Your Thanksgiving Turkey is Probably on Drugs

Turkeys are fat on antibiotics, but not in a healthy way

For all of you who are about to get your gobble, gobble on this coming Thursday, you might want to check your turkey into rehab as it likely is on drugs, reports Alternet. According to the Clinical Infectious Diseases journal, half of the meat sold in grocery stores are pumped up with antibiotic resistant staph germs, and turkey had two to three times the amounts of any other meat.

Farms beef up their turkeys, cows and chickens with antibiotics so that they will eat less. The less a farm has to feed its animals, the more money it saves. Meanwhile turkeys are fed with Histostat, which contains the cancer-causing carcinogenic metal arsenic in it, for "feed efficiency."

In August, Cargill Value Added Meats, the nation's third-largest turkey processor, recalled 36 million pounds of ground turkey because of a salmonella outbreak that led to one death and 107 illnesses in 31 states.

Meanwhile, the turkey drug industry argue that without drugging up the turkeys that their purchase cost would go up -- from $1.29 to $2.29 a pound according to the National Turkey Federatin's Michael Rybolt. No word, though, on the cost to consumers who may get sick because of eating the unhealthy turkeys. Read more about this at Alternet.