Antibiotics: Use With Care

Imagine a world where a paper cut lands you in the ICU and a routine hip replacement feels risky. 

We trace how antimicrobial resistance (AMR) gets us there, and what it takes to steer away, by decoding how bacteria outsmart antibiotics and why everyday choices either fuel or slow that arms race. Along the way, we connect the dots to gut health, showing how the microbiome’s postbiotics support appetite, hormones, barrier integrity, and brain signaling, and why unnecessary antibiotics can flatten those benefits.

We start with clear, plain-language science: bacteria evolve resistance by pumping drugs out, changing drug targets, and even sharing resistance genes. Overuse is the accelerant. Many prescriptions are written “just in case,” and diagnostics can lag behind symptoms. Beyond the clinic, the hidden engine is agriculture: the majority of antibiotics worldwide are used in livestock, creating resistant strains that move through food, water, and the environment. 

That means AMR is not just a hospital issue, it’s a food system issue that touches home kitchens, grocery carts, and community health.

Then we flip the lens to your gut ecosystem. Prebiotics feed probiotics, which make postbiotics like short-chain fatty acids that fortify the mucin layer, tighten gut junctions, and shape hormones including GLP-1, leptin, ghrelin, and PYY. These signals affect mood, appetite, and metabolic resilience. Unnecessary antibiotics can wipe out diversity and blunt postbiotic production, nudging metabolism and immunity in the wrong direction. 

The fix is practical: ask your clinician if antibiotics are truly needed, never share or save pills, and complete the full course when prescribed. Prevent infections with handwashing, vaccines, and safe food handling. Vote with your fork for producers that curb routine antibiotic use. And rebuild your microbiome with fiber-rich plants, beans, lentils, oats, vegetables, fruits, and seeds.

Antibiotics are a gift worth guarding. 

Use them wisely, protect your gut, and help keep routine care safe for everyone. If this resonated, follow, share with a friend, and leave a quick review so more listeners can find the show.

