There are many reasons for this. Structural inequalities across U.S. society contribute to this problem, including unequal access to fresh healthy foods, specific targeting of communities of color by manufacturers of junk food, unequal access to health care, more workers in essential jobs who cannot stay home and excess exposure to toxic chemicals and unhealthy air.
In this post, we are tracking studies and news articles about the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on black Americans, Latinos and communities of color, and how junk food manufacturers specifically and disproportionately target communities of color. For recent reporting on the connections between food-related diseases and the coronavirus, impacts on farmworkers and food workers, and other vital food system issues related to the pandemic, see our Coronavirus Food News Tracker.
Data on the disproportionate targeting of junk food advertising and marketing to communities of color
A national investigation found 95% of baby foods tested contained the heavy metals lead, arsenic, cadmium and mercury. Some also contained the rocket fuel component perchlorate
Apple and grape juice, oat ring cereal, macaroni and cheese, puff snacks and rice-based foods had the highest levels of heavy metals
Heavy metals are developmental neurotoxins that can harm a baby’s developing brain and nervous system
Organic food may still contain heavy metals due to the presence of heavy metals in soil
There are several ways parents can safeguard their infant’s food, including making their own or using organic or biodynamically-grown vegetables
A national investigation commissioned by Healthy Babies Bright Futures (HBBF) recently made a disturbing finding. A shocking 95% of baby foods tested contained the heavy metals lead, arsenic, cadmium and mercury.1
I have often written about how most commercial infant formulas are high in processed sugar and questionable ingredients including soy. They can contain as much sugar as a can of soda yet lack the benefits of the natural sugars found in breast milk.
Worse, most formulas also contain genetically modified organisms (GMOs), synthetic vitamins, inorganic minerals, excessive protein and harmful fats while lacking vital immune-boosting nutrients found in breast milk.
Still, the new findings about poisons like heavy metals lurking in baby food add urgency to the problem and raise questions about how parents can safely feed their infants.
Parent volunteers working with HBBF’s partner organizations were asked to buy the most prominent baby food brands at their local stores or online.
The organizations the parents worked with were the Alaska Community Action on Toxics, Campaign for Healthier Solutions, Coming Clean, Ecology Center, Environmental Justice Health Alliance, Getting Ready for Baby, Learning Disabilities Association of America, Organizacion en California de Lideres Campesinas Inc., and Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services.2
The foods selected by the parents included 61 brands and 13 food types, including infant formula, teething biscuits, cereals and fruit juices. The results were staggering. Lead was found in 94% of the baby foods; cadmium and arsenic in approximately 75% of the items; and mercury in just under 33% of the products.
Fifteen of the baby foods accounted for 55% of the heavy metal contaminants. These included apple and grape juice, oat ring cereal, macaroni and cheese, puff snacks and rice-based foods. Rice foods such as cereal and rice-based snacks account for one-fifth of the risks babies face, as these foods have high levels of arsenic, as well as the other three metals, HBBF says.3
The presence of heavy metals in baby food has been known for a decade, but the HBBF’s study sheds new light on just how widespread the contamination is, and the specific risks babies and toddlers may face from such foods, especially to their IQs. An excerpt from the report reads:4
“The four heavy metals we found in baby food have a unique significance. All are developmental neurotoxins … They can harm a baby’s developing brain and nervous system, both in utero and after birth, for impacts that include the permanent loss of intellectual capacity and behavioral problems like attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
All four metals are linked to IQ loss from exposures early in life. The scientific evidence spans decades and continues to build: at least 23 studies published in the past seven years confirm these four heavy metals’ impacts to a child’s healthy development …
These metals are so prevalent in foods eaten by babies and toddlers that every child could be exposed daily to all three of the most common heavy metals detected in food — lead, arsenic, and cadmium — based on an analysis of federal surveys of children’s dietary patterns and heavy metals levels in food …”
Heavy metals are not the only IQ-lowering substances found in baby food, according to HBBF. The industrial chemical perchlorate, a rocket fuel component, was also detected, and this dangerous substance adds to the cognitive risks posed by heavy metals, HBBF says:5
“Perchlorate disrupts thyroid functions crucial to brain development and has been linked to IQ loss among children born to mothers with thyroid dysfunction, who are more vulnerable to perchlorate toxicity …
It is a rocket fuel component used since the Cold War. In 2005 FDA approved its use as an antistatic in plastic food packaging, and in 2016 expanded the approval to cover dry food handling equipment.
