Hi everybody this is Monica Reinagal and you're listening to the

nutrition diva quick and dirty tips for eating well and feeling fabulous

Sarah asked me to do a show about hormones and antibiotics in meat.

She's wondering whether it's worth spending the extra money to avoid them.

Although antibiotics and hormones are usually mentioned in the same breath, they're

really two different issues. So I'll tackle

antibiotics this week and in a couple of weeks I'll circle back and I'll talk about

the use of hormones and livestock. In fact, Sarah, I think that the use of antibiotics

in our livestock is a big problem for all of us,

no matter what kind of meat we buy or even if we choose not to eat meat at all.

As in people, antibiotics are used to treat sick animals, but in the U.S. most livestock are also given low doses

of antibiotics throughout their entire lives, sort of the way many people take vitamins.

Putting antibiotics in the feed helps make the animals grow bigger, faster.

For one thing, it allows farmers to feed the animals a rich diet which they might not otherwise be able to tolerate.

A steady diet of antibiotics also helps keep the animals from succumbing to disease

due to the extremely overcrowded and unsanitary conditions in which they're raised.

Growing more animals bigger and faster increases profits and to some extent keeps costs at the grocery store down.

So what's the problem?

The problem is that antibiotics are not vitamins.

They're drugs that we depend on to fight infections that would otherwise kill millions of people every year.

You have to remember just how big a deal the discovery of antibiotics was in the beginning of the 20th century. It was a staggering leap forward.

Overnight, we added eight years to the human life expectancy by turning once deadly infections, like the ones that cause pneumonia, tuberculosis, strep throat and

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