What are antibiotics?

*Anti-* is a prefix meaning “opposed” or “against.” Biotic relates to living things.

True to their name, antibiotics have a knack for working against living things (microbes) in your body. Depending on the antibiotic, this means all bacterial life, including the beneficial microbes that we want to keep around.

Antibiotics have revolutionized medicine and made many formerly catastrophic diseases easily manageable. But the flip of this is that they also kill bacteria that are beneficial to us. Short term side effects, such as diarrhea and vaginal yeast infections, are also common after antibiotics.

Destroying large groups of bacteria indiscriminately gives opportunistic microbes a chance to grow. For this reason, we want to pay special attention to antibiotic use and how it impacts your gut community. This is especially important for babies during the first 1,000 days.