Glyphosate Still Contaminates Organic Oats, Children’s Cereals, and Other Snack Products
It shouldn’t be a surprise but, of course, it still needs to be reported. The kid’s cereals and other packaged marketed to children still contain alarming amounts of glyphosate, the cancer-causing ingredient in Roundup, the herbicide produced by Bayer-Monsanto. The Environmental Working Group (EWG) detected the carcinogen in all 21 oat-based cereal and snack products sampled in their latest testing.
Nearly two dozen popular children’s cereals and other snack products tested and show to contain glyphosate.
Organic oats were not exempt from glyphosate contamination either.
The new tests were performed by independent laboratories and they confirm the findings from EWG’s testing in July and October of last year. Honey Nut Cheerios and Medley Crunch showed the two highest levels of glyphosate at between 729 and 833 parts per billion. The EWG “children’s health benchmark” is 160 ppb.
EWG-commissioned independent laboratory tests of oat-based products found glyphosate present in 95 percent of samples made with conventionally grown oats and 31 percent of samples made with organic oats. Conventional products had much higher glyphosate levels than their organic counterparts.
It is common practice for conventional oats to be sprayed with glyphosate prior to harvest, as a desiccant that kills all crops uniformly. Organic oats are not treated that way, but may become contaminated by glyphosate drifting from nearby conventional crops.
EWG purchased products via online retail sites. Approximately 300 grams of each product were packed in our Washington, D.C., office and shipped to Anresco Laboratories in San Francisco. Glyphosate levels were analyzed by a liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry method described here.
Study Finds Conventional Milk Has High Levels of Antibiotic, Pesticide Residues Compared to Organic Milk
Researchers at Emory University have recently had a study published in the journal Public Health Nutrition that found that in comparison to organic milk, conventional milk samples contained more pesticide and antibiotic residues. In addition to that, some of the samples collected contained residue levels above the federally recognized limits for antibiotic residues. Study researchers explained…
To our knowledge, the present study is the first study to compare levels of pesticide in the U.S. milk supply by production method (conventional vs. organic)…It is also the first in a decade to measure antibiotic and hormone levels and compare them by milk production type.”
Fewer Pesticides, Fewer Antibiotics
The study looked at 69 total samples of organic (34) and conventional (35) milk from all different regions of the United States. Of the 14 pesticides researchers tested for, both organic and conventional samples tested positive for legacy pesticides, chemicals that are no longer allowed in the United States but remain in our environment and food supply (DDT, DDE, and hexachlorobenzene). In addition to those, conventional milk also contained atrazine, chlorpyrifos, cypermethrin, diazinon, and permethrin.
There was an even more clearcut difference between organic and conventional milk when researchers examined antibiotic residues. Organic milk samples did not test positive for antibiotics, while conventional milk samples tested positive for 5 different kinds of antibiotics, amoxicillin, oxytetracycline, sulfamethazine, sulfadimethoxine, and sulfathiazole. One of the conventional samples contained levels of amoxicillin above federal limits, while 37 percent of samples had higher than legal amounts sulfamethazine. Twenty-six percent of those samples also contained high levels of sulfathiazole.
Critics of this study have pointed out the involvement of The Organic Center, a non-profit research organization. Be that as it may, it’s hard to deny the facts. Organic milk has fewer pesticides and antibiotics, and some conventional milk contains verified unsafe levels of these chemicals.
You would think that I would be urging you to live a pesticide-free life, seeing that this is Organic Lifestyle Magazine. And I will. Organic milk will always be better than conventional milk from the viewpoint of someone trying to avoid pesticides and unnecessary antibiotics in their food. It seems an added insult to conventional milk to reveal that some of that product isn’t even meeting the basic federal requirements for those chemical residues. But it’s difficult to realize that both types of milk contain pesticides banned in 1972 (DDT). These samples were collected in 2015, the same year the International Agency for Research on Cancer finally classified as “probably carcinogenic” and 43 years after the pesticide was banned. How pesticide free can we truly be at this point?
Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is an intestinal disorder that causes pain in the belly, gas, diarrhea, and constipation. Sometimes the condition goes away without treatment, and for some, it ends up being a lifelong affliction. IBS is often associated with stress, depression, anxiety, or a previous intestinal infection. IBS is often referred to as spastic colon or spastic bowel.
What’s the Difference between IBS, IBD, CD, and UC?
IBS: irritable bowel syndrome
IBD: inflammatory bowel disease
CD: Crohn’s disease
UC: ulcerative colitis
Dysbiosis: gut microbial imbalance
With irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), there is an autoimmune reaction to foods, bacteria, or other substances in the intestinal tract. Most conventional medical professionals do not believe that IBS causes inflammation, ulcers, or other damage to the intestinal tract. The digestive system looks normal under x-ray, but it doesn’t function properly. Conventional medical professionals believe IBS has a physiological basis. It is associated with stress, depression, and anxiety. But today, newer technologies are now being used with older methods to reveal specific abnormalities associated with IBS. For doctors keeping up with research, it’s no longer thought of as primarily psychosomatic.
Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC) are both inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD). IBD is not believed to have a physiological basis (it’s not associated with stress, depression, anxiety). IBD can be debilitating and can cause life-threatening complications.
How to Know if You Have Irritable Bowel Syndrome
Doctors call IBS a “functional disease.” A person with IBS will have many or all of the following symptoms, but current medical testing won’t show any physical explanation for these symptoms. IBS is also sometimes called spastic colon or spastic bowel. Symptoms will often fade or even become nonexistent for a period of time.
Symptoms of IBS can include:
Abdominal pain
Cramping
Gas
Diarrhea
Constipation
Alternating diarrhea and constipation
Bloating
The feeling that a bowel movement may be incomplete
Stools that contain mucus, which may be white in color
Nausea after eating
For women, symptoms tend to flare up during their menstrual period
There is no test to definitively diagnose IBS. Doctors generally look at medical history and perform a physical exam along with other tests to rule out other conditions. If you have IBS with chronic diarrhea, the doctor should also test for celiac disease.
How to Know if You Have Inflammatory Bowel Disease
Inflammatory bowel disease is an umbrella term for disorders that involve chronic inflammation in the digestive tract. Types of IBD include ulcerative colitis (UC) and Crohn’s disease (CD).
UC is characterized by chronic inflammation and ulcers in the innermost lining of the large intestine and rectum.
CD is a chronic inflammatory disease characterized by chronic inflammation of the digestive tract. Crohn’s can affect any part of the digestive tract, from the mouth to the rectum, but it usually affects the small intestine near the connection to the large intestine.
IBD is considered a “structural disease.” This means there is underlying physical damage that causes the symptoms. With IBD, doctors can see physical signs of chronic inflammation or ulcers when they examine the gut.
IBD can cause serious longterm damage to the digestive system, and it will increase one’s risk of colorectal cancer.
New research shows that IBD may be the body’s way of compensating for a “leaky gut.”
“Both have significant overlap in terms of symptoms, pathophysiology, and treatment, suggesting the possibility of IBS and IBD being a single disease entity albeit at opposite ends of the spectrum.”
Symptoms of IBD can include the previously mentioned symptoms of IBS and the following:
Blood in your stools
Black stools
Weight loss
Loss of appetite
Fatigue
Severe, frequent diarrhea
Progressively worsening symptoms
Fever
Inflammation throughout the body
The Difference Between a Healthy Gut and an Unhealthy Gut
Scientists estimate that there are 100 trillion or so microorganisms in the human body, and they say approximately half of these microbes live in the gut.
“…the number of microbial cells we carry can be as much as 10 times greater than the total cell number in the human body, and their genetic information is at least 150-fold greater than that of our human genome.”
Dysbiosis (also called dysbacteriosis) is a gut flora imbalance. We now know that such an imbalance profoundly affects our wellbeing. We know that it can lead to neuropsychiatric symptoms and conditions, autoimmune disorders, allergies, cancer, bowel diseases, obesity, diabetes, and more. We know that a gut imbalance can exacerbate every chronic disease. On that note, I surmise that a gut imbalance is the cause of more than 99% of modern chronic diseases.