Perchlorate is also a degradation product of hypochlorite used to disinfect food processing equipment. Levels in children’s food increased dramatically from 2005 to 2012 …”
This is not the first time perchlorates — salts derived from perchloric acid used in the ways described above — have been found in baby food. Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found 15 brands of powdered infant formula were contaminated with the substance 10 years ago.6
Most people are exposed to perchlorate through their diet, in the form of contaminated water and/or foods. But the exposure infants receive may be far greater than that of adults if they are fed infant formula, as the toxin may be present in both the formula and the milk or water used to prepare it.
Perchlorate blocks the thyroid gland from taking up iodine, which can have a serious effect on a developing fetus and infant whose neurodevelopment depends on access to iodine.7 The harmful impact of perchlorate is also mediated by other endocrine disruptors that affect the thyroid found which might be found in the environment.
Sadly, parents can’t “shop their way out of” the toxic heavy metal problem by buying organic products, HBBF warns. Heavy metals are everywhere — they naturally occur in the soil, but pesticides, fertilizers, factory farms and other environmental pollution greatly increase their presence.
Because heavy metals are in the soil (whether deposited there naturally or through artificial means), leafy greens and root vegetables like carrots and sweet potatoes take up and retain them to a greater degree than fruits and above ground crops.
While parents may decide to buy organic foods and make their own baby food, this does not entirely solve the problem because organic standards do not set strict limits for such contaminants; both adult and baby foods may contain heavy metals.8
Parents also cannot rely on bottled water to avoid heavy metals. Bottled water is no safer than filtered tap water and generates toxic plastic waste to boot.9 In a previous article, I noted that that microplastics are also found in bottled water.
Parents Should Beware of Fruit Juices
The HBBF report recommends against giving babies and toddlers fruit juices for two reasons. First, because common juices like apple and grape contain heavy metals and secondly because parents tend to give excessive amounts of juices to their children. This means the metal levels can build up.
According to a consensus statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the American Heart Association and the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry, “Even 100% fruit juice offers no nutritional benefits over whole fruit.”10
There are other reasons to shun juice, say child and medical experts. Fruit juices can cause weight gain and lifelong obesity to the same degree as soft drinks, and their effect on teeth is equally destructive.
Most parents probably don’t realize that giving their child apple juice is akin to giving them a Coke, but metabolically, and in terms of dental health, it is. The lack of protein and fiber in juice counteracts any nutritional benefits, add the experts.11
Over seven years ago, Dr. Oz and Consumer Reports exposed high levels of arsenic in fruit juices. A full 10% of juice tested by Consumer Reports exceeded federal drinking-water standards for arsenic in the U.S.
Low-level chronic exposure to arsenic can lead to gastrointestinal problems, skin discoloration and hyperkeratosis, chronic fatigue syndrome, high blood pressure, diabetes, reproductive problems, neurological problems, various cancers and reduced IQ, as cited in the HBBF report.
Rice Is Also a Harmful Baby Food
Though pediatricians continue to tell parents that rice cereal mixed with breast milk or formula should be a baby’s first meal, it is irresponsible advice that I have always resisted.
Acclimating infants to the taste of highly processed white rice could set them up for a lifetime of bad eating habits and put them at risk for diabetes.12 The way that white rice is processed strips away vitamins, fiber and other nutrients. The rice that is left turns to sugar and raises insulin levels.
Since rice is submersed in water to grow, it also readily absorbs inorganic arsenic, which is the most harmful kind of arsenic. “Rice cereal has six times more arsenic than other types of cereal, like oatmeal and multigrain,” says Jane Houlihan, HBBF’s national director of science and health.13
“I have not been recommending rice cereal as a first food for many years, because I prefer babies eat whole grains with more nutrition,” agrees pediatrician Dr. Tanya Altmann.14 So, just how can baby food be made safe? Government clearly needs to do more, says the HBBF report, pointing out that:15
“FDA can use its testing programs, recall authority, and guidance to industry, among other tools, to characterize and control heavy metal levels in food. The agency tests a fraction of imported food in their Import Program, prioritizing food likely to pose risks to consumers, including those with high heavy metals levels.
