Showing posts with label antibiotics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label antibiotics. Show all posts

Thursday, May 23, 2024

LAYNE KILPATRICK: Chick-Fil-A bringing back antibiotics into their chicken

from Layne Kilpatrick, the Hormones Specialist.

 
Why is Chick-fil-A moving to chicken-raised with no antibiotics important to human medicine (NAIHM)?

To maintain supply of the high quality chicken you expect from us Chick-fil-A restaurants in the US and Puerto Rico will shift from chicken raised with no antibiotics ever to chicken raised with no antibiotics important to human medicine ((NAIHM) starting in the spring of 2024.  Canadian restaurants will transition from chicken raised without antibiotics the chicken raised with no antibiotic important to human medicine starting in the spring of 2024.  www.chick-fil-a.com/our-chicken-commitment. 

Chick-fil-A is reintroducing antibiotics back into their chicken when I heard that I was a little alarmed so I did some research maybe I can help you understand what's happening in the chicken industry.  Chick-fil-A made a pledge in 2014 to serve only chicken that had never been exposed to antibiotics as did Tyson Foods, one of their suppliers.  You see in the poultry industry has been using antibiotics routinely in chicken feed to prevent disease in crowded conditions with poor sanitation.  And, if we're honest, because they learned that antibiotics make them gain weight.  But daily antibiotics also make smart bacteria mutate and become resistant and this would transfer to people who ate the meat.  And more [chickens] began getting nasty infections that no longer responded to any antibiotics and they were dying.  The pressure was on and No Antibiotics Ever or NAE became a status label in the chicken business.  They just charged 20% more for the extra care required without antibiotics.  And to make up for the dead chickens that got sick after a decade or so, that 20% increase has been absorbed into the collective acceptance of grocery shoppers and largely forgotten.  Well, it has been forgotten.  That's just the price of chicken, right?  Things were good for a while.  The whole process was better.  Then along came super inflationary pressure on production costs, and the industry is again looking for pharmaceutical relief.  And frankly sticker-shocked consumers are looking for a reprieve as well a difference designation in the chicken Market is now in favor. NAIHM, or No Antibiotics Important in Human Medicine.  Has the industry dropped the bar a little here Tyson Foods announced last year they are largely abandoning the NAE standard preferring instead the NAIHM label.  This means that they can now use antibiotics in raising chickens that are not used to treat conditions in humans except, of course, in their organic line where antibiotics are still prohibited.  So this reserves antibiotics for human diseases for us, preserving their effectiveness there, and this is with the blessing of the FDA and the World Health Organization.  The more relaxed standard seems to even have the buy-in and some of the more natural-minded.  Although she works for Southland Organics, veterinarian student Alyssa Routon says,

NAE was correct in it's time, [but it is] not ideal for animals.  We cannot treat disease, and that drives prices up for consumers. 

I get that there can be overreach and regulation which needs to be adjusted as greater understanding comes to light but the implementation here seems a little wonky on this.  There doesn't seem to be a listing I can find anywhere that specifies which drugs qualify for the NAIHM designation. So who gets to decide that status?  As a pharmacist, I worry that we won't always know the full impact of animal antibiotics on humans when they eat the meat.  We are after all animals too so what about negative effects on our gut bacteria?  I would say we need to test them for safety? We could test them in other ways but that probably won't happen.  For me personally, I think I just prefer to pay a little more and buy organic which will always be NAE, No Antibiotics Ever.  They position an NAIHM in the best interest of animal husbandry.  But let's face it, the public information spigot of Big Food doesn't exactly have the reputation of being a fountain of Truth.  Consumers are pretty smart.  We've had the NAE standard already baked in the price of chicken for nearly a decade.  Now they want to drop the standard, but I bet they won't drop the retail price proportionally.  Sales for Tyson Foods were almost $53 billion in 2023.  Profit was $933 Million which was down 79% from 2022.  Maybe that's the real motive. 

 

Monday, March 25, 2024

NEW: Chick-fil-A Announcing They Are Going Back On Their Pledge Of ‘No Antibiotic In Chickens’ Tyson Foods & Chick-fil-A “Are reintroducing certain antibiotics to its chicken supply chain”

I stopped eating here too about 3 years ago.  Started getting rotgut from their sandwiches.  Stopped eating at Chipotle years ago.  Got sick each of the three times that I ate there.  And Wendy's got deathly ill from their French Fries.  Oy.

