New Report Finds Most Fast Food Chains Serve Meat Raised On Drugs

Image – Chain Reaction – How Top Restaurants Rate On Reducing The Use Of Antibiotics In Their Meat Supply

A report by the Center for Food Safety, Friends of the Earth and others has found that most of the large U.S. restaurant chains have zero publicly available policy to limit routine use of antibiotics for disease prevention and growth promotion in their meat and poultry supply chains.

Only Panera Bread and Chipotle scored an “A”, Chick-Fil-A a “B”, Dunkin’Donuts and McDonalds a “C” and the rest an “F” – including Denny’s, Starbucks, Burger King, Subway, IHOP, Taco Bell, Jack In The Box, KFC, Domino’s Pizza and more.

Antibiotics are considered the most overused medicine on Earth. The Center For Disease Control has even stated that “Up to half of antibiotic use in humans and much of antibiotic use in animals is unnecessary and inappropriate and makes everyone less safe.” ^[1]

Most of the meat used by large chain restaurants comes from animals raised in industrial facilities. These animals are routinely fed antibiotics – not just to treat them when sick, but as a preventative measure owing to the filthy, overcrowded, unnatural conditions in which they live – and also for “growth promotion”.

However, there is a big problem with this approach. When antibiotics are added at low levels to animal feed every day after day, the antibiotics kill the weak germs, leaving behind those hardest to destroy and causing natural selection to strengthen the bacteria. This drug-resistant “superbugs” can then spread to our communities via meat, poultry, workers, air, soil, and water – causing a risk to the public. ^[1]

Despite the risk to the health of the public, a large number of companies in the meat and pharma industries have for decades successfully prevented restrictions on antibiotics use in livestock.

Instead of legal restrictions to phase out the routine use of antibiotics in the meat industry, in December 2013 the FDA “encouraged” drug makers to voluntarily stop marketing medically important antibiotics for growth promotion in animals (as if this would slow them down!) ^[1]

The reality here is that animals are routinely housed in absolutely disgusting conditions and the meat industry needs to stop using antibiotics as a “band-aid” and clean up its act.