What happened to the grasshoppers?

When I was a kid, grasshoppers were everywhere. I walked through a field every day to get to school and grasshoppers were everywhere, jumping back and forth across my path, frequently banging off my legs. At night in summer, the backyard was filled with fireflies that we’d chase and capture in jars to watch up close. And there were butterflies of many colors and varieties everywhere, flitting from flower to flower. Today, I don’t see any grasshoppers. In fact, I haven’t seen one in over 40 years. I saw one—just one—firefly this past summer in my backyard. And I can count the number of butteries I’ve seen in the past year on two fingers. We have managed to massively alter our external environment with widespread use of herbicides, pesticides, and other factors, sufficient to wipe out huge populations of creatures that used to be plentiful. Just as we have messed up our external environments, so we have also dramatically distorted our internal environments, specifically our microbiome. Given the many factors that distort the composition of the human microbiome, such as prescription antibiotics, antibiotic residues in meats, acid-blocking drugs, sugar consumption, synthetic sweeteners like aspartame, synthetic emulsifying agents like polysorbate 80, etc., we have changed the species and number of microbes inhabiting our intestines, skin, mouths, sinuses, airways, vaginas, and other areas. As a reflection of how far adrift we’ve come from...
Source: Wheat Belly Blog - Category: Cardiology Authors: Tags: Agribusiness bowel flora Inflammation microbiota prebiotic probiotic wheat belly Source Type: blogs