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Dr. Jules

Chapters

• 0:00 Section A

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:10

Yo plant base buddies, welcome back to season three of the podcast. This year's gonna be amazing. We'll be talking about all of the different pillars of lifestyle medicine, from nutrition to exercise to stress to sleep and everything in between. Yo, plant based buddies, welcome back to another episode. Today we're gonna be talking about antimicrobial resistance, or AMR. Now, I regularly get people asking questions about how to rebuild their gut microbiome after a course of antibiotics, and that tells me that a lot of people recognize that the bugs that we have in our bowels are not just dormant or passive. And now studies show that our gut microbiome, the population of gut bugs in our large colon, they actually produced bioactive compounds that get reabsorbed in our bodies and circulate everywhere, coursing through our blood, to our brain, to all organs. And now it has been shown and well accepted in the scientific community that gut bugs produce compounds that pretty much impact every facet of our life in metabolism, from mood to appetite to hormones to metabolic dysfunction, all being determined by the quality and variety of our gut bugs. Now, I spend most of my time telling people that gut health is based on having good gut bugs in large quantities and in many different varieties or species, so that you get the widest range and proper quantities of bioactive postbiotics. Postbiotics are compounds that bacteria produce once they fermented prebiotics, typically fiber or resistant starches. So if you've heard the term probiotic, you've likely heard the importance of gut health. So basically, the way it works is that prebiotics or fiber-resistant starches, for example, are fermented by probiotics, which are simply a term that we give to our good gut bugs, and our good gut bugs, after fermenting prebiotics, produce postbiotics. Right? So these postbiotics are the compounds that make our gut microbiome so valuable. They help rebuild our mucin layer, the protective layer of mucus that lines our gut cells, and they help keep our gut lining made by one single layer of colonocytes that are tightly bound together by proteins that make them leak-proof, or I should say, selectively permeable, meaning that our body can regulate what crosses our gut barrier into our circulation. We know that when our gut microbiome is disrupted, our gut barrier is disrupted. One of the main culprits in the modern age is the use of antibiotics. So today I want to talk about antimicrobial resistance, the overuse of antibiotics, and the impacts that it can have on our health, either acutely or chronically. So picture this: a paper cut sends you to the intensive care unit. Or a routine hip surgery carries the same risk as extreme sports. Now it sounds dramatic, but that's the future that we may face if we don't start paying attention to antibiotic and antimicrobial resistance. And the World Health Organization calls it one of the biggest threats to human health in the next decade. And this isn't science fiction, it's already happening. So in this episode, we'll talk about what antimicrobial resistance is, why it matters, and most importantly, what you can do about it. Now, antimicrobial resistance, or let's call it AMR, happens when bacteria, viruses, fungi, or parasites stop responding to the drugs that were designed to kill them. But for now, let's focus on bacteria and antibiotics. Now, think of bacteria as mini shape shifters. Over time, they learn tricks to help them survive antibiotics. Some are able to pump the drug out of through their cell membranes. Others will change their surface, their certain proteins on their cell membrane, so that the drugs can't bind to them and kill them. Some bacteria will even share resistance genes with other bacterial buddies. And the result is that infections that used to be easy to treat become stubborn, dangerous, and even sometimes deadly. But the key is that it's not the human body that becomes resistance, it's actually the bacteria. And that's a common misunderstanding. Once resistance spreads, we actually lose one of medicine's most powerful tools, which are antibiotics. Now, if we talk numbers, in 2024, millions of antibiotic prescriptions were written. A significant portion of them weren't even necessary. And sometimes doctors prescribe them just in case, or because some patients really insist or expect them. And sometimes it's simply because trying to distinguish between a bacterial and viral infection is tricky without extra tests. And people are waiting sometimes weeks and months to get routine blood work or imaging studies done. So the result is that there's overuse of antibiotics. And every unnecessary prescription that we make for antibiotics will give bacteria another chance to practice and build defense mechanisms, things that will make them resistant to antibiotics. But the part that people don't know is that around 70% of antibiotics worldwide aren't even used in humans, they're used in livestock. Cows, pigs, chickens, they get low-dose antibiotics to help them grow faster and to help them prevent infections because they live in unsanitary and crowded farm conditions. And that means that your burger or your chicken wings, they've been raised in an environment soaked with antibiotics. And this practice fuels resistant bacteria, which can travel from farms to people through food, through water, through the environment. So antibiotic resistance, it's not just a hospital problem, it's a food system problem. Now, antibiotics, first of all, they don't cure viral infections. So they won't fix your cold, your flu, your COVID-19, and most sore throats, with the exception of a few ones like strep throat. Taking antibiotics for these conditions is like it's like spraying bug spray on your sandwich. It's not just useless, it's maybe even potentially harmful. Now, antibiotics can wipe out your gut microbiome, they can cause side effects, and worst of all, they actually can train bacteria to become resistant to them. So the next time that you're tempted to ask your doctor for a prescription of antibiotics, just because you want to be safe, remember that antibiotics aren't a safety net. They're a specific tool, and like all