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I would have thought that adding antibiotic compounds to food might have an effect on the bacterial ecosystem in our gut. Does that seem unexpected?
by hgomersall 3y ago
I would have thought that adding antibiotic compounds to food might have an effect on the bacterial ecosystem in our gut. Does that seem unexpected?
- lazide 3y ago‘Something happens’ != ‘specific harm’. We’re all still walking around after this has been happening for 50+ years. So whatever is going on is relatively subtle no? And likely easy to blame on something else. If it’s even actually a problem. But the benefit is clear, in the form of less food spoilage, longer expiration dates, etc.
- cassepipe 3y agoHow long has it been since we discovered the existence and the importance of the gut microbiome ?
- hgomersall 3y agoI'm always amazed at how surprised people seem to be when it's found that a biological system has complicated effects that weren't obvious at first glance. Given the nature of how they're evolved my working assumption is that every component of biological system is impactful in some way and messing with them will likely result in unexpected consequences.
- lazide 3y agoSure. We’ve also survived numerous ecological collapses, multiple world wars, the extinction of megafauna (and likely caused most of them), and have radically changed our environment and style of living from nomadic groups hunting and gathering across wide open wilderness, to mass agriculture and being mostly urbanized. If something changes, that doesn’t mean we all die. It doesn’t mean it’s all good, but it doesn’t mean it’s all bad either. We still don’t actually know what, if any, real difference we’re talking about here either. It’s not like we have a decent baseline data set.