Hello and a happy and healthy welcome to the Friday 5 with me Laz, coming at you with my weekly roundup of news, views, and Earl's Pearls of Wisdom.

And as you can tell, I'm in a slightly demer-pappy mood today as I'm about to skip off for a few days break in the

Austrian mountain air with my youngest son and I'm so looking forward to a bit of

battery recharge but never fear I'm taking my trusty microphone with me and so I shall be back in your ear

Same time next week too. So what's caught my eye this week? Well let's start with a bit of gut health

Now as you no doubt know the good gut guide is a book that I wrote a couple of

years ago and since then I have become something of a gut health crusader and one of the reasons

why it's so important to check out the health status of our microbiome

is because almost all of us will have taken some kind of antibiotics at some time in our lives.

And we know that this can disrupt and adversely affect our levels

of good gut bacteria but we didn't necessarily realize just how much of a negative impact

antibiotics can cause until a new study was released this week.

Now this was a study by researchers at the University College London and it found

that just one prescription, just one dose, can change the composition of our

microbiome affecting our beneficial bacteria, all those little fungi and microbes which regulate our immune system and help our digestion and produce vital vitamins for us.

Now we've known before that antibiotics decrease the diversity of microbes in our gut before it recovers.

But this new study is actually slightly more worrying because it suggests that the disturbance caused by antibiotics may transition the microbiome to a whole new composition perhaps even permanently.

So what to do? Well obviously we need to cut down the use of antibiotics for non-essential treatment, that much is clear,

and we do need to try and repopulate our gut if we've had to take them. And don't forget,

it's not just the medical use of antibiotics in humans that may be at work here.

The vast majority of antibiotics around the world are used in intensive livestock

forming, especially poultry. So this is how they enter the food chain

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