Because mice are not little people.
You just wouldn't know that from the school's press release, which alleges pesticides are ruining your microbiome and probiotics may save us, a leap so far beyond the scope of the study we have to wonder if the academics involved are about to launch a new line of supplements.
Like epigenetics and fMRI, microbiome hype proceeded from a kernel of scientific truth, some bacteria are good and patients depleted absolutely benefit from transplants, but then became a catch-all for anything and everything companies wanted to link to 'gut health.' You can't prove it, but you also can't disprove it, so it is invoked a lot because the suggestion is that, like hormones, if a change can be detected it can be framed as bad if you want it to be framed as bad. Or good if you want it to be framed as good.
Once a fad catches on a whole lot of university scholars will rush to endorse it. Harvard School of Public Health epidemiologists have bilked American taxpayers out of billions of dollars looking at data they didn't even collect and then "linking", "correlating" and "suggesting" products and outcomes in a cycle of Miracle Vegetable and Scary Chemical claims they wrap in a halo of statistical significance.(1)
Ohio is not in the northeast so by culture is more immune to woo but people move there, so it can't be a surprise they have gotten scholars who wanted to be writing supernatural claims at Harvard instead moving to Columbus.
Supernatural is what it reads like. They chose 18 compounds used in agriculture because of "emerging evidence" they are toxic to our gut microbiomes and then mapped changes to 17 bacteria.(2) They created 306 pesticide-gut microbiota pairs, including the usual suspects that environmental lawyers always want to sue over, like atrazine and chlorpyrifos but included DDT, because though banned in the United States for political reasons, it is still used in countries afflicted by malaria.(3)
They did tests in petri dishes and then in mice. They found changes in metabolites, which have so many functions it's almost pointless to note changes happen, and lipids, which also have so many functions it is challenging to claim a change is worse. Especially not in cell cultures or mice.
But because one bacteria, Bacteroides ovatus, was not changed by pesticides, they have a ready answer for that also - a potential probiotic product "somehow buffering the inflammation process" that can protect us all even though there is no plausible biological mechanism for why or how it can be real.
Inflammation is how healing works, which is one reason why a 1980s fad, antioxidants, were cause for concern by scientists. Luckily, antioxidants don't become bioavailable, they are just supplements, because if they did become bioavailable they could do harm as well as good.
So it goes with tinkering in a complex system like gut bacteria. Use caution when being sold a miracle product claiming it will help. You already know not to drink DDT.
NOTES:
(1) Then they get allies to pile on with talk of "bioaccumulation" and "may explain" and call it "emerging evidence" but that really means 'we have no evidence but we see other papers claiming correlation.'
(2) Really toxic stuff like Organic-Certified™ copper sulfate was not included despite it being the dominant pesticide in a $140 billion industry and far more prevalent than DDT. That alone is reason for skepticism about the motivations of the authors.
(3) Our EPA banned it over the objections of its own scientists and then literally wrote the book on how to spray it inside homes for countries that still had the infestations DDT wiped out in America. WHO endorses it. Mice in exploratory papers out to sell supplements, not so much.
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