Federal law gives FDA the authority to require a recall of food it deems to be adulterated, that ‘bears or contains any poisonous or deleterious substance which may render it injurious to health,’ including heavy metals …
Despite FDA’s many areas of authority and its recent emphasis on reducing exposures to heavy metals, for 88 percent of baby foods tested by HBBF — 148 of 168 baby foods — FDA has failed to set enforceable limits or issue guidance on maximum safe amounts. And none of the agency’s existing guidance considers the additive neurological impacts of multiple metals in baby food.”
How Can Parents Ensure Baby Food Safety?
I have often written about how parents can make sure their babies and toddlers eat the most nutritious and safest foods. For instructions on how to make your own homemade baby formula, see “The U.S. Campaign Against Breastfeeding.” Here are a few other ideas sparked by the HBBF report that appeared on CNN:
Feed your baby a variety of healthy foods — This will help children be less picky eaters and avoid future food allergies.16
Choose snacks carefully — Rice teething rusks and other teething biscuits have little nutrition.
Reduce juice — Water and milk should be the drinks of choice.
Serve carrots and sweet potatoes less frequently — When you do, peel them carefully and cook them in water that is then disposed.
Minimize the use of plastic, especially with reheating foods — Heat causes dangerous plastics to leach into the food.
Steam and puree organic or biodynamically grown vegetables — Cool them in small glass containers, then freeze and put in bigger containers.
Scientific scrutiny of pesticide residue in food grows; regulatory protections questioned
(Environmental Health News) Weed killers in wheat crackers and cereals, insecticides in apple juice and a mix of multiple pesticides in spinach, string beans and other veggies – all are part of the daily diets of many Americans. For decades, federal officials have declared tiny traces of these contaminants to be safe. But a new wave of scientific scrutiny is challenging those assertions.
Though many consumers might not be aware of it, every year, government scientists document how hundreds of chemicals used by farmers on their fields and crops leave residues in widely consumed foods. More than 75 percent of fruits and more than 50 percent of vegetables sampled carried pesticides residues in the latest sampling reported by the Food and Drug Administration. Even residues of the tightly restricted bug-killing chemical DDT are found in food, along with a range of other pesticides known by scientists to be linked to a range of illnesses and disease. The pesticide endosulfan, banned worldwide because of evidence that it can cause neurological and reproductive problems, was also found in food samples, the FDA report said.
U.S. regulators and the companies that sell the chemicals to farmers insist that the pesticide residues pose no threat to human health. Most residue levels found in food fall within legal “tolerance” levels set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), regulators say.
“Americans depend on the FDA to ensure the safety of their families and the foods they eat,” FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said in a press release accompanying the agency’s Oct. 1 release of its residue report. “Like other recent reports, the results show that overall levels of pesticide chemical residues are below the Environmental Protection Agency’s tolerances, and therefore don’t pose a risk to consumers.”
The EPA is so confident that traces of pesticides in food are safe that the agency has granted multiple chemical company requests for increases in the allowed tolerances, effectively providing a legal basis for higher levels of pesticide residues to be allowed in American food.
But recent scientific studies have prompted many scientists to warn that years of promises of safety may be wrong. While no one is expected to drop dead from eating a bowl of cereal containing pesticide residues, repeated low level exposures to trace amounts of pesticides in the diet could be contributing to a range of health problems, particularly for children, scientists say.
“There are probably many other health effects; we just haven’t studied them”
A team of Harvard scientists published a commentary in October stating that more research about potential links between disease and consumption of pesticide residues is “urgently needed” as more than 90 percent of the U.S. population has pesticide residues in their urine and blood. The primary route of exposure to these pesticides is through the food people eat, the Harvard research team said.
Several additional Harvard-affiliated scientists published a study earlier this year of women who were trying to get pregnant. The findings suggested that dietary pesticide exposure within a “typical” range was associated both with problems women had getting pregnant and delivering live babies, the scientists said.
“Clearly the current tolerance levels protect us from acute toxicity. The problem is that it is not clear to what extent long-term low-level exposure to pesticide residues through food may or may not be health hazards,” said Dr. Jorge Chavarro, associate professor of the Departments of Nutrition and Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and one of the study authors.
