Here's why you should seriously think twice before loading up on antibiotics. While they can be lifesavers, but antibiotic misuse has also increased the number of drug-resistant germs.

The latest antibiotics research shows that it can seriously mess up the natural bacteria found in our digestive tracts, which in turn affects how the human body absorbs nutrition. As it turns out, the history between weight gain and antibiotics is just as messed up.

Over at the New York Times, writer Pagan Kennedy provides a fairly detailed overview of the relationship between antibiotics and weight gain in farm animals as well as humans.

Back in the 1950s, scientist believed they could use antibiotics to stimulate growth in children. This has to do with the discovery of Aureomycin, which is an antibiotic used on pigs, sheep, and cows, And apparently, they didn't really have reservations about using kids as guinea pigs.
In the 1950s, a team of scientists fed a steady diet of antibiotics to schoolchildren in Guatemala for more than a year, while Charles H. Carter, a doctor in Florida, tried a similar regimen on mentally disabled kids. Could the children, like the farm animals, grow larger? Yes, they could.
While all that was secretly going on, farms were also busy stockpiling the antibiotics and not giving a crap about how their livestock was being treated:
By 1954, Eli Lilly & Company had created an antibiotic feed additive for farm animals, as "an aid to digestion." It was so much more than that. The drug-laced feeds allowed farmers to keep their animals indoors — because in addition to becoming meatier, the animals now could subsist in filthy conditions. The stage was set for the factory farm.
It's only now that scientists are finding out about the effect of antibiotics on our micribiome, which is a bacteria that plays a role "in all sorts of immune responses, and, crucially, in digesting food, making nutrients and maintaining a healthy weight. And antibiotics can kill them off."
In the meantime, we are faced with the legacy of these drugs — the possibility that they have affected our size and shape, and made us different people.
Check out the full post over here