Growing Doubt: a Scientist’s Experience of GMOs

August 31, 2015

http://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/growing-doubt-a-scientists-experience-of-gmos/

Jonathan R. Latham, PhD
By training, I am a plant biologist. In the early 1990s I was busy making genetically modified plants (often called GMOs for Genetically Modified Organisms) as part of the research that led to my PhD. Into these plants we were putting DNA from various foreign organisms, such as viruses and bacteria.
I was not, at the outset, concerned about the possible effects of GM plants on human health or the environment. One reason for this lack of concern was that I was still a very young scientist, feeling my way in the complex world of biology and of scientific research. Another reason was that we hardly imagined that GMOs like ours would be grown or eaten. So far as I was concerned, all GMOs were for research purposes only.
Gradually, however, it became clear that certain companies thought differently. Some of my older colleagues shared their skepticism with me that commercial interests were running far ahead of scientific knowledge. I listened carefully and I didn’t disagree. Today, over twenty years later, GMO crops, especially soybeans, corn, papaya, canola and cotton, are commercially grown in numerous parts of the world.

Jonathan Latham

Depending on which country you live in, GMOs may be unlabeled and therefore unknowingly abundant in your diet. Processed foods (e.g. chips, breakfast cereals, sodas) are likely to contain ingredients from GMO crops, because they are often made from corn or soy. Most agricultural crops, however, are still non-GMO, including rice, wheat, barley, oats, tomatoes, grapes and beans.
For meat eaters the nature of GMO consumption is different. There are no GMO animals used in farming (although GM salmon has been pending FDA approval since 1993); however, animal feed, especially in factory farms or for fish farming, is likely to be GMO corn and GMO soybeans. In which case the labeling issue, and potential for impacts on your health, are complicated.
I now believe, as a much more experienced scientist, that GMO crops still run far ahead of our understanding of their risks. In broad outline, the reasons for this belief are quite simple. I have become much more appreciative of the complexity of biological organisms and their capacity for benefits and harms. As a scientist I have become much more humble about the capacity of science to do more than scratch the surface in its understanding of the deep complexity and diversity of the natural world. To paraphrase a cliché, I more and more appreciate that as scientists we understand less and less.

The Flawed Processes of GMO Risk Assessment

Some of my concerns with GMOs are “just” practical ones. I have read numerous GMO risk assessment applications. These are the documents that governments rely on to ‘prove’ their safety. Though these documents are quite long and quite complex, their length is misleading in that they primarily ask (and answer) trivial questions. Furthermore, the experiments described within them are often very inadequate and sloppily executed. Scientific controls are often missing, procedures and reagents are badly described, and the results are often ambiguous or uninterpretable. I do not believe that this ambiguity and apparent incompetence is accidental. It is common, for example, for multinational corporations, whose labs have the latest equipment, to use outdated methodologies. When the results show what the applicants want, nothing is said. But when the results are inconvenient, and raise red flags, they blame the limitations of the antiquated method. This bulletproof logic, in which applicants claim safety no matter what the data shows, or how badly the experiment was performed, is routine in formal GMO risk assessment.
To any honest observer, reading these applications is bound to raise profound and disturbing questions: about the trustworthiness of the applicants and equally of the regulators. They are impossible to reconcile with a functional regulatory system capable of protecting the public.

