The twentieth century may well go
down as the century of war against microbes, mainly the bacteria (and some
viruses) that were found to be responsible for infectious diseases like
malaria, cholera, tuberculosis, smallpox, and the common cold and flu. Most of
these diseases are communicable, so much of human hygiene became the struggle
to keep ourselves clean and free of “germs,” up to and including the overuse of
antibiotic soaps that were the rage a few years ago. Chlorine bleach became as
common in western kitchens as salt. More recently, however, we are being told
that all this cleanliness that we thought next to godliness may not be so great
for us after all. Rodney Dietert’s new book, The Human Superorganism (Dutton: 2016), takes this idea to the next
level. Dietert, a professor of immunogenetics at Cornell, goes so far as to
state that “human mammals are not really viable. As mammals devoid of microbial
partners, we lack what we need to exist” (p. 28). In this view, all that
cleaning with disinfectant and the overuse of antibiotics in both children and
farm animals (chickens were given antibiotics in their feed because the normal
chicken immune response against pathogens caused muscle loss—and muscle loss
meant small chicken breasts, while producers, and consumers, wanted large breasts,
i.e. lots of white meat) has led to an epidemic of non-communicable diseases
(NCDs); the latter being the result of our war on what is literally an
indispensable part of ourselves—the microbiome.
That is, we are composed in large part of bacteria, something that the biologist
Lynn Margulis pointed out years ago. Some estimates of bacterial cells in the
human body range as high as 90 percent of the total cells. This astonishing
number refers to the more than 10,000 different microbial species in and on our
bodies from our gut to our mouths to our skin: “one square inch of our skin can
contain up to six billion microorganisms!” (5). This, in short, is what Dietert
means by calling humans a “superorganism”: we humans are made up of thousands
of species (mostly bacterial), including the genetic information we carry,
which is not, as we have been instructed most recently, just the 22,000 genes
in our mammalian genome. No, Dietert points out, “ninety-nine percent of the
genetic information within the space we call you is not from your genome” but
from all those microbes in your microbiome. Ten million of them.
Does
this matter? It matters crucially, according to Professor Dietert. And the
reason is that with deficiencies in our microbiome, countless processes that we
need for digestion, for our immune systems, for our very preferences for food
and our partners derive from the work of our microbiome. Without the full
complement of microbes, that is, we humans are incomplete. And the consequence
of being incomplete is the current epidemic of NCDs the world population is
suffering from: obesity, autism, heart disease, asthma, and all the allergies
and auto-immune diseases that plague many of us these days. Dietert quotes the
World Health Organization to the effect that these NCDs now kill three times as
many people as infectious diseases (68% to 23%). That’s because defects in the
microbiome (occurring through drugs, diet, oversanitation, stress, and exposure
to chemicals) lead directly to defects in the immune systems which determine
what gets through to our cells, tissues and organs, and what does not.
Is
there scientific evidence that this is the case? Consider one study done by
Derrick McFabe at the University of Western Ontario. McFabe demonstrated that
simply by altering the concentration of one gut bacterial metabolite, the
short-chain fatty acid known as propionic
acid, he could make normal mice antisocial to the point where they ignored
their littermates and obsessed on a ball. In the same vein, John Cryan and
researchers at University College in Cork, Ireland, raised germ-free mice (bubble
mice) and found that, lacking normal gut microbes, the mice had “altered gene
expression” in the amygdala. They lack social cognition, are generally
antisocial, and “have eerily similar social interaction profiles to those of
autistic children” (247). As Dietert summarizes it, these metabolites (or
products of bacterial metabolism), including such things as the vitamins B3,
B5, B6, B12, and K, and critical brain
chemicals like serotonin, dopamine, acetylcholine and norepinephrine, “can
influence virtually every physiological system and tissue in the body” (70).
They influence what we like to eat, whom we are attracted to, if anyone, and
whether we can function normally or live our lives plagued by excessive
inflammation leading to diseases like atherosclerosis. Again, as Dietert puts
it, virtually every NCD (non-communicable disease), which is itself often due
to loss of the full integrity of the microbiome, “has unhealthy inflammation
with excessive oxidation at its core” (129).
