The article explores hypotheses about what antibiotics might be doing to human health. A quotation from one of the expert sources sums up the conclusion: "'It’s still too early to draw definitive conclusions,' Dr. Cho said. 'And antibiotics remain a valuable resource that physicians use to fight infections.'" A couple years ago, a participant here shared a data chart from Scientific American that appears to no longer be at the original source but which has been mirrored[1] at the website of the journal Nature. The data chart points out that all-cause mortality has been steadily decreasing at all ages during my lifetime throughout the developed world. This is roughly the time span covered by the interesting article kindly submitted here. If human intake of antibiotics (which, after all, in many cases are "natural" substances emitted by fungi to guard against being destroyed by bacteria) has increased, as surely must be the case, it doesn't seem to be hurting us much.

On the specific issue of body weight, "normal" weight ranges for a given height were defined years ago on the basis of statistics on weight distributions in the general population. Oddly, current mortality and morbidity statistics tend to show that the persons with longest expected lifespans are not persons with "normal" weight as defined by body mass index but rather persons who are (slightly) "overweight." (This is however, most true for "overweight" persons who have good cardiovascular fitness.[2]) So if today's population in developed countries weighs more than populations a generation ago, the issue to look at is how many people have shifted from underweight to normal weight, how many from normal weight to overweight, and how many from overweight to obsesity. Obesity is definitely harmful to health. Moderate physical exercise, the kind I get by substituting walking or bicycling to do errands for driving, is surely good for pretty nearly everyone, independent of other lifestyle factors. But it has yet to be shown that antibiotic intake in the current amounts experienced by human beings in the developed world is harmful. There has been investigation in the last decade or so of the hypothesis that some antiobiotics may be protective against heart disease,[3] for instance, although maybe not all antibiotics have the same risk-benefit profile.

[1] http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box...

http://www.pinterest.com/pin/195977021257786739/

[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20118386

[3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC387430/