A recent paper caused a group of academics to shout the alarm about human food additives, even though their study was only in mice and there is no plausible biological hypothesis for how their results can be true.
Welcome to 2019, where you just wave your hands and say "microbiome" and invoke jargon about immune cells and hope editors at increasingly desperate pay-to-publish corporate journals and then some journalists take the bait. We can shake our heads that the anti-vaccine movement is now so prevalent that a disease simulator/video game, "Plague, Inc.", is including anti-vaxxers in its model but long before anti-science progressives on the west coast made denial of science dangerous for people with compromised immune scientists, they had done it to the rest of us regarding our pantries.
Decades ago the "fear your food" movement came into existence.(1) They didn't call it that, of course, they eventually called it natural and organic and claimed it was about a right to know and that all foods need more research, but really it was scaremongering science no different than vaccines. But unlike the anti-vaccine movement, which remains entrenched along the coasts, terrifying people about food has been wildly successful. So successful the U.S. Department of Agriculture has created a publicity campaign to undermine the scare tactics created by the marketing groups for the organic process that USDA legitimized in the first place.
That is why a recent paper about food is able to make an odd claim based on an even odder premise, and no one in media even blinks or asks awkward questions about exactly what kind of madhouse is being run by the probiotic, endocrine disruption, and microbiome movements.
they even say gut health and brain health are linked, which they got right out of the probiotic supplement fad diet playbook, and that "there may be common mechanisms" causing obesity, inflammatory diseases and behavioral disorders. Yes, dietary emulsifiers gave your child autism, they are suggesting.
Dietary emulsifiers prevent food waste and improve texture, which also prevents food from being thrown out.
shelf life, may adversely affect anxiety-related and social behaviors in mice, Georgia State researchers have found.
They also observed sex differences in the mice’s behavioral patterns, suggesting that emulsifiers affect the brain via distinct mechanisms in males and females. When an additive has all this different stuff happening, and researchers are fabricating hypotheses as to why their results must be true, they are doing science backwards.
The study, published in Scientific Reports, was led by Geert de Vries, professor of neuroscience and associate vice president for research at Georgia State, and Benoit Chassaing, assistant professor of neuroscience. Andrew T. Gewirtz, professor in the Institute for Biomedical Sciences, also contributed.
Previous research by Chassaing and Gewirtz has shown that emulsifiers can cause low-grade intestinal inflammation by altering the composition of gut microbiota, a diverse population of trillions of microorganisms that are vital to health. Their research has linked emulsifier consumption to obesity, metabolic syndrome and inflammatory bowel diseases such as colitis, conditions whose incidence has significantly increased since the mid-20thcentury.
In the same period there has also been an increased incidence of behavioral disorders such as autism, leading scientists to theorize that brain function may be affected by environmental exposure to modern chemical substances as well.
“We asked the question: Can emulsifiers’ effects on general systemic inflammation also be extended to the brain and to behavior?” de Vries said. “The answer was yes.”
The researchers added one of two commonly used emulsifiers, polysorbate 80 and carboxymethylcellulose, to the drinking water of male and female mice. After 12 weeks, they observed that treatment with emulsifiers altered the gut microbiota of males and females in different ways. They then conducted tests to assess the effects of the emulsifiers on behavior. The researchers found that emulsifiers altered anxiety-like behavior in male mice and reduced social behavior in female mice.
Though de Vries says he cannot pinpoint the exact mechanism by which emulsifiers contribute to behavioral changes, “we know that inflammation triggers local immune cells to produce signaling molecules that can affect tissues in other places, including the brain,” he said. “The gut also contains branches of the vagus nerve, which forms a direct information pathway to the brain.”
“We are currently investigating the mechanisms by which dietary emulsifiers are impacting the intestinal microbiota as well as the human relevance of those findings,” Chassaing said.
As to what’s driving the differences between male and female behavior, de Vries said there may be several factors. For example, there are known sex differences in the immune system, which help govern the composition of bacteria in the gut, and in the way the digestive system processes food.
As a result, “adding emulsifiers to the diet will have different consequences for the microbiota of males and females,” he said. “Our data suggest that these sex-specific changes to the microbiota could contribute to the sex differences in behavior.”
The researchers say the study adds to evidence that food additives should be evaluated for their effect on the microbiome, which is tied up in many aspects of human health. De Vries said the results also confirm that gut health and brain health are intertwined, and that there may be common mechanisms driving the parallel epidemics of obesity, inflammatory gut conditions and behavioral disorders.
(1) Drs. Beth Whelan and Fred Stare wrote "Panic in the Pantry" in 1975, so it was already a problem by then.
