Dr. Marty Makary: We have to stop screwing up the microbiome

"We have to stop screwing up the microbiome by carpet bombing the microbiome with these antibiotics. Remember the microbiome is a lining of millions of different bacteria along the GI tract that are involved in absorption and digestion. It trains the immune system that's in close proximity in the wall of the intestine. Some of those bacteria produce serotonin involved in mood and maybe mental illness.

And some of those bacteria make GLP-1. Now that's the Ozempic- the Ozempic active ingredients. So that your microbiome makes your own Ozempic. At low levels, yeah, it's a natural hormone in the body. So we, 60% of antibiotics in many studies are unnecessary that are prescribed. I think it's much higher.

I'm forced to give antibiotics, or have been much of my career, for minor procedures, because there's a protocol even though the data really supports antibiotics for major procedures, not minor, but it's just kinda, ah, what the heck? There's this myth that, oh, they won't hurt you. They're probably altering the microbiome. Good animal studies show that.

I go through it on my book with the world expert on the microbiome. And an amazing study just came out of the Mayo Clinic that is in one of the giant blind spots of modern medicine that no one I know in medicine had noticed this study. It was brought to my attention by a friend.

The Mayo Clinic looked at 14,000 kids and compared those who had an antibiotic in the first couple years of life. This is a scary part of the book, yeah. It's amazing, right? Because the average three-year-old has already taken about an antibiotic course each year. Wow. Right, so think about its effect in altering the microbiome. They compare, and by the way, antibiotics save lives, C-sections save lives, but they're both overused and people need to have good judicious understandings of these things.

The kids who took an antibiotic in the first couple years of life compared to kids who did not, had a 20% higher rate of obesity, 21% higher rate of learning disabilities, all of which are on the rise in the modern era of antibiotics, 32% higher rate of attention deficit disorder, 90% higher rate of asthma, and nearly a 300% higher rate of celiac.

All of these things are going up and we scratch our heads in medicine and say, I don't know why it's genetic or you're smoking or you're obese. No, it's the underlying disruption of the microbiome and it's not just antibiotics. And by the way, in that study, the more courses of antibiotics, the greater the risk of each of those chronic diseases. But what's the risk of the disease?"