feed” Emily Main, Rodale News, January 28, 2014, rodalenews.com