The Dangers of GMOs

Aside from grave doubts about the quality and integrity of risk assessments, I also have specific science-based concerns over GMOs. I emphasise the ones below because they are important but are not on the lists that GMO critics often make.
Many GMO plants are engineered to contain their own insecticides. These GMOs, which include maize, cotton and soybeans, are called Bt plants. Bt plants get their name because they incorporate a transgene that makes a protein-based toxin (usually called the Cry toxin) from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis. Many Bt crops are “stacked,” meaning they contain a multiplicity of these Cry toxins. Their makers believe each of these Bt toxins is insect-specific and safe. However, there are multiple reasons to doubt both safety and specificity. One concern is that Bacillus thuringiensis is all but indistinguishable from the well known anthrax bacterium (Bacillus anthracis) (1). Another reason is that Bt insecticides share structural similarities with ricin. Ricin is a famously dangerous plant toxin, a tiny amount of which was used to assassinate the Bulgarian writer and defector Georgi Markov in 1978. A third reason for concern is that the mode of action of Bt proteins is not understood (Vachon et al 2012); yet, it is axiomatic in science that effective risk assessment requires a clear understanding of the mechanism of action of any GMO transgene. This is so that appropriate experiments can be devised to affirm or refute safety. These red flags are doubly troubling because some Cry proteins are known to be toxic towards isolated human cells (Mizuki et al., 1999). Yet we put them in our food crops.
A second concern follows from GMOs being often resistant to herbicides. This resistance is an invitation to farmers to spray large quantities of herbicides, and many do. As research recently showed, commercial soybeans routinely contain quantities of the herbicide Roundup (glyphosate) that its maker, Monsanto, once described as “extreme” (Bøhn et al 2014).
Glyphosate has been in the news recently because the World Health Organisation no longer considers it a relatively harmless chemical, but there are other herbicides applied to GMOs which are easily of equal concern. The herbicide Glufosinate (phosphinothricin, made by Bayer) kills plants because it inhibits the important plant enzyme glutamine synthetase. This enzyme is ubiquitous, however, it is found also in fungi, bacteria and animals. Consequently, Glufosinate is toxic to most organisms. Glufosinate is also a neurotoxin of mammals that doesn’t easily break down in the environment (Lantz et al. 2014). Glufosinate is thus a “herbicide” in name only.
Thus, even in conventional agriculture, the use of glufosinate is hazardous; but With GMO plants the situation is worse yet. With GMOs, glufosinate is sprayed on to the crop but its degradation in the plant is blocked by the transgene, which chemically modifies it slightly. This is why the GMO plant is resistant to it; but the other consequence is that when you eat Bayers’ Glufosinate-resistant GMO maize or canola, even weeks or months later, glufosinate, though slightly modified, is probably still there (Droge et al., 1992). Nevertheless, though the health hazard of glufosinate is much greater with GMOs, the implications of this science have been ignored in GMO risk assessments of Glufosinate-tolerant GMO crops.
A yet further reason to be concerned about GMOs is that most of them contain a viral sequence called the cauliflower mosaic virus (CaMV) promoter (or they contain the similar figwort mosaic virus (FMV) promoter). Two years ago, the GMO safety agency of the European Union (EFSA) discovered that both the CaMV promoter and the FMV promoter had wrongly been assumed by them (for almost 20 years) not to encode any proteins. In fact, the two promoters encode a large part of a small multifunctional viral protein that misdirects all normal gene expression and that also turns off a key plant defence against pathogens. EFSA tried to bury their discovery. Unfortunately for them, we spotted their findings in an obscure scientific journal. This revelation forced EFSA and other regulators to explain why they had overlooked the probability that consumers were eating an untested viral protein.
This list of significant scientific concerns about GMOs is by no means exhaustive. For example, there are novel GMOs coming on the market, such as those using double stranded RNAs (dsRNAs), that have the potential for even greater risks (Latham and Wilson 2015).

