Expelling toxic “forever chemicals” from the body may take guts — or at least, their microbes.
Some microbes found in the human gut can absorb some per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, researchers report July 1 in Nature Microbiology. Mice harboring those bacteria in their guts excreted PFAS in their feces, suggesting microbes are intestinal allies that flush forever chemicals from the body.
Bacteria often encounter many potentially stressful chemicals such as pesticides and have mechanisms to deal with them. But “from the bacterial perspective, chemicals are chemicals,” says Kiran Patil, a molecular biologist at the University of Cambridge. Previous studies had showed that gut microbes can pick up