Allow me to take some liberties to explain what’s really going on in the gut.
The Gut Microbiome
For a long time, we’ve had this idea that the gut lets certain items pass into the rest of the body and blocks certain items, end of story. Supple, permeable living tissue doesn’t work that way; it’s not so black and white.
A healthy gut has a healthy gut microbiome. A healthy gut microbiome is a gut lining of bacterial biofilm that covers the entire intestinal tract.
We are on the verge of a health revolution. In fact, we’re in the middle of one. Gut microbes are being discovered in various glands and organs and all over the human body. We also have recently come to find that there are not merely hundreds of different kinds of bacteria on our gut, but thousands. This number will keep growing for some time.
Gut bacteria does so much more than just digest food. A healthy microbiome breaks down and removes toxins from the body like heavy metals, glyphosates, and BPAs. Healthy bacteria can also cause an anti-inflammatory response in the gut and throughout the entire body. Our beneficial gut bacteria also produce enzymes we need for good health. The microbiome acts as a shield that lines the intestinal wall and breaks down particles before they pass through the intestinal wall into the body. This process not only allows for nutrient assimilation, but gut bacteria also synthesize vitamin K and B vitamins including cobalamin, folates, pyridoxine, riboflavin, and thiamine. And that’s merely what we now know. There could be many more necessary nutrients that our bacteria produce for us.
Let’s look at B12. It’s been said that B12 is only created in the lower intestine where we don’t absorb the nutrients. I suspect there may be a mechanism for which the nutrients can move up into the lower part of the upper intestine, but there’s no evidence of this. So the consensus has been that humans need to either eat meat, supplement with B12, or eat our own feces. But, a study found that there is actually some bacteria in the small intestine that can produce B12 in some people. This bacteria is less common in people who adhere to the Western diet, and this makes sense because the Western diet and lifestyle stifle bacterial diversity in the gut.
The gut microbiome also houses gastrointestinal immune cells, known as “Peyer’s patches.” These immune cells protect the intestinal tract against infection by releasing white blood cells.
In other words, our gut bacteria contains white blood cells (a healthy gut microbiome contains more white blood cells) and these cells and the gut bacteria together act as a barrier to keep undigested particles (and toxins) out of the rest of our body, and they synthesize nutrients we need. Our gut bacteria also suppresses cancer, helps regulate our hormones, and even affects our DNA! We need a lot of different kinds of bacteria to do right by us. Chronically ill people have less diversity in the gut microbiome. The diversity of gut bacteria helps keep each and every potential pathogen in check.
The Most Interesting Part – THE GUT ALWAYS LEAKS
In my mind, the most important and interesting job of our gut bacteria is how it affects our immune system throughout our whole body. As mentioned previously, there was this belief that our gut bacteria pretty much stayed in the gut, only leaking out of the gut if the gut is “leaky.” This is wholly inaccurate.
The gut “leaks” our beneficial bacteria into our entire body. A healthy gut is a factory that produces a vast array of, and massive quantities of, beneficial bacteria. This bacteria seeps into and all over the body to provide protection from pathogenic activity. But most people in our modern world do not have healthy gut microbiomes.
If you have an ache from an old injury that never seems to heal all the way, you have pathogenic activity infecting that injury, causing inflammation and pain. Damaged or dead cells in the body feed microbes. If the body is full of beneficial bacteria the damaged and dead cells will be feeding beneficial bacteria, and the dead and damaged cells will be broken down and cleaned up by enzymes and beneficial bacteria.
The “bad” bacteria and other pathogenic microbes attack the body, as we all know, and their lifecycle causes off-gassing that damages the surrounding cells while they feed off of the damage they create. With more pathogenic activity in the body, the immune system becomes overwhelmed and begins reacting to allergens.