The True Purpose of GMOs

Science is not the only grounds on which GMOs should be judged. The commercial purpose of GMOs is not to feed the world or improve farming. Rather, they exist to gain intellectual property (i.e. patent rights) over seeds and plant breeding and to drive agriculture in directions that benefit agribusiness. This drive is occurring at the expense of farmers, consumers and the natural world. US Farmers, for example, have seen seed costs nearly quadruple and seed choices greatly narrow since the introduction of GMOs. The fight over GMOs is not of narrow importance. It affects us all.
Nevertheless, specific scientific concerns are crucial to the debate. I left science in large part because it seemed impossible to do research while also providing the unvarnished public scepticism that I believed the public, as ultimate funder and risk-taker of that science, was entitled to.
Criticism of science and technology remains very difficult. Even though many academics benefit from tenure and a large salary, the sceptical process in much of science is largely lacking. This is why risk assessment of GMOs has been short-circuited and public concerns about them are growing. Until the damaged scientific ethos is rectified, both scientists and the public are correct to doubt that GMOs should ever have been let out of any lab.
(An earlier version of this article appeared at http://nutritionstudies.org/)
(1) Two references on the anthrax issue (added Sept 2nd): Helgason, E., O. A. Økstad, D. A. Caugant, H. A. Johansen, A. Fouet, M. Mock, I. Hegna, and A.-B. Kolstø. 2000. Bacillus anthracis, Bacillus cereus, and Bacillus thuringiensis—one species on the basis of genetic evidence. Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 66: 2627-2630.
And:
Adelaida M. Gaviria Rivera, Per Einar Granum, Fergus G. Priest. 2000. Common occurrence of enterotoxin genes and enterotoxicity in Bacillus thuringiensis. FEMS Microbiology Letters 190 (2000) 151-155; http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1574-6968.2000.tb09278.x

References

Bøhn, T, Cuhra, M, Traavik, T, Sanden, M, Fagan, J and Primicerio, R (2014) Compositional differences in soybeans on the market: Glyphosate accumulates in Roundup Ready GM soybeans. Food Chemistry 153: 207-215.
Droge W, Broer I, and Puhler A. (1992) Transgenic plants containing the phosphinothricin-N-acetyltransferase gene metabolize the herbicide L-phosphinothricin (glufosinate) differently from untransformed plants. Planta 187: 142-151.
Lantz S et al., (2014) Glufosinate binds N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors and increases neuronal network activity in vitro. Neurotoxicology 45: 38-47.
Latham JR and Wilson AK (2015) Off -­ target Effects of Plant Transgenic RNAi: Three Mechanisms Lead to Distinct Toxicological and Environmental Hazards.
Mizuki, E, Et Al., (1999) Unique activity associated with non-insecticidal Bacillus thuringiensis parasporal inclusions: in vitro cell- killing action on human cancer cells. J. Appl. Microbiol. 86: 477–486.
Vachon V, Laprade R, Schwartz JL (2012) Current models of the mode of action of Bacillus thuringiensis insecticidal crystal proteins: a critical review. Journal of Invertebrate Pathology 111: 1–12.

GE Soybeans Give Altered Milk and Stunted Offspring, Researchers Find

October 26, 2015 

By Jonathan Latham, PhD
http://www.independentsciencenews.org/news/ge-soybeans-give-altered-milk-and-stunted-offspring-researchers-find/
Pregnant goats fed with genetically engineered (GE) soybeans have offspring who grow more slowly and are shorter, according to a new Italian study (Tudisco et al., 2015). Publishing in the journal of Small Ruminant Research, the researchers were testing the results of supplementing the feed of female goats with Roundup Ready GE soybeans.  Roundup Ready soybeans are engineered to resist the herbicide Roundup and are sold by agribusiness giant Monsanto. They are some of the most widely grown soybeans in the world.
The reduced growth of the goat kids was attributed by the researchers to their observation that the milk of the GE-fed mothers was significantly less nutritious and contained less of the IgG antibodies important for early growth.

