Don't Overuse Antibiotics
Antibiotics are life-saving drugs! You get sick. You see the doctor. You get a prescription for antibiotics. Then you’re all fixed up, right? Not necessarily. Antibiotics work by killing bacteria, so in addition to killing disease-causing bacteria, antibiotics also kill healthy bacteria, which negatively affect the trillions of bacteria and other microbes living in your intestines. In fact, only one week of antibiotics can change the makeup of the gut microbiota for up to a year!
Make no mistake: antibiotics save lives. But it’s up to us to use them responsibly, so if you need to start taking an antibiotic, also start taking a probiotic! The best time to start taking a probiotic is the same day you start your prescription. Why? Because the risks associated with antibiotic use are due to diminished numbers of beneficial bacteria – so prevention is the name of the game.
How does this approach work? If an antibiotic kills bacteria, it seems logical that it will kill the probiotic bacteria too. The trick is in the timing: when taking antibiotics, take your probiotic 2 hours after any one of your daily antibiotic doses. This allows time for the antibiotic to move through the gut before you introduce the probiotic. Also, keep taking the probiotic for a minimum for 5 days post treatment.
Also, keep eating those un-heated probiotic-rich foods, such as: fresh sauerkraut or kimchi, kefir, of kombucha tea as they all contain live microorganisms.
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Peterson, C. T., et al. Immune homeostasis, dysbiosis and therapeutic modulation of the gut microbiota. Clinical & Experimental Immunology (2015): 363-377.
Zaura E, Brandt B. W., Teixeira de Mattos M. J., et al. Same Exposure but Two Radically Different Responses to Antibiotics: Resilience of the Salivary Microbiome versus Long-Term Microbial Shifts in Feces. mBio (2015)
Hempel S1, Newberry SJ, Maher AR, Wang Z, Miles JN, Shanman R, Johnsen B, Shekelle PG. Probiotics for the prevention and treatment of antibiotic-associated diarrhea: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of The American Medical Association. 2012. 307(18):1959-69.