Have you ever walked by the perfume aisle in a department store, or walked through the cleaning products in your grocery store and suddenly noticed a bad taste in the back of your mouth? This is post nasal drip caused by chemicals damaging the cells in your nasal cavities. Bacteria, fungi, viruses, and other pathogens feed off of or otherwise benefit from damaged cells. Damaged cells release sugars, starches, and fats that feed pathogens, and they allow the proliferation of viruses. If your body contains lots of pathogens, breathing in chemicals will cause an immediate proliferation of pathogenic activity, which can lead to illness.
A body with massive amounts of a wide variety of healthy bacteria will have a different reaction. The beneficial bacteria will still feed off of the damage like pathogens do, but the vast variety of healthy microflora eliminates the possibility of infection by any one type of microbe. If you have only a few kinds of bacteria in such a situation, one or more are likely to proliferate and become pathogenic, or yeast or other pathogens can take over. Many of the beneficial bacteria within us are capable of causing infection. It is the variety of bacteria that keeps everything in check.
This is a very simplistic way of explaining this concept. Many kinds of beneficial bacteria strains will not ever infect us. Some will only cause problems under very unusual circumstances, and many will cause problems if left to flourish without enough beneficial microbe diversity to keep them in check. Plus, there are also autoimmune reactions and allergy issues that can come into play in this scenario. But the point of this section is to provide an understanding of how important a healthy microbiome is to our immune system. Earlier I wrote, “allow me to take some liberties” because I do not yet see that science has discovered this function of our microflora. So, feel free to take my conclusions here with a grain of salt, but we do know that the gut bacteria work this way (warding off infection) in the gut, and we know how and why variety is paramount to good health (keeps bacteria and yeast in check), and we now know that gut bacteria also is found in the brain and the liver (it’s all over the body, we’ll discover this soon enough). And we know that gut bacteria evolves based on its environment. To understand how to achieve optimum health you just need to put the pieces of the puzzle together.
Dysbiosis Causes IBS and IBD and Other Autoimmune Diseases
As mentioned, dysbiosis is an impaired or unbalanced microbiota. An unbalanced microbiome causes poor digestion of food, poor nutrient uptake, a “leaky gut” that leaks food particles and toxins into the bloodstream allowing pathogenic activity. Typically, with our modern, antibacterial world and our limited gut bacteria, virulent bacteria (often antibiotic resistant), viruses, parasites, and lots of fungi are able to flourish in our bodies.
Consider the examples above (the perfume aisle, aches, and pains that don’t heal). It’s easy to understand how chronic inflammation and autoimmune disease works.
Celiac Disease May Be Causing Dysbiosis
If diarrhea is a predominant IBS symptom, celiac disease or another gluten intolerance is a likely cause. Celiac disease is characterized by gluten causing chronic inflammation of the small intestinal mucosa. This causes the intestinal villi (small finger-like projections of tissue called villi which increase the surface area of the intestine) to atrophy (waste away), which leads to malabsorption (nutrition is not absorbed properly). Dysbiosis can cause these symptoms too, so it’s a bit of a chicken-egg issue. Gluten allergies and wheat allergies are also common with gut issues and may be precursors to celiac disease.
Research suggests that many people with IBS and IBD have celiac disease. Medical professionals are starting to see that wheat can trigger IBS and lead to IBD and celiac disease. Research also suggests that many more people have celiac disease than originally thought.
Celiac disease can be diagnosed using simple blood tests, but even if tests come back negative, other gluten intolerances are still likely.
Like almost everything else in conventional medicine, treatments for IBS and IBD focus on relieving symptoms, not on curing the disease. Conventional treatments don’t work because they don’t address the actual cause. Conventional treatments include a wide variety of drugs to manage inflammation (which will make the health problems worse in the long run), minimal (insufficient) diet changes, and a few supplements (often of dubious quality) like fiber and probiotics. For IBS, many doctors also recommend therapy.
In order to manage dysbiosis, one needs to manage their diet. Cut out refined foods, wheat, dairy, and chemicals such as artificial colors, flavors, preservatives, soy, GMOs, and MSG.
