Pesticides used on commercial farms, and even your backyard flower bed, could be harming the healthy bacteria that live in your gut, new research suggests.
And it's not only pesticides: British researchers found that other chemicals ubiquitous in modern homes -- flame retardants and plastics compounds -- may also be toxic to your "microbiome," the trillions of helpful germs living in the digestive tract.
"We've found that many chemicals designed to act only on one type of target, say insects or fungi, also affect gut bacteria," said study lead author Indra Roux, of the University of Cambridge's MRC Toxicology Unit. "We were surprised that some of these chemicals had such strong effects. For example, many industrial chemicals like flame retardants and plasticizers -- that we are regularly in contact with -- weren't thought to affect living organisms at all, but they do."
The findings were published Wednesday in the journal Nature Microbiology.
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