“Exposure to pesticide residues through diet is associated [with] some reproductive outcomes including semen quality and greater risk of pregnancy loss among women undergoing infertility treatments. There are probably many other health effects; we just haven’t studied them sufficiently to make an adequate risk assessment,” Chavarro said.
Toxicologist Linda Birnbaum, who directs the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), has also raised concerns about pesticide dangers through exposures once assumed to be safe. Last year she called for “an overall reduction in the use of agricultural pesticides” due to multiple concerns for human health, stating that “existing US regulations have not kept pace with scientific advances showing that widely used chemicals cause serious health problems at levels previously assumed to be safe.”
In an interview Birnbaum said that pesticide residues in food and water are among the types of exposures that need greater regulatory scrutiny.
“Do I think that levels that are currently set are safe? Probably not,” said Birnbaum. “We have people of different susceptibility, whether because of their own genetics, or their age, whatever may make them more susceptible to these things,” she said.
“While we look at chemicals one at a time, there is a lot of evidence for things acting in a synergistic fashion. A lot of our standard testing protocols, many that were developed 40 to 50 years ago, are not asking the questions we should be asking,” she added.
Legal doesn’t mean safe
Other recent scientific papers also point to troubling findings. One by a group of international scientists published in May found glyphosate herbicide at doses currently considered “safe” are capable of causing health problems before the onset of puberty. More research is needed to understand potential risks to children, the study authors said.
And in a paper published Oct. 22 in JAMA Internal Medicine, French researchers said that when looking at pesticide residue links to cancer in a study of the diets of more than 68,000 people, they found indications that consumption of organic foods, which are less likely to carry synthetic pesticide residues than foods made with conventionally grown crops, was associated with a reduced risk of cancer.
A 2009 paper published by a Harvard researcher and two FDA scientists found 19 out of 100 food samples that children commonly consumed contained at least one insecticide known to be a neurotoxin. The foods the researchers looked at were fresh vegetables, fruits and juices. Since then, evidence has grown about the harmful human health impacts of insecticides, in particular.
“A number of current legal standards for pesticides in food and water do not fully protect public health, and do not reflect the latest science,” said Olga Naidenko, senior science advisor to the non-profit Environmental Working Group, which has issued several reports looking at potential dangers of pesticides in food and water. “Legal does not necessarily reflect “safe,” she said.
Unacceptable levels
One example of how regulatory assurances of safety have been found lacking when it comes to pesticide residues is the case of an insecticide known as chlorpyrifos. Marketed by Dow Chemical, which became the DowDuPont company in 2017, chlorpyrifos is applied to more than 30 percent of apples, asparagus, walnuts, onions, grapes, broccoli, cherries and cauliflower grown in the U.S. and is commonly found on foods consumed by children. The EPA has said for years that exposures below the legal tolerances it set were nothing to worry about.
Yet scientific research in recent years has demonstrated an association between chlorpyrifos exposure and cognitive deficits in children. The evidence of harm to young developing brains is so strong that the EPA in 2015 said that it “cannot find that any current tolerances are safe.”
The EPA said that because of unacceptable levels of the insecticide in food and drinking water it planned to ban the pesticide from agricultural use. But pressure from Dow and chemical industry lobbyists have kept the chemical in wide use on American farms. The FDA’s recent report found it the 11th most prevalent pesticides in U.S. foods out of hundreds included in the testing.
A federal court in August said that the Trump Administration was endangering public health by keeping chlorpyrifos in use for agricultural food production. The court cited“scientific evidence that its residue on food causes neurodevelopmental damage to children” and ordered the EPA to revoke all tolerances and ban the chemical from the market. The EPA has yet to act on that order, and is seeking a rehearing before the full 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
When asked how to explain its changing positions on chlorpyrifos, an agency spokesman said that the EPA “plans to continue to review the science addressing neurodevelopmental effects” of the chemical.
The fact that it is still in wide use frustrates and angers physicians who specialize in child health and leaves them wondering what other pesticide exposures in food might be doing to people.
“The bottom line is that the biggest public health concerns for chlorpyrifos are from its presence in foods,” said Dr. Bradley Peterson director of the Institute for the Developing Mind at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. “Even small exposures can potentially have harmful effects.”