How
does this happen, and why is it happening so much now? As noted above, modern
conditions are major contributing factors to the compromising of our
microbiome, our microbial partners. Dietert lists six factors contributing to
the epidemic: 1) antibiotic overreach; 2) the food revolution and diet; 3) urbanization;
4) birth-delivery mode; 5) misdirected efforts at human safety; 6)
mammalian-only medicine. Antibiotic over-use has received a great deal of
attention in recent years, and many food producers have now cut back or
eliminated the use of antibiotics in animal feed. But not all. And one of the
areas where antibiotic use still reigns, as far as I can tell, is in its use to
compensate for the obscene crowding that takes place in feedlots for cattle and
in poultry cages. Disease cannot help but be rampant amid such intolerable
crowding, and antibiotics are required to help keep diseases in check. In
addition, doctors have routinely prescribed antibiotics for minor ailments like
ear infections, and thus led to the compromise of not just the offending
bacteria but to all the bacteria in and on our bodies. Use of probiotics like
yogurt can help, but Dietert and others now recommend a major effort to limit
the use antibiotics to only dire cases. One other area where antibiotics have
been used routinely is in childbirth. Dietert makes much of the fact that
Cesarean sections have increased exponentially in recent years, doubling and tripling
in many countries. Today, Cesarean sections in the U.S. are up to 33% of all births, compared
to 24% in England, 40% in parts of India, and 46% in China. One major result of
this, according to Dietert, is that the newborn fails to get the contact with
vaginal microbes that it needs to complete its own microbiome—so it is born
incomplete. In addition, Cesarean sections run the risk of infection, so
antibiotics are routinely employed pre-surgically, compromising the mother’s microbiome,
and thereby her infant’s, even before birth.
One
other factor deserves mention here (though all of them are important). That is
the role of chemicals with which our environment, our food, and our bodies have
been flooded. A simple thing like food
emulsifiers (the chemicals that smooth things like ice cream, chewing gum, artificial
tears), such as Polysorbate 80 and carboxymethylcellulose, have been “found to
alter gut microbe populations by thinning the mucus layer and increasing
inflammation” (167). In this experiment on mice, eventually the mucus thinning
led to inflammation-driven NCDs in the mice. Bisphenol A, the infamous
endocrine disruptor found in plastic baby bottles, food packaging and other
plastics has also been found to compromise the gut barrier, again leading to
increasing inflammation and NCDs. And that scourge of our planet, glyphosate,
the chief agent in Monsanto’s Roundup pesticide, has been found to “selectively
alter the ecosystem of environmental microbes (in the soil), such as favoring
the formation of some types of biofilms” (256). This leads to reduction in the
presence of some fungi needed by grass roots, which in turn leads to less
foraging areas for ungulates. In a study of chicken gut microbes, pathogenic
bacteria were found to be more resistant to glyphosate than were the helpful
bacteria—thus helping the pathogens! And in Germany, glyphosate was found to affect the
microbe mix in cows, reducing the normal protection their gut bacteria (Enterococcus) provided in restricting
the growth of botulism spores. The result: an increase in botulism-related
diseases in cattle in recent years.
Enough
said. Even if Dietert has overstated his case, it seems clear that a revolution
in human health and food intake is under way. Dietert’s main recommendations
call for a reduction in the flagrant use of antibiotics, a return to natural
forms of childbirth where possible, and an increase in the use of probiotic
foods. This gets to another point he makes: that traditional cultures, before
the advent of cold food transport and frozen foods, used fermentation processes
to keep foods from spoiling. Sauerkraut, kimchi, miso, tempeh, chichi, wines
and beers, and of course yogurt were used by various cultures to keep foods
edible, the side effect being that all of these foods have bacterial cultures
that promote and restore the gut microbes we need to digest most of our foods.
Some doctors have been for years recommending the use of yogurts after
antibiotic treatment, precisely to restore the favorable gut fauna. Now Rodney
Dietert’s book is providing the scientific rationale for even more attention to
the microbes that foster our health and our very lives. It wouldn’t take much—except
of course for the resistance sure to be mounted by industries like Big Pharma,
which are quite content with the epidemics that keep millions sick and them
wealthy. In that regard, we can expect lots of ‘scientific’ studies to prove
that diseases like obesity, autism, asthma, and the rest are genetic. For
myself, though, eating yogurt regularly and even preparing sauerkraut in my own
kitchen seems like a much better option—until, that is, the world wakes up and outlaws
GMOs, glyphosate, and Monsanto, and many others like them. At the least, it’s
worth thinking about.
Lawrence DiStasi
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