This means that eating food that contains little or no anti-biotics for a long time will encourage rapid growth of microbes in the gut.
The mix of microbes in your gut can affect how well you use and store energy from food. In laboratory experiments, transferring bacteria from certain obese mice to normal ones led to increased fat in the normal mice. Blaser and his colleagues are concerned that changes in our microbiome early in life may contribute to weight problems later.
An estimated 30% of bacteria are disease causing pathogens. According to health care experts, infectious diseases caused by microbes are responsible for more deaths worldwide than any other single cause. It is estimated that, at beginning of the 20th century, more than half the people who ever lived died from smallpox, caused by a virus, or malaria, caused by a protozoan. Bacteria, too, have been the cause of some of the most deadly and widespread diseases in human history. Bacterial diseases such as tuberculosis, typhus, plague, diphtheria, typhoid fever, cholera, dysentery, and pneumonia have taken a huge toll on humanity.
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