Rising Gut Dysbiosis Rates Point to How Nature’s Microbiome Impacts Our Own

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As of 2022, the global probiotics market is valued at over $60 billion and rising. Probiotics are designed to benefit your gut, and the role gut health plays in our holistic wellbeing is gaining recognition from scientists, nutritionists, doctors, and many others. At the same time, there is a startling rise in the condition of gut dysbiosis, an imbalance of the microorganisms in our gastro-intestinal tract. Today, the limelight shines bright on the gut issue.

A healthy gut is essential to us. Not only are the trillions of bacteria, archaea, fungi, and viruses in our gut essential for digestion and vitamin production, they also play a key role in our immune system, metabolism, and many more functions.

Think of our gut as an ecosystem we maintain in order for it to function and benefit us, and keep us in good health. It is interesting to note that the phenomenon of gut dysbiosis occuring frequently amongst the chronically ill was noticed long ago. Around 400 BCE, Hippocrates made the bold claim that “all disease begins in the gut.” This claim is backed by a growing collection of scientific evidence.

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However, the emerging science suggests food we eat every day leads to gut dysbiosis.

Gluten: One Potential Culprit

Gluten sensitivity is also called celiac disease. Celiac patients cannot properly digest gluten in food like bread, pastas, and most things made with a dough. For them, gluten entering the intestine results in an immune response which commonly cascades into conditions related and unrelated to the digestive tract, ranging from diarrhea to nerve damage. Celiac disease isn’t the only form of gluten intolerance on the rise.

There exists a less severe version of gluten intolerance which is known as non-celiac gluten sensitivity. The medical community, despite estimating the prevalence of this condition at up to 13 percent of the general population, does not have a candid definition for it.

A famous case for this would be Kelly Ryerson, better known as the environmental activist Glyphosate Girl. Ryerson shared on the webinar “Gluten, Glyphosate, and the Industrialization of Our Food System” that she visited a number of doctors who all simply prescribed her a list of medications for her extensive list of issues, yet none helped. One day, a doctor recommended her to go gluten free and organic, which in fact worked wonders for her.

Ryerson experienced a dramatic improvement in her health when she meticulously filtered out gluten, and she isn’t the only one. A University of Nebraska-Lincoln article reported that one in four Americans self-diagnose as gluten intolerant. But why is it that foods like wheat, barley, and rye, which have been defining sources of nourishment for millennia, are now causing dietary problems at these rates?

What Is Gluten?

Gluten is a protein. It is what makes bread “sticky,” gooey, yummy, and what some would even consider slightly addictive.

In the same webinar, Dr. John Gildea, the research director at the Felder Core Laboratory with over 20 years of experience, explained how gluten is digested. Gildea said when gluten enters the intestine, it is digested by the enzymes pepsin and trypsin. Peptides are made from amino acids, much like how a motor is made from metal; peptides come together to form proteins like gluten.

During this process, there are about four peptides that come from gluten which are potentially harmful. Two of the four induce an immune response in the intestine, one is toxic at high concentrations, and one works like morphine (which is what makes bread a little addictive). The former two also cause the protein zonulin to be released, which deteriorates the gut lining and leads to leaky gut (pdf).

Since gluten can cause such significant issues, why isn’t everyone suffering after eating bread and beer? After gluten is broken down into various peptides, they are received by enzymes on the surface of the intestine which metabolize these components to the basic amino acid level—like stripping a motor for parts. These peptides are reduced by an enzyme called Dipeptidyl peptidase-4 (DPP4) which ideally prevents leaky gut and a series of other issues.

But in comes glyphosate. Glyphosate was first used as a pipe cleaner, until people noticed plants dying off where it was applied. It was popularized as the herbicide Roundup, and still extensively applied on GMO crops. It is also used as a desiccant to dry off crops before harvest for uniform yields. As of 2016, we have poured about 8.6 billion kg of glyphosate into our planet.

At its crux, glyphosate is an antibiotic, meaning that it inhibits the growth of or destroys microorganisms. According to a well known 2013 study, after glyphosate enters our body, it puts a break on bacteria and enzymes that reduce toxin levels and other metabolic functions. In simple terms, glyphosate is a menace for many enzymes like DPP4, Cytochrome P450, and the NRF2 complex because it oxidizes them. Put simply, glyphosate makes them “rust.”