Cilentana Goats, Italy

“This was a carefully conducted study” commented Dr Judy Carman, Director of the Institute of Health and Environmental Research, Australia. She was not involved in the research, but told Independent Science News that:
“The differences in the composition of the colostrum between the mothers fed the GE soy and the non-GE soy were particularly striking.  The colostrum from the GE-fed mothers contained only 2/3 of the fat, 1/3 of the protein and close to half of the IgG of the mothers fed the non-GM soy.”
To carry out these experiments the researchers divided pregnant female Cilentana goats into four groups, sixty days before kidding. Two of the groups were fed goat food containing GE Roundup Ready soybeans (at two different concentrations). The other two groups were fed conventional (non-GE) soybeans, also at two different concentrations.
After the mothers gave birth all offspring were fed only with their mother’s milk for sixty days. The growth of these kids was measured twice. After both thirty days and sixty days the kids of GE-fed mothers were approximately 20% lower in weight and shorter in stature. Both these differences were statistically significant.
Lower offspring weights were not the only unexpected findings. The researchers also found that the milk of GE-fed goats was lower in protein and fat. This difference in milk quality was large (6% protein in both GE-fed groups versus 18% in both non-GE fed groups) for the first few weeks after birth but gradually disappeared—even though the mothers continued to be fed the GE soybeans. Additionally, the researchers also found that the colostrum produced by GE-fed mothers had low amounts of IgG antibodies. These antibodies are important for growth and for healthy immune development.
A third difference noted by the researchers was that transgenic DNA could be detected in the colostrum of most (10/16) of the GE-fed goats. No transgene DNA was detected in the milk of goats fed non-GE soybeans. This is not the first time that transgene DNA (or non-transgenic DNA) has been found in the milk of ruminants, however.
Interestingly, the researchers found that all of the kids were of similar size at birth, regardless of whether their mothers ate Roundup Ready GE soybeans or not. The researchers therefore proposed that the stunting of the offspring of GE-fed mothers reflected a milk deficiency. Presumably either the lower nutritional value of the colostrum and milk of GE-fed mothers or the colostrum antibody differences that were observed. The authors noted that low IgG antibody levels in colostrum are correlated in other ruminants with slower growth and also that IgG antibodies are known to have a role in nutrient absorption because they promote gut development in newborns.
The researchers did not discuss whether the transgene DNA fragments found in the milk played a role in altering kid development.
This result is the strongest demonstration so far of altered growth and development in offspring of GE-fed mothers. The same researchers in 2010 showed altered activity of the lactic dehydrogenase enzyme in kids fed milk from mothers that ate GE Roundup Ready soybeans. In that previous study however, no additional effects on goat offspring were detected (Tudisco et al., 2010).
“It is already known that Roundup Ready soybeans have various defects including a Manganese deficiency. Yet regulators and GMO developers have continuously dismissed credible reports of GMO crops causing apparent harm to animals, from many different research groups.” Said Dr Allison Wilson of The Bioscience Resource Project. “Hopefully they will not ignore yet another study.”
References
Tudisco R., V. Mastellone, M. I. Cutrignelli, P. Lombardi, F. Bovera, N. Mirabella, G. Piccolo, S. Calabrò, L. Avallone and F. Infascelli (2010) Fate of transgenic DNA and evaluation of metabolic effects in goats fed genetically modified soybean and in their offsprings. Animal 4: 1662-1671.
Tudisco R., S. Calabrò, M.I. Cutrignelli, G. Moniello, M. Grossi, V. Mastellone, P. Lombardi, M.E. Peroa, F. Infascelli (2015) Genetically modified soybean in a goat diet: Influence on kid performance. Small Ruminant Research 126: 67–74.

Pregnant activist crashes glitzy arms industry dinner, urges guests ‘consider career change’

Screenshot from youtube.com/user/wwwcaatorguk

Published time: February 05, 2015 18:32
Edited time: February 05, 2015 21:50

Get short URL

A pregnant political activist entered a glitzy arms industry dinner in Westminster, commandeered a microphone and warned assembled arms dealers and MPs that making profit “causing death and destruction around the world” is unacceptable.
After making her way to a microphone undetected, Anne Marie O'Reilly expressed concern her unborn child would face a world where arms dealers profit from human suffering and bloodshed.
The anti-arms activist’s unexpected intervention left the crowd somewhat stunned.
While O'Reilly's unassuming manner initially drew a warm reception, her criticism of the UK establishment’s links to the arms trade was followed by a long and awkward silence.
Before being escorted off stage, O'Reilly suggested arms dealers in the audience should reconsider their careers.

