I wonder if this is the real reason for the obesity crisis.
No doubt it’s a factor due to people failing to absorb as many nutrients, leading to increased over-eating
this is highly speculative. people don’t over eat because they’re lacking vitamin X, they over eat because processed foods are scientifically designed to be tasty as fuck. we are surrounded by ultra indulgent food and a lot of people can’t handle it.
It’s speculative to suggest that it’s a factor?
Meanwhile you’re talking as if there’s a single definitive cause and effect in a fundamentally complex system.
And stress. And processed foods tend to be high in calories.
Citation of Interest: Roux, I & Lindell A et al: ‘Industrial and agricultural chemicals exhibit antimicrobial activity against human gut bacteria in vitro.’ Nature Microbiology, November 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41564-025-02182-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-025-02182-6
Abstract
Industrial and agricultural chemicals such as pesticides are often considered to have restricted biological activity. Yet, there are concerns regarding their broader toxicity range and impact on human gut microbiota. Here we report a systematic in vitro screening to assess the impact of 1,076 pollutants, spanning diverse chemistries and indicated applications, on 22 prevalent gut bacteria. Our investigation uncovered 588 inhibitory interactions involving 168 chemicals, the majority of which were not previously reported to have antibacterial properties. Fungicides and industrial chemicals showed the largest impact, with around 30% exhibiting anti-gut-bacterial properties. We demonstrate that the scale of our dataset enables a machine learning approach for predicting the antibacterial activity of pesticides. Mechanistically, chemical–genetic screens using transposon mutant libraries of Parabacteroides merdae and Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron implicated genes involved in conserved efflux pathways, including the acrR locus, as mediators of pollutant resistance. We also found that loss-of-function mutations in genes coding for metabolic enzymes were selected under pollutant exposure, including those for branched short-chain fatty acid biosynthesis under tetrabromobisphenol A, a flame retardant. Taken together, our results suggest that the antibacterial activity of chemical pollutants should be considered in future studies on the microbiome and the emergence of antimicrobial resistance, as well as in toxicological assessments.
Page 3109 has Figure 1, which is useful to understand the breadth of effect grouped by type of contaminant and grouping of the 22 bacteria studied.
I am very annoyed by the thought that some people’s reaction to this title will be “Good! I don’t want them damn bacterias in my gut!”
This, my friend, is the perfect example of a strawman.
A strawman is when you purposefully misrepresent someone’s opinion to make it easy to “prove” wrong. This cannot apply here because there is no misrepresentation possible, as the only group I am referring to are specifically those who are thinking like that.
which you made up.
You are the literal example of the 'Nobody: ’ meme.
I’ve had a creationist tell me that evolution can’t be real because he found out that DNA means “Deoxyribonucleic acid” and that an acid would just “dissolve” the body and therefore he “knew” that DNA wasn’t real.
I’ve had a religious flat Earther tell me that the Earth isn’t round, it was just created by God like a pacman level where if you go too far in one direction you appear in the other end “so you can’t escape”.
I wouldn’t be so sure to think that people who think that gut bacteria is bad don’t exist.
Reacting preemptively negatively only reinforces them.
