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Livestock<br>Alternative Medicine for Chickens

By Lela Nargi<br>Jul 26, 2026

Graphic by Adam Dixon

As antimicrobial resistance rises in humans, researchers are looking for ways to fix the problem back where it starts: in the hen house.

There’s lately been a furor over what’s known as “functional medicine.” Think red ginseng for metabolic disorders like diabetes; plant compounds called polyphenols, found in red wine, dark chocolate, and berries, to boost digestion; and probiotic-packed fermented foods like yogurt and sauerkraut for gut health. There’s even a $100 million federal fund, called MAHA ELEVATE, earmarked to address chronic health conditions with these sorts of nutritional interventions.<br>Read Next

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Operating outside this cultural zeitgeist (but perhaps even more consequential) is the potential for food-based cures to find a toehold in the $45 billion broiler hen business. Most meat birds are produced in massive, over-crowded facilities that expose them to a range of infections; coccidiosis, from a group of parasites called Eimeria, is the most common, causing intestinal lesions that prevent nutrient absorption so “basically, the animal is starving,” said Elad Tako, a food science researcher at Cornell University.<br>Antibiotics are the most efficient treatment for coccidiosis and the secondary bacterial infections that come with it. The thing is, many of those drugs are medically important to humans and the more we use them in poultry and livestock, the more antibiotic-resistant super-bacteria we create. Once-treatable infections in people now lead to 35,000 human deaths in the U.S. every year.<br>“Because of the risks antibiotics present to us we have to make a shift,” Tako said. But he also sees an opportunity: “To find an alternative that not only can fill the gap in the context of antibiotics but possibly provide other nutritional value that can contribute to the productivity and overall health of the animal.” He’s talking functional medicine for chickens.<br>For the last several years, Tako has been fiddling with a formula that uses as its base the pomace from grapes—the skins, pulp, and seeds left over from the wine-making process. (He’s previously tried a similar fix, using apple scraps.) Like the red wine it’s a byproduct of, grape pomace is loaded with polyphenols, which have anti-inflammatory properties. When you feed it to chickens, “You shift the microbiome towards something that is health-promoting,” Tako said. This mitigates and even reverses the “constant, low-grade inflammation” that’s common in the broiler business as hens’ immune systems respond to the stress of being exposed to so many pathogens.<br>Calming that inflammation creates overall healthier birds that can better fight off infection without the use of antibiotics. In a research facility, “On pretty much all the biomarkers that were tested, from lesions on the intestine to the microbiome to feed conversion ratio to size to weight, we’re able to reverse it, maybe not completely as a healthy animal, but very close to it,” Tako said.

Tako found that just the right dose of grape pomace extract injected into the amniotic fluid in chicken eggs resulted in healthy Cob and Ross hens—the most common broiler breed.

Tako wasn’t the first researcher to have this idea; he’s just the first one to get grape pomace to work. He thinks the reason is that other studies relied on overly heavy doses of pomace. Thinking about the French Paradox (now debunked), in which low incidence of cardiovascular disease is found in the French population despite their high fat consumption, Tako realized, “To see this effect, we can’t drink tons of grape products,” he said. “So maybe it’s enough to consume a significant but not-too-much amount.”<br>Tako found that just the right dose of grape pomace extract injected into the amniotic fluid in chicken eggs resulted in healthy Cob and Ross hens—the most common broiler breeds—that grew to full size (5.5 pounds) in the industry-standard 42 days. In another study, a microdose of 0.5 percent grape pomace extract added to broiler feed reduced chickens’ inflammation, increased their growth, and improved their microbiome.<br>Medically important antibiotics such as the Salinomycin, Monencin, and Semduramicin that are commonly used to treat coccidiosis could once be purchased over the counter at the local Tractor Supply. In 2017, however, new rules limited the number of medically important antibiotics that could be used, and mandated a veterinarian’s prescription for them.<br>Usage went down and down until it shot back up, by almost 80 percent, in 2024, when “birds were dying from secondary bacterial infections after bouts with viruses like infectious...