The EPA decision to continue to allow chlorpyrifos into American diets is “emblematic of a broader dismissal of scientific evidence” that challenges human health as well as scientific integrity, according to Dr. Leonardo Trasande, who directs the Division of Environmental Pediatrics within the Department of Pediatrics at New York University’s Langone Health.
Epidemiologist Philip Landrigan, director of Boston College’s Global Public Health initiative, and a former scientist with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, is advocating for a ban on all organophosphates, a class of insecticides that includes chlorpyrifos, because of the danger they pose to children.
“Children are exquisitely vulnerable to these chemicals,” said Landrigan. “This is about protecting kids.”
Increased tolerances at industry request
The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act authorizes the EPA to regulate the use of pesticides on foods according to specific statutory standards and grants the EPA a limited authority to establish tolerances for pesticides meeting statutory qualifications.
Tolerances vary from food to food and pesticide to pesticide, so an apple might legally carry more of a certain type of insecticide residue than a plum, for instance. The tolerances also vary from country to country, so what the U.S. sets as a legal tolerance for residues of a pesticide on a particular food can – and often is – much different than limits set in other countries. As part of the setting of those tolerances, regulators examine data showing how much residue persists after a pesticide is used as intended on a crop, and they undertake the dietary risk assessments to confirm that the levels of pesticide residues don’t pose human health concerns.
The agency says that it accounts for the fact that the diets of infants and children may be quite different from those of adults and that they consume more food for their size than adults. The EPA also says it combines information about routes of pesticide exposure – food, drinking water residential uses – with information about the toxicity of each pesticide to determine the potential risks posed by the pesticide residues. The agency says if the risks are “unacceptable,” it will not approve the tolerances.
The EPA also says that when it makes tolerance decisions, it “seeks to harmonize U.S. tolerances with international standards whenever possible, consistent with U.S. food safety standards and agricultural practices.”
Monsanto, which became of unit of Bayer AG earlier this year, has successfully asked the EPA to expand the levels of glyphosate residues allowed in several foods, including in wheat and oats.
At that time, it also said it would raise the tolerance for glyphosate in barley from 20 ppm to 30 ppm, raise the tolerance in field corn from 1 to 5 ppm and raise the tolerance of glyphosate residue in wheat from 5 ppm to 30 ppm, a 500 percent increase. The 30 ppm for wheat is matched by more than 60 other countries, but is well above the tolerances allowed in more than 50 countries, according to an international tolerance database established with EPA funding and maintained now by a private government affairs consulting group.
“The Agency has determined that the increased tolerances are safe, i.e, there is a reasonable certainty that no harm will result from aggregate exposure to the pesticide chemical residue,” the EPA stated in the May 21, 2008 Federal Register.
“All these statements from EPA – trust us it’s safe. But the truth is we have no idea if it actually is safe,” said Dr. Bruce Lanphear, a clinician scientist at the Child & Family Research Institute, BC Children’s Hospital, and a professor in the faculty of health sciences at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. Lanphear said that while regulators assume toxic effects increase with dose, scientific evidence shows that some chemicals are most toxic at the lowest levels of exposure. Protecting public health will require rethinking basic assumptions about how agencies regulate chemicals, he argued in a paper published last year.
In recent years both Monsanto and Dow have received new tolerance levels for the pesticides dicamba and 2,4-D on food as well.
Raising tolerances allows farmers to use pesticides in various ways that may leave more residues, but that doesn’t threaten human health, according to Monsanto. In a blog posted last year, Monsanto scientist Dan Goldstein asserted the safety of pesticide residues in food generally and of glyphosate in particular. Even when they exceed the regulatory legal limits, pesticide residues are so minuscule they pose no danger, according to Goldstein, who posted the blog before he retired from Monsanto this year.
About half of foods sampled contained traces of pesticides
Amid the scientific concerns, the most recent FDA data on pesticide residues in food found that roughly half of the foods the agency sampled contained traces of insecticides, herbicides, fungicides and other toxic chemicals used by farmers in growing hundreds of different foods.
