Your gut microbiome could change the way you metabolize medicines, a new paper says

The microbes that live in people’s guts may be able to break down hundreds of drugs, according to a new paper published Monday in Nature.

Researchers at Yale looked at how hundreds of prescription medicines interacted with about 70 strains of bacteria that they selected because they represented a range of those found in the human gut. They found that for about two-thirds of the drugs, the presence of the bacteria decreased the level of the medicine in a culture.