Monday, November 23, 2015

HOSPITALS "ADMIT" YOU SO THEY CAN GET YOU EVEN MORE SICK

". . . this is the way people entering the hospital begin to go downhill and face complications."
It starts like this.
h/t Lew Rockwell
These are my prefacing remarks.  Hospitals get you in, no, maybe I should use their elite professional term of "admit."  Right, hospitals admit you.  You've earned it.  How do they do that?  They have to come up with a diagnosis first.  My mother's ER doctor claimed she had pneumonia.  She didn't. Something else was causing her bleeding. Pneumonia doesn't cause bleeding.  But do you think that anyone in the family knew the difference between pneumonia and the causes of her bleeding?  Do you think that her doctor or anyone of the attending physicians would tell her or the family the truth about pneumonia symptoms?  What, are you crazy?  And is bleeding so bad?  Her ER doctor diagnosed her with pneumonia to give the family a bone to chew on while he admitted her so that the slew of hospital-contracted technicians could roll their holy hardware in and out of her room and get paid.  And why not?  Her health insurance was a veritable ATM machine, like the ones you drive up to, put your card in, press a few keys, and hundred dollar bills come shooting out.  Once inside the hospital, the family expected her to get well and be out in a day or two.  She was in for ten days.  Her conditioned worsened, of course. She was on the anti-biotic, Zosyn, for each of the ten days, a standard anti-biotic.  Insomnia is one of its side effects.  So the doctors ran their tests, one even proving that she had no pneumonia. They just kept pumping her with Zosyn.  But the doctor hemmed and hawed and hedged his bets by keeping her.  The family didn't know their rights.  They accepted the doctor prescription of death.  She was after all 89 years old. You have to love it how doctors, well anybody for that matter, use people's age against them.  Her one immunity resource, her gut flora, was destroyed by the Zosyn.  Se la vie. Remember that hospitals have bills to pay.  Hospitals have things to sell you.  But they don't really give you a choice, since the product is often forced or coerced upon you by a doctor, who operate more like money managers making sure you take and buy their dope.  Don't do it.

Here is Bill Sardi . . . .

I had made it to age 70 without any chronic diseases and no need to take any prescription drugs.  Last Tuesday afternoon that ended.  The mild chest pressure and shortness of breath began Tuesday afternoon while I was driving to my son’s counseling session in Chino, CA.  I began popping vitamin C tablets every few minutes, which is all that I had available in the car. 
I drove to Pomona Valley Hospital emergency room within an hour where I was quickly ushered into a hallway to undergo an immediate electrocardiogram.  It appeared normal on the print out but the technician said he saw an abnormal beat on his screen (a premature ventricular contraction).  I took my pulse.  My heart was skipping a beat every six beats.   I was having real heart trouble.

It took another 40 minutes for emergency room personnel to take me into a treatment room and give me a nitroglycerin tablet to dilate my blood vessels, a blood thinner and an aspirin tablet to halt any clots.  Within 20 minutes my condition was stable; no shortness of breath.
My cardiac enzyme level (troponin level) was 0.6 upon admission (0.3 is normal), 1.5 later in the emergency room and eventually rose to 50.0 the next day.  High troponin levels indicate a heart attack (blockage of circulation in a coronary artery).

I was admitted to the hospital late that afternoon and began dealing with the challenges of hospitalization. 
First, the nurse offered me vaccines for the flu and pneumonia.  I declined, saying I didn’t come to the hospital with a health crisis intending to get injected with two pathological germs, a mycobacterium and a virus.  I said this is the way people entering the hospital begin to go downhill and face complications.

The male nurse acquired personal information for the hospital chart.  He didn’t believe I was 70 years old and had me take my driver’s license out of my wallet to confirm my birthdate. 

The ordeal of staying overnight in a hospital was challenging. Uninterrupted sleep is almost impossible.  Light pollution (I had to cover up 9 lights in my room) and noise pollution (the incessant “beep” of the
heart monitoring  machine directly outside my room) were agonizing.  I got 4 hours of sleep that first night.  (How does anybody get well in an environment like that?)

At 5AM the nurses and technicians began working me up with blood tests and prepping me for an angiogram (dye test of my coronary arteries).  At 7 AM I was being wheeled in my bed to the cardiac cath room on the ground floor.  A humorous moment came when my hospital bed wouldn’t fit into the elevator.   Made you feel like they really planned things well (??).

