Here’s the Downside of Antibiotics Your Doctor Might Not Tell You

Hey, everybody. Welcome to my weekly house call. Your chance to ask me your questions. And this week's question comes from a reader on Facebook who writes, my doctor wants me to take another antibiotic for this cold that just won't quit. But I kind of read that antibiotics damage the gut. How bad are antibiotics really? Well, antibiotics can save your life in certain situations. They're absolutely necessary. They've literally saved millions of people's lives. But the truth is that they're often over prescribed and very often unnecessary. You know, the development of sanitation, early vaccines, and the discovery of antibiotics have dramatically reduced deaths from infectious disease. But our focus on hygiene and the sterilization of our world, the obsession with hand sanitizers, the overuse of vaccines and antibiotics, has dramatically altered the ecosystem of the bugs in our gut. And this has led to the explosion of autoimmune diseases, allergic diseases, and has even been linked to things like obesity, diabetes, to heart disease, cancer, depression, even autism, and lots more. Now, we've had great advances in the care of acute disease, right? But we're failing miserably in addressing chronic disease. And here's the deal. Pasteur discovered the bug or the microbes. Fleming discovered antibiotics. Simple cause and effect and simple cure. Single bug, single disease, single drug. Works for infection, but not so much for chronic disease. And we've been searching for the cure for everything else since. The cure for heart disease, for cancer, for diabetes, for dementia. But you know what? We can't find it because it's not so simple. The history of medicine is the pursuit of this holy grail, a pill for every ill. Now, this approach has continued to fail and will continue to fail. Chronic disease actually results from this complex interaction of our genes, our lifestyle, and our environment. And it can't be cured by one thing. All right, now let's go back to the antibiotics story. The reason antibiotics are bad is because they damage the ecosystem in your gut. The microbiome, that's the hundred trillion bugs that live inside you and that actually outnumber your cells by 10 to 1. And here's how antibiotics mess you up. They not only destroy the bad bacteria that you're trying to fight, but they also destroy the good bacteria. It's like herbicides. It can kill everything. You're not careful. There are trillions of bacteria in your gut, and they collectively contain at least 100 times as many genes as your own genes. You're literally only 10% human. The bacterial DNA in your gut outnumbers your own DNA by a huge margin. You've got like 20,000 genes. Well, you got like 2 million bacterial genes, and they're doing all sorts of things. They're controlling your immune function, they're regulating digestion, they're affecting your gut function. They're protecting you against infection. They're even producing vitamins and minerals and nutrients, even regulating your brain chemistry. So not only do antibiotics destroy these good bugs, but they also encourage the overgrowth of bad bugs and yeast, which then leads to a whole mess of symptoms like mood disorders, food allergies, fatigue, skin problems, digestive issues, and lots more. So the overgrowth of bad bugs can also encourage cravings, and it can make you crave sugary, processed junk food, and that causes weight gain, and that causes more growth of bad bugs, and that causes other problems. All these things happen from eating the junk that you're craving because you killed the good bugs and you grew bad bugs, and that makes your whole system go haywire. So when a patient comes to see me, one of the first questions that I ask is, do they have a history of taking antibiotics? Because more often than not, this leads to something called a leaky gut. A patient the other day had a history of being born by C section. They were bottle fed, and then they had recurrent ear infections, and they got tons of antibiotics. And then they developed irritable bowel as a teenager, and then they got an autoimmune disease as a young adult. This is a story I see over and over again, because when you destroy your gut, your whole system breaks down. And it's all because we don't honor, respect, or tend our inner gardens. Now, often children are given lots of antibiotics for viral infections, for colds and sore throats and other things that would get actually better on their own. And these antibiotics then damage this delicate gut flora at a really early age. In fact, a CDC study found that 71% of kids who suffered C Diff infections, that's a bad infection in the gut caused by these special bacteria called Clostridium difficile. Well, they've been given courses of antibiotics for ear infections, for respiratory infections, for nasal congestion in the 12 weeks before they got this horrible gut infection. So you treat one infection, you get another one. It's kind of a bad scene. Another study published in mBio, found that one week of antibiotics could negatively affect our whole microbiome for long periods of time, even for up to a year after you take the antibiotics. Other studies have linked long term antibiotic use with problems of the immune system, with higher stress responses, with behavior problems, obesity, and lots More. Okay. So how do you protect yourself from the dangers of antibiotics? Well, now, like I said, there are times when antibiotics are really necessary. And if you do have to take antibiotics and there aren't any other options, there's a few things I recommend you do before and after. First, I want you to make sure you add in the good stuff. In addition to eating a low glycemic, that's low sugar processed food starch diet, a whole foods diet, I want you to take probiotics and prebiotics. Prebiotics are like fertilizer for the probiotics. Also, a high quality multi strain probiotic will help populate your gut with good bugs. And the prebiotics that this special kind of fiber helps feed the good bugs. And prebiotics are things like onions and garlic and resistant starch like potato starch, sweet potatoes, dandelion greens, jicama. All these are really good foods you can add in. They'll help to fertilize the good bugs. My favorite resistant starch is potato starch. I like to use Bob Red Mills potato starch. Start with about a teaspoon a day in water. You can build up to two to four tablespoons a day. And this is the kind of starch that's not digested in the small intestine. Instead, you your gut bacteria process it and it creates all these beneficial molecules that help balance your blood sugar and promote healthy gut bugs. In other words, when you eat resistant starch, it resists digestion by you. It doesn't spike your blood sugar or insulin and helps you fuel all the good bugs and feed them and also speeds up your metabolism. Next, I want you to focus on repairing your gut, especially after you finish taking the antibiotics. So you can use all sorts of things in addition to the pre and probiotics. Things like glutamine and omega 3 fats and vitamin A and zinc. These all help repair the gut lining so you can resume normal function in there. And also, digestive enzymes help to help you digest your food better. And you can use those as you're starting to repair your gut. So remember, only take antibiotics if absolutely necessary and learn how to tend your inner garden with the right foods, with pre and probiotics and with the right nutrients. So now I want to hear from you. How did you recover from taking antibiotics? And have you ever had adverse effects from taking short term or long term antibiotics? Share your comments below or on my Facebook page. And if you like this video, please share it on your social media and be sure to submit your questions to drhyman.com and maybe next week I'll make a house call to you.