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| Superbug multidrug resistant plasmid |
A recent, informative article by Tori Rodriguez for The Atlantic suggests that, I want to discuss other ramifications of using essential oils as antibiotics to avoid multiple antibiotic resistant superbugs.
The logic for using essential oils in place of medical antibiotics is compelling:
- Essential oils are extracts of plants, which have myriad traditional uses, including food.
- Most antibiotic use is to increase livestock production.
- Antibiotics selectively kill gut bacteria in livestock and make them obese.
- Antibiotic resistance occurs within a week of use in livestock (or people.)
- Medical antibiotics are quickly losing efficacy.
- Antibiotic resistance genes quickly move from agriculture to superbugs to people.
- Plants/essential oils contain natural antibiotics that kill gut flora and increase livestock productivity.
- Resistance to essential oil antibiotic activity is slower, because of simultaneous use of multiple antibiotics.
Obesity is a Symptom of Antibiotic Damage to Gut Microbiome
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| Antibiotics make meat fatter |
We may enjoy a fat marbled steak, but the corn and antibiotics used to produce that mouth-watering plate of satiety, is not so healthy. Corn and antibiotics make that meat on the hoof fit for human consumption, but the cattle are quickly dying and the fat marbling is a symptom of cattle metabolic syndrome. The corn and antibiotics disrupt the bovine gut microbiota and alter energy flow. The result is prime beef.
As It Is with Cattle, so It Is with Middle Americans
General descriptions of Americans with metabolic syndrome and steers ready for the abattoir are similar. That should not be surprising, because both are caused by damaged gut microbiota and consequences of metabolic syndrome. Americans routinely damage their gut microbiota with antibiotics (processed food, etc.) and the major symptoms of the resulting gut dysbiosis are chronic inflammation, depression, autoimmune diseases, obesity and metabolic syndrome.
Repairing gut microbiota reverses all of these symptoms.
But Essential Oils Are Just Natural Antibiotics
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| Essential oils are natural antibiotics |
Is it better to use essential oils than medical antibiotics to fatten cattle or treat Lyme disease or hospital infections such as C. diff.? Most pharmaceuticals were derived from plants or fungi and were originally used to kill microorganisms, i.e. they were natural antibiotics. We call these phytochemicals by a variety of names, e.g. antioxidants or essential oils, but they are more appropriately called
phytoalexins, all natural, all plant, all toxic antibiotics. It is entertaining that essential oils have had so many different traditional and pharmaceutical uses, and yet they have always been experienced by microorganisms (and our livers) as simply toxic. Essential oils do have the significant advantage of being a mixture of antibiotics and might be very useful where pharmaceutical antibiotics have problems. The toxicity of essential oils, especially toward gut bacteria, should not be ignored.
Resistance to Essential Oils as Antibiotics
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| Antibiotic resistance develops in sewage |
I previously kept track of laboratory strains of bacteria by simply exposing large numbers of the bacteria to an antibiotic and selecting for the rare individual that had already spontaneous mutated (DNA replication error of one in a million). We could then use the new drug resistant strain in experiments and identify it by its resistance. The same thing happens to your gut bacteria with an overnight exposure to an antibiotic. And of course it also occurs immediately in livestock exposed to antibiotics or in sewage plants where tons of antibiotics and gut bacteria are mixed. Resistance to each of the chemicals in an essential oil also would rapidly occur, if bacteria were exposed to each alone and in a toxic concentration. This is repeatedly observed, since commonly used drugs are just individual components of essential oils that have been produced in large amounts in pills and marketed based on their predominant physiological activity, rather than just another antibiotic. Thus, resistance to a statin or Metformin, as antibiotics, could be easily observed (even on multiple drug resistance plasmids), but is just ignored.
Essential Oils Are just Mixtures of Natural Antibiotics
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| Statins from fungal antibiotics |
The impact of essential oils on gut microbiota is unpredictable, because the composition of essential oils is highly dynamic and so are gut microbiota. Each component of an essential oil has a different spectrum of toxicities to hundreds of different target proteins to each of the hundreds of different species of bacteria in the human gut. Ingested essential oils are modified by the detox enzymes of the intestine and liver. The modified phytochemicals have different toxicities and act as additional antibiotics. Mixtures of antibiotics, as in essential oils, less likely to select for resistance than individual antibiotics, but an antibiotic is still just an antibiotic, regardless of whether it is straight from the plant or via a pharmaceutical salesman.
Common Medicines Are the Source of Superbugs
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| Common meds are antibiotics |
Doctors with prescription pads and steers eating antibiotics are blamed, I think unjustly, for the crisis of antibiotic resistance. The real culprit is you taking NSAIDs, statins, proton pump inhibitors, antidepressants and other common medicines. Since they are all developed from plant antibiotics, they are still antibiotics, and they still select for antibiotic resistance. It is important to remember that
pharmaceuticals are repurposed natural antibiotics from plants. The answer to the superbugs that are resistant to all of the common antibiotics is to dramatically reduce the use of all pharmaceuticals. The initial goal should be a 90% reduction. Costly pharmaceutical chemicals could be replaced with preventive diets and less disruptive manipulations of gut microbiota, e.g. ingestion of capsules containing freeze-dried gut flora. This more gentle approach to health care would also provide huge cost savings, as well as vastly improving health.