The UK arms industry, which profits from brokering arms deals with questionable regimes and conflict-ridden states worldwide, is backed and subsidized by the British government.
Tuesday’s annual dinner, which cost attendees £246 per head, was hosted by ADS – a trade body for British Aerospace, and other defense, security and space companies. The group represents a collective of the world’s 50 largest arms firms.
The opulent soiree was attended by Britain’s Business Secretary Vince Cable, the representatives of 100 arms firms across the globe, over 40 British MPs, 30 civil servants, and 30 Ministry of Defence (MoD) personnel.
Andrew Smith, of UK think tank Campaign Against The Arms Trade (CAAT), said the event was a hotbed of lobbying.
“The arms companies don't invite politicians because they want to be nice, it is because it's good for business,” he told RT.
“These arms companies couldn't sell their wares without the active support and promotion that comes from the UK government.”

Image from baesystems.com

CAAT was provided with a list of all MPs who attended the lavish dinner. The document also detailed their seating arrangements.
Tobius Elwood MP, a Foreign and Commonwealth Office minister, was seated at Cobham PLC’s table. The firm is one of the biggest arms companies in the world, and is headquartered in Dorset. Cobham has applied for arms export licenses to Saudi Arabia, Israel, the UAE and Turkey, according to CAAT.
Margaret Curran MP, shadow secretary of state for Scotland, was seated at the table of US-headquartered arms manufacturer Raytheon.
Raytheon makes the targeting system for the Reaper drone deployed by the CIA and other states to conduct strikes across the globe.The firm has also been linked to manufacturing components for bombs deployed in the 2014 Gaza conflict.
Business Secretary Vince Cable, who spoke at the event, sat at the top table beside Shadow Secretary for Defence Vernon Coaker and a group of ADS executives.
CAAT’s Andrew Smith said Cable’s decision to speak at the dinner was telling.
“The fact that a group like ADS is being addressed by Vince Cable MP, the Secretary of State for Business, is a sign of how powerful they are,” he argued.
Also present at the extravagant event were controversial arms firms Thales, BAE Systems and MBDA.
Thales is the eleventh largest arms firm in the world, and has sold military wares to some of the most oppressive regimes across the globe, according to CAAT.
BAE Systems, which had three MPs at its table, is Europe’s largest arms firm, and has also supplied multiple repressive governments. Among the regimes BAE Systems sells to are Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Mubarak's Egypt.
MBDA is a missile company partially owned by BAE. It sold military wares to Muammar Gadaffi’s government in 2007, and its military hardware was deployed by Britain and France in the 2011 bombing of Libya. The company’s missiles are also thought to have been supplied to rebel groups in Libya, CAAT says.
Probed on the impact of Britain’s government-backed arms trade, Smith said the UK facilitates rampant human rights abuses abroad.
“When the UK sells weapons to regimes like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Bahrain, it doesn't just provide military support, it also provides political support and a UK endorsement for the human rights abuses that are taking place,” he said.
Smith said it is “outrageous the government actively supports and promotes this deadly trade.”
“The fact that arms dealers were swilling champagne with over 40 MPs is a disgrace and shows the extent of the arms trade's connections and political lobbying,” he added.
READ MORE: ‘I won’t be used to peddle UK arms in Middle East’ – Prince Charles
On Tuesday, it emerged the Prince of Wales allegedly wants to end his role as a promoter of British arms in Gulf States.
The revelation was unveiled by an unauthorized biography documenting Prince Charles’ life, which was published on Thursday.

County Health Rankings with interactive map and links

The County Health Rankings rank the overall health of nearly every county in all 50 states. The Rankings allow counties to see how well they are doing on 29 factors that influence health, including smoking, high school graduation rates, employment, physical inactivity and access to healthy foods.

The Rankings are available at www.countyhealthrankings.org.