How To Cure IBS, IBD, Dysbiosis
Managing disease is for suckers. Ridding the body of disease is a much better option. It takes patience and time, but it will likely take a lot less time than how long it took to develop the autoimmune issues.
Most prescription drugs cause or at least exacerbate gut problems. One can still make the gut much healthier and elevate many chronic conditions while on prescription drugs, but as long as prescription drugs are consumed the gut will not be fully well.
This is also true for over-the-counter medications, recreational drugs, and alcohol. And if you smoke, you’ll have to quit. Smoking wreaks havoc on the gut in a variety of ways. You will never have a healthy gut if you smoke.
One of my favorite quotes:
‘There is only one disease: cellular malfunction. And there are only two causes of disease: deficiency and toxicity.”
Raymond Francis
The key to better gut health is eliminating toxins and getting the proper nutrition. You might be thinking, “If only it were that simple…” And in a way, it is. But in other ways, our modern world complicates things.
Diet for Dysbiosis – How To Build Healthy Gut Microbiota
The best bacteria love the best foods. Nature wouldn’t work right if it were any other way. The healthiest foods are raw vegetables and herbs. A wide variety of healthy bacteria is essential for optimum health. Different bacteria like different foods at different stages of digestion. This means that if you blend your vegetables in a blender before you consume them you’re missing out on feeding some of the bacteria that would have broken down the vegetables to that state. Unprocessed, unadulterated vegetables and herbs are essential for building incredibly diverse, strong, and healthy gut flora. Salads are the key. And not just any salad. I’m talking about huge salads with 15 different vegetables and five different herbs. All fresh. Here’s the salad recipe: Detox Cheap and Easy Without Fasting – Recipes Included. The cranberry lemonade recipe in that article will also help detoxify and bring the body into homeostasis.
Many people can’t digest salads well enough. This may cause discomfort. I recommend starting off with smaller salads and building up while snacking on small amounts of random vegetables throughout the day. But any doctor who tells you that salads are bad for you because your body is different, or because you need more “heat producing” foods, or whatever, is wrong! Most people will benefit from ingesting huge salads right away, and a select few need to work their way up to them, but this is the most important step to building a healthy gut colony in the gut.
Other meals should only include whole foods and these meals should be prepared by you. Do not let a company prepare your meals. Don’t even buy nut milk. Make it yourself. It’s easy and much cheaper, here’s how.
I do recommend grains (brown rice, wild rice, amaranth, montina, quinoa, millet, buckwheat, and sorghum. But avoid oats until the gut is well.), legumes (when soaked and/or sprouted properly), and nuts and seeds (seeds are typically easier to digest than nuts). But these foods will need to be brought into the diet slowly if digestive troubles occur when they are consumed. Once the right kind of bacteria is flourishing in the gut, whole healthy foods are much easier to digest.
Cooked vegetables are also wonderful for you. I eat an 11 cup salad for breakfast and I also usually put tons of vegetables and herbs in my dinner. Dinner at my house usually consists of a grain, a legume, lots of veggies, and lots of herbs.
Meat from a healthy free-range animal is typically fine for people who are healing the gut. So are eggs when they’re from healthy chickens. Like with the aforementioned, these may need to be introduced slowly if stomach troubles occur.
Avoid sweet fruits at first and slowly introduce them later as the gut gets better and better. Most of the fruit that we eat is not what we would have found in nature. We’ve evolved to eat fruit seasonally, and most of the fruit we did eat was not nearly as sweet before hybridization.
The benefits of eating like this also include not having to take a bunch of vitamins and minerals. Vitamin and mineral deficiencies will normalize and the body will take what it needs and discard what it doesn’t. But if you still feel you need vitamins and minerals I recommend Total Nutrition and Liquid Light.
The SF722 kills all fungi better than anything else I know of. Abzorb supplies vitamin D, Magnesium, systemic enzymes, and a probiotic. Take Abzorb without food to heal the gut and with meals to help digest the food. Berberine is an anti-microbial pre-biotic with tons of other health benefits, read more here. The MycoCeutics is an anti-microbial fungal complex, and MicroDefense kills non-beneficial microbes including parasites.