More than 90 percent of apple juices sampled were found to contain pesticides. The FDA also reported that more than 60 percent of cantaloupe carried residues. Overall, 79 percent of American fruits and 52 percent of vegetables contained residues of various pesticides – many known by scientists to be linked to a range of illnesses and disease. Pesticides were also found in soy, corn, oat and wheat products, and finished foods like cereals, crackers and macaroni.
The FDA analysis “almost exclusively” is focused on products that are not labeled as organic, according to FDA spokesman Peter Cassell.
The FDA downplays the percentage of foods containing pesticide residues and focuses on the percentage of samples for which there is no violation of the tolerance levels. In its most recent report, the FDA said that more than “99% of domestic and 90% of import human foods were compliant with federal standards.”
The report marked the agency’s launch of testing for the weed killer glyphosate in foods. The Government Accountability Office said in 2014 that both the FDA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture should start regularly testing foods for glyphosate. The FDA did only limited tests looking for glyphosate residues, however, sampling corn and soy and milk and eggs for the weed killer, the agency said. No residues of glyphosate were found in milk or eggs, but residues were found in 63.1 percent of the corn samples and 67 percent of the soybean samples, according to FDA data.
The agency did not disclose findings by one of its chemists of glyphosate in oatmealand honey products, even though the FDA chemist made his findings known to supervisors and other scientists outside the agency.
Cassell said the honey and oatmeal findings were not part of the agency’s assignment.
Overall, the new FDA report covered sampling done from Oct. 1, 2015, through Sept. 30, 2016, and included analysis of 7,413 samples of food examined as part of the FDA’s “pesticide monitoring program.” Most of the samples were of food to be eaten by people, but 467 samples were of animal food. The agency said that pesticide residues were found in 47.1 percent of the samples of food for people produced domestically and 49.3 percent of food imported from other countries destined for consumer meals. Animal food products were similar, with pesticide residues found in 57 percent of the domestic samples and 45.3 percent of imported foods for animals.
Many imported food samples showed residues of pesticides high enough to break the legal limits, the FDA said. Nearly 20 percent of imported grain and grain product samples showed illegally high levels of pesticides, for example.
Human feces consist of undigested food residues and a great variety of bacteria. SEM shows a very large proportion of the bacteria and, thus, a high health hazard that the bacteria may contaminate food sources if hygienic rules are not adhered to, particu
Moving to a new country can be challenging, not just for us but also for our bacteria. A compelling new study published in Cell suggests migration between certain countries can profoundly affect the bacteria that live in our digestive systems, with important implications for our health.
The National Institutes of Health notes that immigrants to the U.S. are more susceptible to developing obesity and metabolic diseases such as diabetes than either people from the same countries who don’t migrate or native-born U.S. citizens, but we don’t really understand why. To try to understand this phenomenon from a health perspective, researchers from the University of Minnesota conducted a large, in-depth study of Chinese and Thai immigrants moving to the U.S. The authors looked at the diet, gut microbes and body mass index of the immigrants before and after they moved. The evidence showed that the longer immigrants spent in the U.S., the less diverse their bacteria became, and that this was linked to rising obesity.
The human gut is home to hundreds of different species of bacteria known collectively as the “gut microbiome.” As well as breaking down food, this community of microorganisms helps our bodies fight and prevent disease, according to BioMed Central, which also notes there is even tantalizing evidence that the gut microbiome can influence our mental health.
A more diverse gut microbiome is associated with a healthier digestive system. And things that reduce this diversity, such as antibiotics, stress or changes in diet, can help make us more susceptible to conditions like obesity or irritable bowel disease.
The study compared a total of 514 healthy women, split into those born and living in Thailand, those born in Southeast Asia who later moved to the U.S., and those born in the U.S. to immigrant parents originally from Southeast Asia. It found that changes to the gut microbiome began as soon as the immigrants arrived in the U.S. and continued to change over decades. The longer they spent living there, the more their microbiomes began to resemble those of native-born Americans of European ethnic origin. The majority of participants, living in the U.S., also gained weight during the course of the study.
The combination of species that make up our gut microbiomes is strongly influenced by our diets, and so people from different parts of the world tend to have different bacteria. Western guts commonly contain lots of Bacteroides species, which are good at digesting animal fats and proteins. The guts of people with non-Western diets rich in plants tend to be dominated by Prevotella species, which are good at digesting plant fiber. The new study revealed that strains of bacteria from the immigrants’ native countries, particularly Prevotella species, were completely lost, as were relevant enzymes for digesting important plant fibers.