“The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s vision for a culture of health is one where everyone has the opportunity to be healthy,” said Dr. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, RWJF president and CEO. “The County Health Rankings are a starting point for change, helping communities come together, identify priorities, and create solutions that will help all in our diverse society live healthier lives, now and for generations to come.”

The Rankings provide county-to-county comparisons within a state. Nationally, this year’s Rankings show that people living in the least healthy counties are twice as likely to have shorter lives as people living in the healthiest counties. Unhealthy counties also have twice as many children living in poverty and twice as many teen births as the healthiest counties. This year’s Rankings also feature several new measures including housing, transportation and access to mental health providers.

County Health Rankings is part of the County Health Rankings & Roadmaps. The program includes the Roadmaps to Health Action Center, which provides local leaders with tools, step-by-step guides, and stories to help communities identify and implement solutions that make it easier for people to live healthy lives. The program also includes the annual RWJF Culture of Health Prize, which celebrates communities that are harnessing the collective power of leaders, partners and stakeholders to build a culture of health. This year’s prize winners and the call for 2014-2015 prize applications will be announced in June at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Spotlight: Health, a public gathering of national and international leaders to share ideas and information related to medicine, population health and global health, as well as the relationship between health and other disciplines.

“The County Health Rankings show us how health is influenced by our everyday surroundings – where we live, learn, work and play,” said Bridget Catlin, Ph.D., MHSA, director of the County Health Rankings. “The County Health Rankings often provide the spark for businesses, community planners, policy-makers, public health, parents and others to work together for better health.”

 

Michael Pollan on the Links Between Biodiversity and Health

Author Michael Pollan has often written about people’s relationship to the natural world. In a Yale Environment 360 interview, he talks about researching his latest book and what he learned about the connections between ecology and human health.

by jack hitt
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/michael_pollan_on_the_links_between_biodiversity_and_health/2655/

It was an odd paradox that led author Michael Pollan to write a book about cooking: How was it, he wondered, that in an era when Americans were buying more and more pre-packaged, ready-to-eat food, they were spending more time watching programs about cooking on television?

That question led to his new book, Cooked, which like his previous books, delves into issues relating to the connections between the environment and what we eat, and, more broadly, to humanity’s relationship to the natural world. Pollan argues that taking control of cooking may be the single most important step an individual can take to help make the American food system healthier and more sustainable.

Photo by Fran Collin

Michael Pollan

In an interview with Yale Environment 360 contributor Jack Hitt, Pollan talked about how his research led him on a journey that ranged from the monoculture fields of U.S. commodity agriculture to the bacterial world inside the human body. And he noted the fundamental importance of biodiversity — in the landscape and the farm field, as well as in people’s diets. “This may prove to be the key legacy of ecology — what it teaches us about health,” Pollan said. “Who would have thought?”

Yale Environment 360: In your new book, Cooked, you head to the stove, where previously you had been in the garden or the feed lot or a cornfield. Has taking your observations indoors changed the way you think about the big outdoors?

Michael Pollan: I would say it has. Like most journalists I tended to gravitate toward exotic places, places my reader hadn’t been — like the feedlot or the laboratory. That’s one of the things we do — we’re kind of these designated inquirers. And it was my experience on the feedlot and other sites of industrialized agriculture that sent me into the kitchen. Because I came to realize that the way we cook, or whether we cook or not, or who’s doing the cooking, is creating that other landscape. And it really was the industrializing of cooking — which we call food processing, done by corporations, of course — which drove the industrialization of our farming.

It’s McDonald’s that gives us the giant monocultures of Russet Burbank potatoes that I wrote about in Botany of Desire, or the feed lots that I wrote about in Omnivore’s Dilemma. And I came to realize that you couldn’t understand those landscapes without reference to these everyday decisions we make about whether we’re going to cook or whether we’re going to go out to McDonald’s. That they were linked. I never expected to write a book about a landscape as familiar as my kitchen, or anyone’s kitchen. But that’s of course the great lesson of ecology — these things are connected.

e360 Recently you’ve described yourself as a “superorganism.” What do you mean?