While glyphosate is officially being a herbicide, a lot of our exposure actually comes from farmers spraying it pre-harvest as a dessicant. This produces picture perfect harvests because they all die at the same extraordinary pace. When glyphosate lands in our stomach, it will inhibit the necessary enzymes which makes it harder for gluten, among many things, to be processed properly. This then results in gut dysbiosis, leaky gut, inflammation, and other issues.

However, this is not a cry to stop eating bread from now on, nor is it meant to demonize farmers across the country. There is something bigger at work which ultimately resulted in this gluten fiasco. But why now?

At War With the Microbiome

Dr. Zach Bush, an internationally recognized educator and thought leader on the microbiome, was another speaker at the webinar. He said there has been an ongoing war on nature and its microbiome. All organisms from the range of biological kingdoms, visible to the naked eye or not, are linked to each other.

The “war” began at the turn of the 20th century, where the agricultural revolution changed the way we farm. Specialization and mechanization allowed crop production to proliferate, which led to the issue of monocultures. Usually, the biodiversity found in nature is an organic buffer zone and inhibits the rapid spread of a certain disease. Therefore, planting a monoculture across massive areas can be potentially catastrophic.

One example is soybean production. Due to the high demand of soy, it is most efficient to mass produce it by flattening out as much land as possible, dumping fertilizer onto the area, planting scores of the crop.

But when one soy plant gets some sort of disease, there is not much of a natural buffer to prevent a rapid spread across entire fields. In nature, biodiversity acts like a great equalizer which deals with any anomalies by itself; the agricultural industry replaced this fundamental condition with antibiotics and pesticides.

Parallel to this, after WWII, the base for fertilizers underwent a cardinal change. Because the war prompted countries to invest heavily into their chemical and petroleum industry, what remained was later channeled into agriculture.

Fertilizers were traditionally made organically using decayed materials, but today they are mostly petroleum based. Chemical fertilizers are more potent, cheaper to manufacture, and contain a blend of heavy metal residue from drilling. To deal with weeds that found a comfortable spot in the monoculture fields, potent herbicides like glyphosate were introduced.

Concoctions like glyphosate were so successful that entire GMO strains could be developed to supplement them. Popular crops like soy were made “Roundup resistant” and distributed globally.

According to Bush, 97 percent of our arable soils have lost their vitality. We have acres and acres of monocultures, in the sense that not only do the flora and fauna find themselves out of balance, but also the micronutrients, bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms that permeate the microcosm below the surface of the earth. If the natural balance of arable soil is disrupted, then it means that nature herself has gut dysbiosis.

Monocultures alone can’t be blamed for “nature dysbiosis.” While many pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides might not harm us humans, they end up disrupting the microorganisms in nature. This is not visible at first because soil, whether sterile or blended with organisms, looks more or less the same. Lab tests also say that these agrochemicals on crops are at an “acceptable level”  but this only means that they won’t harm or kill us. However, Gildea says they’ll likely wipe out microorganisms in our body.

As previously mentioned, glyphosate has the ability to stop a lot of healthy metabolic processes in our bodies, yet research has found that it is sometimes difficult to determine how much of it is distributed on fields across the nation. Despite a number of research papers indicating that processes like desiccation have resulted in higher amounts of glyphosate in our food, the results are still troubling because glyphosate is not the only chemical used by the agricultural industry, it is simply the most well-known of the substances.

Monsanto, a chemical company founded in 1901, became a gamechanger in the 80s, developing the first genetically modified crop. By the turn of the century, it was a key player dominating areas such as corn, cotton, soy, vegetable seeds, and herbicides.

It also became a public target with its involvement in “terminator seeds”—seeds meant to yield only one harvest—and DDT, Agent Orange, and prolific government lobbying. Monsanto was the target of numerous lawsuits, and bought out by Bayer in 2018. Two years later, Bayer promised to pay settlements in Monsanto’s former lawsuits, and the agrochemical firm no longer legally exists.

Monsanto was merely one of many corporations which still heavily invested in agriculture. Syngenta makes the spectrum of chemicals sprayed into our fields, Nutrien makes fertilizers, and Bayer does the same. These industrial agriculture giants are a key component of the food supply chain.

They also spend millions lobbying the government. According to Environmental Working Group research in 2015, big food and biotechnology companies disclosed $51.6 million over the first half of the year, some or all of which was spent on lobbying for legislation aimed at defeating GMO labeling. They also fund research, develop avant-garde crop strains, and more.

