In a few years we might look back at this period and think: oh, it was at the time when we thought gut bacteria was the solution to every health problem known to mankind.
Maybe one day we'll realize that there is no single factor for good health. Maybe it's Vitamin D AND gut bacteria AND lot of other factors that are even individually different?
It turns out antibiotics are actually pretty awful - they wreak havoc on your microbiome, they modulate your immune system in weird ways, they cause some weird allergies.
But they are still way better than the diseases they cure, and definitely better than death!
Yep, antibiotics are the lesser evil. The only thing I really don't agree with is how easily and how much it is used in our food production.
Toxins move up the food chain, and with humans being pretty much the top of that chain we shouldn't be dumping medicine into livestock just to keep them from getting sick.
Worse, in China they are sold OTC and are as popular as you suggest (aside from being the thing that is prescribed on nearly every doctors visit to a health center). Even though anti-viral medicines (for what little good those do...) are also available OTC...
I think this is very different in that it's something we previously completely disregarded in health outcomes. We consume various things that we know wreak havoc on our gut biome including antibiotics and various residual herbicides, but it was felt that this was mostly harmless as the gut biome did not play a critical role in our physiological condition. Now it's seeming that it may indeed be quite a critical system in the human physiological condition and so it's more of an entirely new field of study than a miracle cure.
I feel as though there is some degree of ostrich-syndrome when it comes to the deterioration of American physical and mental health. Something is causing this change, and most convenient explanations (lethargic lifestyles, internet, etc) do not really work since that would imply a comparable decline in other areas that have also seen such changes, yet the correlations there are spotty at best.
As far as I know, the US is the only prosperous country where life expectancies are going down. Makes one sit back and think, no?
A lot of factors are probably involved as you say, but if I had to guess at the elephant-in-the-room dominant factor I'd say it's the US's model of what's euphemistically called "health care" and "health insurance." It's a complete no-brainer that people who can't afford medical treatment are dying earlier.
Look at the reasons that people are dying. It's been blamed on things like the opioid crisis but the numbers in no way support such 'hypothesis', which don't even really qualify as such.
Cardiovascular disease, heart failure, stroke, diabetic complications, etc are where the big increases are coming from. And nearly all the major causes of death that are increasing are strongly linked with obesity, which is skyrocketing out of control. This is what I was alluding to early when suggesting that this change is, in turn, blamed on lethargic lifestyles, the internet, etc yet such changes are also happening in other nations yet they are not experiencing such radical shifts in lack of healthfulness.
We should already know better that there most likely is no "secret". That is, it's probably more than one special variable we have to look at. Somehow many scientists are having a hard time to let go of one dimensional thinking.