Pollan: One of the byways of this book was learning about fermentation, and meeting these “fermentos” as I call them — these passionate fermentation geeks who have a completely different relationship to bacteria than most of us do. And they taught me a different way to think about bacteria. Learning about these external fermentations, whether you’re talking about tea or beer or bread, very quickly gets you into its mirror image, which is the fermentation within, the fermentation in your own large intestine, and what those bacteria are up to.

So I followed this path into the microbiology of the gut and was amazed to learn that first, we are only 10 percent human, if you’re counting cells, and 90 percent bacterial. And those bacteria have a profound impact on your

That’s of course the great lesson of ecology — these things are connected.”

health, on your mood, on your immune system, on your metabolism, and whether you’re going to become infected by bad bacteria or not. And it turns out that health — which we think of as a property of us, the human cells in our body — turns out to be a collective property of the whole community. That community consists of these microbes. You can’t be healthy if they’re not… That’s a radical rethinking of who we are.

e360 At one point you referred to “the impoverished westernized microbiome,” and you posed the question of whether the human body needs what some microbiologists call “restoration ecology.” So you’re applying environmental metaphors to the human body. How might this kind of language make us think in a new way about our bodies?

Pollan: I think when you bring the concepts of ecology into your body, that’s a revolutionary new paradigm for medicine and for the philosophy of human identity. It breaks down the “us and them” attitude we bring to nature. It’s a very direct implication of the natural world in the body. We know when we eat we’re always taking nature into us. But the idea that we’re a host to an ecological community and that that ecological community is obviously shaped by what’s going on in the world — whether we’re talking about toxins, antibiotics — you’re really breaking down that barrier between us and nature out there. Nature is passing through us. I didn’t tease out these implications, but I think it does have important implications for how you think about nature. It definitely brings it home.

e360 And also how you think about what you eat?

Pollan: Yes. If it doesn’t necessarily change your diet, it does change your attitude toward the various chemical compounds that poison this environment. We’ve understood that feeding antibiotics to livestock is a public health risk because of the rise of superbugs and antibiotic-resistant microbes, and that’s the reason people have campaigned to remove them. But it turns out there’s another reason to remove them, and that is that these antibiotics are poisoning and cutting down on the biodiversity inside you. So there are implications of knowing this that go beyond diet.

e360 How was it that scientists recently came to start talking about the human microbiome?

Pollan: There are two tools that have allowed for this wilderness to be explored. One is this new sequencing technology. But the other was theories of ecology. It was when scientists began thinking, “Hey, what if we

I was struck by how many microbiologists were concerned about very common food additives.”

ask the questions that ecosystems scientists ask?” Which was radical for medicine. Medicine doesn’t usually think that way. And that really opened it up. And they started using terms like community dynamics and invasion resistance. And exotic species. And resilience. So there was an intellectual tool and there was a technical tool. And they were both required to make the breakthroughs we’re starting to make.

e360 Wow, that’s cool. So there really was a kind of theoretical borrowing?

Pollan: Yes. And this may be prove to be a key legacy of ecology — what it teaches us about health. Who would have thought?

e360 What might the last 50 years of environmental action policy and environmental education teach us as we begin to discover the Amazonian rainforest that resides in our gut?

Pollan: We know that we’re connected and that there are links between soil and health, and water and health. This is just another way to draw those links.

I was really struck by how many of the microbiologists were concerned about very common food additives. Xanthan gum and polysorbate 80,

If you damage the biodiversity enough, the various genes you need to cope will not be there.”

these emulsifiers, which seem like one of the least toxic of food additives — these are just chemicals that allow water and oil to be held in solution so they don’t come apart. And if you’re making processed food, that’s really important because it looks really nasty when the sauce in your frozen, I don’t know, beef Stroganoff, starts separating.