good tools, they lose effectiveness if we don't use them in the right situations. So we should care about antibiotic resistance because if it continues to rise, routine healthcare will become risky again. Joint replacements, cesarean sections, cancer, chemotherapy, organ transplants, all of these depend on effective antibiotics to prevent or treat infections in people that have vulnerable immune systems. And without antibiotics, medicine will take a giant leap backwards. And simple infections like UTIs, urinary tract infections, or skin infections could again become life-threatening. Now, the scary truth is that people forget that without antibiotics, these common infections used to kill people. But now we have bacteria that are resistant to our strongest antibiotics. They can now almost defend themselves against almost nearly every drug that we throw at them. And at some point we'll run out of options. It's not just a problem for hospitals, it affects everyday people, everyday families, and everyday choices we make that put us in a risk of infection. Simple dental procedures could be harmful again. But the good news is that each of us has a role to play in slowing down resistance. Now, firstly, only take antibiotics when they're prescribed by a qualified healthcare provider, not because your cousin has leftovers or because you think it might help your sniffles. Different antibiotics target different types of infection. So if you take nitroferentoin, an antibiotic for urinary tract infection, and you take that for your sinus, it may actually select resistant microbes and increase your complication rate. Now, ask your doctor if you really need the antibiotics. I promise we won't be offended. In fact, we'll respect you more for caring. And a patient double checking to make sure they really need an antibiotic likely reduces the rates at which they're filled. But if you do get antibiotics, make sure to finish the full course. No stopping early halfway. It simply gives the enemy a chance to regroup. If you have a hundred bacteria causing an infection and you take an antibiotic for two and a half days instead of the prescribed seven, maybe you only kill 94 of these. So these bacteria now start to multiply. And when these six bacteria become a hundred, they become a hundred of the most powerful and prone to being antibiotic resistant. So you get a worst infection with less likelihood that the same antibiotic will work. And so don't share antibiotics, don't keep them for later. That's that's typically when people, like desperate times, call for desperate measures. People will use their friends' antibiotics or only have two to three days left in the bottle, and they take that and then they feel better, so they decide to not go see a doctor, and that simply puts you in a situation to suffer from antibiotic resistance. But the best thing to do to avoid antimicrobial resistance is to avoid the infections altogether. So take steps to reduce infections in the first place. Wash your hands, get your vaccines, practice safe food handling and wash produce properly. And finally, think about how your food is actually produced. Support farms and companies that prioritize safe food practices. And every dollar you spend is a vote for the food system that you want. Antibiotics are one of modern medicine's greatest gifts. They turn once deadly infections into minor inconveniences. But their power isn't guaranteed forever. If we treat antibiotics like candy, they won't work when we really truly need them. And if we treat them like the precious resource they are, we preserve them for our kids and for our grandkids. So the bottom line is simple. We cannot be wasting antibiotics on the bacterial equivalent of a mosquito bite. We have to use them wisely and hopefully they'll they'll still be there for us working when we really need them. So the goal here was simply to make you think twice about antibiotics because antibiotics are lifesavers. We use them, I'll prescribe them in people who need them, but some people insist on getting them just in case, and that's where antibiotic resistance increases. And the more the people eat red meat and processed meat and animal products raised in questionable farm environments where infections spread quickly and trigger antibiotic resistance, unless we change the food environment, the foods that are in demand, the foods that we put in our bodies, maybe we can help prevent antibiotic resistance from affecting someone you love. Now the more people understand AMR, the better chance we have to prevent it, right? So hopefully this episode convinced you that not only we want to prevent excessive antibiotic use to prevent antibiotic resistance later on, we also really need to consider seeing this from a gut health perspective. The overuse of antibiotics is not just a problem for resistance, but it's a problem for annihilating good gut bug populations that reside in your gut microbiome now. And these good gut bugs that we call probiotics, they produce short-chain fatty acids and other bioactive compounds that get reabsorbed in your body and impact every single facet of metabolic health, from leptin, ghrelin to PYY, appetite-regulating hormones, they produce GLP1, they cross the blood-brain barrier and they impact mental health. These compounds produced by your good gut bugs, they're just now starting to get studied. We didn't learn about that in medical school because we really minimize the impact of gut health. But we now know that your gut communicates with every single organ in your body. From the gut brain axis to your gut bugs producing chemical compounds that actually decrease appetite. The impacts of our gut health is farther reaching that we can imagine. So not just we want to avoid antibiotics, unneeded antibiotic, unnecessary antibiotics, we want to avoid them for resistance, we also want to avoid them for our own metabolic health. Right on. I hope you've learned more about antibiotic resistance and where it comes from and why we need to work together to improve gut health, but to improve the response to antibiotics when we actually really need them. Cool. Thanks for listening. We'll see you at the next episode. Peace.com to find free downloadable resources. And remember that you can find me on Facebook and Instagram at Dr.JulesCormier, and on YouTube at Plantbase Dr. Jewels.