In the cath lab a team of 5 nurses and technicians were busy moving x-ray machines and monitors into place and setting up instruments.  I informed them I didn’t want to hear the word “oops” during my procedure.
I was offered a pain reliever and a sedative that I once again declined, saying these drugs would induce shallow breathing that could result in pneumonia.  The nurse couldn’t believe I was refusing the medication.
About 40 minutes later the cardiologist had found a single coronary artery that was blocked (blood clots, not cholesterol) and placed a stent (a wire prop).  He kept asking if I felt any pain.  I said no.  The stent was introduced through an artery in my wrist instead of more customary route through the groin. 

I didn’t feel any better after the procedure because my heart circulation had already been re-established with medications.  I had told the cardiologist I didn’t want a stent unless it was absolutely necessary.  I got a stent anyway whether I liked it or not.  Now I have a time bomb in my chest, as stents tend to attract blood platelets that result in clots.  So the very health threat I walked in with is still a present danger that only 8 or 9 months taking blood thinners will avert.  After a few months the tissue covers the stent and then there is nil risk of a clot. 

I would spend another night in the hospital just for monitoring.  My first meal in the hospital was described as a special cardiac lunch.  It was comprised of zero-fat/high sugar carbohydrate foods like soda pop (can you believe?), sugary custard, a sugary jello cup and some sliced beef with noodles. 

I had to call my culinary friends, Tom and Valerie Aruffo, who cater events for me, and they brought me real food to eat (salad greens, meat for protein, etc.) 

By then I had others bring me other dietary supplements: potassium/magnesium capsules; zinc; fish oil; vitamin D; vitamin C, resveratrol.  The nurse allowed me to keep them as long as I hid them from the charge nurse. 

The cardiologist and hospital staff had great difficulty assessing my case.  I had normally low blood pressure (129/69 upon hospital admission), low cholesterol, normal blood sugar (5.5 hemoglobin A1c), and was normal weight (12 pounds over my high school weight) with no history of tobacco use or over-use of alcohol.  Furthermore, to confound everything, I had full heart pumping pressure (ejection fraction) after the event, which means no tissue  damage to the heart muscle.   I didn’t fit the mold. 

This latter phenomenon is explained by my daily intake of resveratrol (Longevinex®), that activates internal antioxidants in the heart tissue prior to a blockage of circulation, which in turn prevents or limits damage to heart muscle.  I explained my case on the telephone to Nate Lebowitz MD, a Ft. Lee, NJ preventive cardiologist, and he believes resveratrol spared me from heart damage. 

What goes unexplained is that the cardiologist who implanted the stents in my coronary artery was not the least bit curious as to why I had no loss of pumping pressure or why I had reached age 70 without any chronic disease.  When I explained I have been taking a resveratrol pill he said he didn’t know what that was.   In fact, the doctor ordered that I cease taking all dietary supplements and continue with the problematic drugs he prescribed.

He had me take an ACE inhibitor (lisinopril), which drove my blood pressure down to 90/40 and I felt mentally fatigued.  I’m holding that drug aside for now.  When blood pressure is that low tissues above the heart (brain, eyes, ears) don’t receive adequate blood circulation.  I also refused to take a statin cholesterol-lowering drug, which the doctor didn’t put up much of a fight over.  Maybe in the back of his mind he knows statins are useless and problematic.

I’m embarking on an accelerated 90-day artery-cleansing regimen of arginine (5000 mg0, chondroitin (5000 mg), vitamin C/lysine-proline, resveratrol.  I’m relying on molecular medicine, not synthetic drugs, to see me through.

For all of my friends who called to offer get-well messages, made me chicken and lentil soup, and provided me support while in the hospital, I am ever grateful.  I’m back home spending time with my 11-year old son Matthew, who helped pa-pa wash the car.  Updates will be provided in due time.

Friday, December 24, 2010

Fighting Fatigue?

Try raw honey.  It vitalizes and has, get this, anti-bacterial functions.  Amazing.  Honey!  And if you use raw honey, the glycemic index is lower than pasteurized, refined honey.  Enjoy getting well.  Here is a link to honey benefits, particularly the benefits of honey mixed with apple cider vinegar.

Honey and bee by-products do provide energy.  Look at all of the bee products that you find in a health food store: bee pollen, Royal Jelly, honey, propolis, and others.  Here are other benefits of honey.  Sweet.