These [emulsifiers] are very important in processed food. But it turns out that they may be damaging the lining of the gut. And that’s not what the FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] ever tested for... So we really have to rethink toxicology in light of the microbiome.

e360 These microbes evolve really, really fast. As you point out, some of them take 20 minutes a generation. That’s crazy — it’s so at odds with everything we know about life out here on the megafauna scale of existence, where evolution is slow, really slow. Is there any evidence that this microbial speed will advantage us in some way as we all adapt to say global warming?

Pollan: One of the questions I’ve struggled with in writing about the gut and writing about fermentation in the book is how weird it is to outsource very important functions of life to microbes and not have evolved our own systems for dealing with metabolism, temperament, immunity. I mean, it is a huge outsourcing of a critical life function.

One case I thought was absolutely fascinating is this difference in the gut of Japanese people and Americans. There’s a very common bacteria that we all share, that all humans have in their gut, and it’s involved in digesting polysaccharides of complex carbohydrates and plants. And the Japanese version of it has a gene that allows it to break down seaweed that we can’t

I still feel that the great evil of American agriculture is monoculture.”

break down. When you eat seaweed in a Japanese restaurant, you’re not getting the nutritional value from it that a Japanese person is getting. And they actually traced the source of that gene, and it came from the bacteria that hang out on seaweed in the ocean. In other words, the bacteria who first learned how to digest seaweed. Through the eating of enough seaweed, this bacteria that is common in the gut of the Japanese borrowed this bit of genetic information and uses it now to digest seaweed. And so now it’s a permanent part of the genome of that bug.

There’s an example of how the microbiome evolved to take advantage of a change in the environment — i.e., Japanese eating of seaweed — probably because they needed to. And the same thing is true with, say, dealing with a new toxin, detoxifying, and other changes in our environment. It’s kind of evolution on fast forward. That’s probably critical to our ability to adapt to change, and it may become more critical as we face more rapid and radical environmental changes.

e360 You’ve written in the past about arguments over preserving “pristine” nature or humans intervening to “garden” nature. How does that apply the human microbiome?

Pollan: Well, if you want to adjust to changes in the environment, you need the genetic resources. This ability to adapt probably depends on high levels of biodiversity, and that’s precisely what we have damaged with the Western diet and the Western overuse of antibiotics and other antimacrobials. As scientists have pointed out to me, if you damage the biodiversity enough, the various genes you need to cope will not be there. And the microbiome will come up empty-handed in meeting the challenges it faces.

So that’s an argument for restoring the biodiversity of the gut, gardening it, if you will, introducing more species. That may turn out to be the value of these pristine microbiomes, that the genetic resources we need may exist there. We may have to culture those and reintroduce those. We don’t know enough to say exactly how to garden the microbiome, but we may need to. We may need to just give it enough biodiversity to be resilient to change. And you see, I’m using all the words we use when we’re talking about a farm or any land.

e360 So now that you’re very intimate with the alchemy of cooking and fire, water, air, and earth, how would you change America’s farm policy if you could, right now?

Pollan: Well, I would try to create incentives that drive diversification. I still feel that the great evil of American agriculture is monoculture. It really does contribute to so many problems at the level of the field and the pests, but also at the level of the diet. The thing you learn is the importance of diversity in what you eat, and to the extent you would drive diversity [in farm policy] you would also be creating raw materials for cooking rather than raw materials for processed food, which are mostly corn and soy.

I love this term “specialty crop.” That’s what the USDA [U.S. Department of Agriculture] lingo is for anything you grow that you could actually eat — fruits and vegetables. Corn and soy and rice and wheat, these are commodity crops — in the case of rice you do eat it directly, but everything else has to be heavily processed first. Right now, we actually have laws that prohibit farmers receiving subsidies to grow commodity crops from growing specialty crops. They get fined. If you’re growing corn and soy, and you want to put in 20 acres of tomatoes because somebody’s doing some local canning deal in your county and you want to get in on it and diversify, you get fined. I know farmers who have been fined forty or fifty thousand dollars for doing that. That’s unconscionable. We should be encouraging farmers to diversify, for both economic and ecological reasons.