While COVID 19 continues to fill the headlines like a past-his-prime football player who refuses to retire, a likely greater challenge in medicine arises from various bacterial infections that are growing stronger and more resistant to antibiotics. Even before 2020’s disastrous debut of COVID, many had been sounding the alarm over the growing number of antibiotic resistant bacteria threatening to outpace our ability to develop new antibiotics. This was mainly blamed on either the overprescribing of antibiotics for non-bacterial diseases like viral colds or the increasing use in the livestock industry to prevent loss of animals there. This study indicates that this threat is worsened by an even more widespread issue than antibiotics overuse. Apparently, our bad nutrition habits could be not only weakening our immune system but encouraging bacteria and yeast in our gut to produce more drug resistant genes.
While all bacteria have some resistance to some antibiotics, under normal conditions in the past we could almost always find an antibiotic that would give us a chance to overcome an infection. Success was a matter of choosing the right drug for the right bug, or at least that was the general consensus. In reality, these drugs only worked well when our immune system had the firepower to finish off the infection once the drug knocked the invader’s numbers down sufficiently. HIV and AIDS weakened the immune system, though, requiring the drugs to be continued longer, until the immune system had recovered enough from the illness. Now we have many previously considered easy to treat infections that are becoming harder and harder to find that right drug for the right bug.
Medical research and clinical experience has shown that with increasing use of various antibiotics, resistance of many bacteria has increased. This happens in labs where conditions are controlled as researchers watch colonies of bacteria which were once antibiotic sensitive become overtaken by bacteria that have resistance genes. This happens in real life when a new antibiotic is released and, over a few years of use, we start to see higher and higher rates of drug resistance and treatment failures in real patients.
In this study, researchers looked at deficiencies in zinc, folate, iron, vitamin A and vitamin B12 and whether such deficiencies contributed to changing resistance patterns in bacteria and fungi. From prior research we know that such microbes carry some resistance genes that can be turned on or amplified in response to antibiotic exposure or nutrient stressors. They looked in mice fed various levels of these nutrients and measured the changes in bacteria, fungi, and viruses in the mice based on which diet they received.
While none of these mice received any antibiotics during the experiment, those which received the nutrient deficient diet were found to have higher levels of various resistant microbes. They had higher levels of Enterobacteriaceae which are related to antibiotic resistance as well as several other bacterial strains known to be directly or indirectly related to drug resistance. These mice also demonstrated higher levels of a yeast known as Candida dubliniensis which is a pathogen as well as different patterns of various against bacteria. Overall, bacteria which experienced higher oxidative stress had higher levels of antibiotic resistance.
As we work with individual patients or with the broader public, we need to be aware of these risks to poor nutrition. Besides low zinc or Vitamin A weakening our immune system, low levels of these and other studied nutrients can also help the bacterial enemies resist the currently available medicines. Helping other restore healthier more abundant lives requires recognition and responses to all the factors involved in disease rather than reacting solely to superficial factors like antibiotic overuse.
Bibliography:
Paula T. Littlejohn, Avril Metcalfe-Roach, Erick Cardenas Poire, Ravi Holani, Haggai Bar-Yoseph, Yiyun M. Fan, Sarah E. Woodward, B. Brett Finlay. Multiple micronutrient deficiencies in early life cause multi-kingdom alterations in the gut microbiome and intrinsic antibiotic resistance genes in mice. Nature Microbiology, 2023; DOI: 10.1038/s41564-023-01519-3
Thanks to Science Daily:
University of British Columbia. “Study reveals surprising link between malnutrition and rising antibiotic resistance.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 17 November 2023. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/11/231117134925.htm>.
Sanctuary Functional Medicine, under the direction of Dr Eric Potter, IFMCP MD, provides functional medicine services to Nashville, Middle Tennessee and beyond. We frequently treat patients from Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and more... offering the hope of healthier more abundant lives to those with chronic illness.