Cause or effect?
Studies that suggest that the microbiome can influence human health or disease are often challenged because it is hard to distinguish between cause and effect. In this case, it’s unclear whether changes in the microbiome are directly contributing to the high incidence of obesity in U.S. immigrants. It may be some time before we fully understand whether a less diverse microbiome leads to obesity, or if obesity leads to a less diverse microbiome.
Most of our knowledge in this area comes from studying laboratory mice. Groundbreaking studies from the lab of U.S. biologist Jeff Gordon first found a link between obesity and the gut microbiome in 2006, when they showed mice gained weight when they were given gut bacteria from obese humans. But, we also know high-fat diets drive obesity regardless of what’s in the gut microbime. So it would be premature to suggest that the microbiome alone is responsible for obesity.
With immigration increasing and eating habits evolving, it is important we better understand how changes in populations, cultures and diets can impact human microbiomes so that we can spot potential health problems. For example, we know that refugees, particularly children, are more prone to developing obesity so we need to develop novel strategies to combat this.
Education is one aspect and another is tackling poverty, which tends to be higher among immigrants than native-born citizens. But if the gut microbiome really is central to health and disease then finding ways to treat it directly by prescribing things like probiotics or even fecal transplants could help. One day we might even have microbial “pills” that could help migrants combat the changes to their gut microbiomes and settle more healthily in their new homes.
Chloe James is a senior lecturer in medical microbiology at the University of Salford, Manchester, U.K., and Ian Goodhead is a lecturer in infectious diseases, also at the University of Salford.
(Prevent Disease) Using artificial sweeteners causes biochemical changes in the body and actually throw off the body’s ability to monitor how many calories we consume. FDA-approved artificial sweeteners and sport supplements have now been found to be toxic to digestive gut microbes, according to a new paper published in Molecules.
Artificial sweeteners are one of the most common food additives worldwide, frequently consumed in diet and zero-calorie sodas and other products. Large examinations have tracked biochemical changes in the body using high-throughput metabolomics.
The collaborative study by researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) in Israel and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore examined the relative toxicity of six artificial sweeteners:
And 10 sport supplements containing these artificial sweeteners. The bacteria found in the digestive system became toxic when exposed to concentrations of only one mg./ml. of the artificial sweeteners.
“We modified bioluminescent E. coli bacteria, which luminesce when they detect toxicants and act as a sensing model representative of the complex microbial system,” says Prof. Ariel Kushmaro, John A. Ungar Chair in Biotechnology in the Avram and Stella Goldstein-Goren Department of Biotechnology Engineering, and member of the Ilse Katz Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology and the National Institute for Biotechnology in the Negev. “This is further evidence that consumption of artificial sweeteners adversely affects gut microbial activity which can cause a wide range of health issues.”
Artificial sweeteners are used in countless food products and soft drinks with reduced sugar content. Many people consume this added ingredient without their knowledge. Moreover, artificial sweeteners have been identified as emerging environmental pollutants, and can be found in drinking and surface water, and groundwater aquifers.
According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 11 to 27 percent of ingested sucralose is absorbed by the human body (FDA 1998). Research published by the manufacturer of sucralose (Roberts 2000) shows that when 8 healthy male adults where given sucralose (in 1 mg/kg amounts), between 10.4% and 30.6% of the sucralose was absorbed. In addition, 1.6% to 12.2% of the sucralose accumulates in the body.
Aspartame is a multi-potential carcinogen, even consumed daily at 20 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. That is a lower quantity than the maximum recommended by the FDA (50 mg/kg of body weight) and the European Union (40 mg/kg).
It increases the incidence of malignant tumours in rats. In the females it increases leukaemia and lymphomas, as well as cancerous cells in the pelvis and urethra. In the males, it especially increases the incidence of malignant tumours in peripheral nerves.
“The results of this study might help in understanding the relative toxicity of artificial sweeteners and the potential of negative effects on the gut microbial community as well as the environment.
Furthermore, the tested bioluminescent bacterial panel can potentially be used for detecting artificial sweeteners in the environment,” says Prof. Kushmaro.