Bush has spent time educating senators on the state of agriculture, and says they’re “quite interested in tackling this issue because right now [because] they really want a healthy food system and they … know that it’s broken.”

A broader issue, Bush said, was that experts are only experts in their fields, so few people are examining the issue from a high level.

For example, regulatory standards for acceptable pesticide levels are based on what is considered harmful to human health. While ethical, this disregards the health of the biosphere more holistically. The foundation laid by bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms impact the entire food chain, much like how contamination of krill eventually leads to fish with abnormally high toxin levels, a large alteration in the microbiome inevitably will find its way to the surface, affecting our health. It is difficult for experts to universally consider these factors when approving agrochemicals as there is simply so much to tackle.

Not only would they be overwhelmed if they were to consider all organisms, just thinking about humans in relation to one particular chemical is already extraordinarily complex.

For example, the average American’s exposure to glyphosate is well below the average threshold. However, glyphosate is not the only chemical added to the mix. Roundup is simply a glyphosate-based herbicide (GBH), meaning that there are a number of herbicides that vary in chemical content. Preliminary research concluded that glyphosate can synergize with other chemicals to induce kidney disease, so what about the other pesticides, fertilizers, and chemical cocktails sprayed onto the fields? What about if you use pesticide ‘X’ together with herbicide ‘Y?’

This is a monumental question that regulators are burdened with, yet the ones Bush spoke with were ready to act. They said to Bush, “We’ve got to stop this situation. How do we do this?”

Reversing Dysbiosis

There are a number of agricultural practices that don’t disrupt the balance of the ecosystem. A 2007 report stated that at least 77 million acres of farmland worldwide are farmed without agricultural chemicals. According to the United Nations 2021 report, there were 72.3 million hectares of agricultural land managed organically. However, veering the agricultural system towards a healthier direction will take government intervention, widespread effort, and quite some time, so here is what you can do today.

First off, it matters what you eat. This doesn’t mean examining your diet only when discomfort arises. Take a look at what you’re eating every day, because a balanced diet nurtures a healthy gut which helps a lot of things stay on track. Aiming for organic is great as even non-GMO crops are dessicated with glyphosate pre-harvest. Check the labels on packaging and see how much you recognize. If you think it looks like alphabet soup, then you probably don’t want to be served it.

If you’re willing to reduce certain items from your diet, be it gluten, alcohol, or sugary snacks, but you’re not entirely convinced of its benefits, then keep track of it. Try your normal diet for a week and write down how you feel, then do the same after switching things up. At the end, the results should speak for themselves—trust your gut. Of course, always consult an expert such as a dietician if you’re not sure.

During the webinar, Ryerson said there seems to be a strong social stigma against going gluten free, especially amongst men. She shared a story of a friend with a son diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, a severe IBS disease linked to gut dysbiosis. Her friend, despite receiving recommendations from experts that he should go gluten free, declined the alternative diet and said the social pressures would be too great.

However, health is not a joking matter and one is not “weak” simply due to a different diet. It’s worse to not be able to make an independent dietary choice. Going out to eat might present difficulties, but it may be worthwhile to check on a restaurant’s offerings ahead of time. Menus nowadays also usually have plenty of labels for convenience.

Changing your diet like going organic, gluten free, or something similar has never been this easy given the abundance of substitutes on the market. There are also a good deal of nutritional supplements out there like probiotics and spice extracts. Special diets can bring certain nutritional deficiencies with them, so you should check with a doctor to make sure your levels are in the green.

When buying food, you can always do so locally like from a trusted source or from brands you know produce responsibly. They tend to be a little pricier because they may partner up with small farmers who produce safely and sustainably. It’s vital to make a holistic choice as your health shouldn’t be inferior to your wallet. Saving cash today to buy bottom shelf goods might mean emptying your savings at the hospital a few years later.

Another way you can make a change is to go through the levels of government and voice your opinions. Contact your local, county, or state-level representatives and tell them about the issues you care about.The reason they were elected into office is to serve the people, but they can’t do their job if you don’t tell them your needs.

The issues that developed over decades can only be gradually reversed. Whatever happened, happened, and it does not do well to dwell on the past. Looking forward, know that every effort you make today will change your world a little tomorrow. You decide what’s going into your stomach, what you’re going to change, and which option suits you best. Our food system has fundamentally changed over the past century—it’s time we did something about it.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. Epoch Health welcomes professional discussion and friendly debate. To submit an opinion piece, please follow these guidelines and submit through our form here.