Shillington’s Intestinal Detox is a clay, fiber, and charcoal intestinal detoxifier. It can slow down bowel movements. Shillington’s Intestinal Cleanse kills parasites and restores gut function. It can make bowel movements easier. The two work very well together. Shillington’s Total Healing Poultice Powder is good for ulcers. Syntol AMD is another probiotic enzyme blend. Total Nutrition is a good multivitamin that contains algae, astragalus, alfalfa, seaweed, lots of vitamin C and some B vitamins. Liquid Light is a multi-mineral formula.
Pesticides and herbicides get absorbed by the crops they’re sprayed on but most of the chemicals are left on the outer most part of the produce. Organic is better than conventional but organic certification does allow some pesticide and herbicide usage. Produce usually looks clean at the store but there’s plenty of pesticide residue on them.
The apples you buy in grocery stores are already washed, usually in a bleach solution, and rinsed before they’re sold, says study author Lili He, Ph.D., assistant professor of food science at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The purpose of this, however, is to remove dirt and kill any harmful microbes that may be on the fruit. “It’s not intended to wash away pesticides,” He says.
Many people are buying designed to wash produce, or scrubbing foods in running water, or using bleach, but according to new research, these options don’t do much good. But baking soda does.
Surface pesticide residues were most effectively removed by sodium bicarbonate (baking soda, NaHCO3) solution…”
The study used thiabendazole and phosmet as the pesticides. Apples were exposed to the pesticides for 24 hours, “applied at a concentration of 125 ng/cm2.”
The authors say that a baking soda washing solution can completely remove thiabendazole and phosmet surface residues of apples in about 15 minutes. That’s a lot of washing! The study authors are not clear if the produce needs to be scrubbed or just left to soak or what, but we suspect just letting them soak in a solution of water and baking soda for fifteen minutes should work. We’re attempted contact with a couple of the authors and are awaiting clarification on this. We’ll update if we hear back.
Their results showed that 20% of the thiabendazole and 4.4% of the phosmet penetrated into the apples following the exposure. So it’s not practically possible to remove all of the chemicals from the produce.
In practical application, washing apples with NaHCO3 solution can reduce pesticides mostly from the surface. Peeling is more effective to remove the penetrated pesticides; however, bioactive compounds in the peels will become lost too.
It should also be noted that different fruits and vegetables will absorb chemicals at different rates and some will have better results from baking soda washing than others.
“Back in my day, no one had these so-called food allergies, and we ate whatever we wanted!”
Anyone with food allergies or diet restrictions has heard a statement like the one above, and it turns out eating whatever you want might be causing the food allergies in the first place. A small study based in Italy found that children with food allergies had higher levels of advanced glycation endproducts (AGE), substances found in highly processed foodstuffs.
What They Found
This new study is by no means a definitive answer to the question of where food allergies come from. First off, it’s a small study. Researchers examined 61 children from ages six to twelve in three groups – those with food allergies, those with respiratory allergies, and a control group. The study drew a link between high levels of AGES and junk food consumption. Children with food allergies registered higher levels of AGEs. The lead researcher for this study, Roberto Berni Canani, thinks that link needs to be examined more closely.
As of yet, existing hypotheses and models of food allergy do not adequately explain the dramatic increase observed in the last years – so dietary AGEs may be the missing link. Our study certainly supports this hypothesis, we now need further research to confirm it. If this link is confirmed, it will strengthen the case for national governments to enhance public health interventions to restrict junk food consumption in children.”
Acquiring AGEs
So what are advanced glycation endproducts? Glycation is a process where a sugar molecule like glucose or fructose binds to a protein or lipid molecule without an enzyme to control the process. You’re probably a big fan of glycation already – a prominent example of this chemical reaction is the Maillard reaction, also known as the browning of food. Glycation makes food delicious, and AGEs are the end result of that process. But that deliciousness comes at a price.
The first issue is with the loss of enzyme activity. Applying heat to food is the easiest way to initiate glycation, but that also destroys enzymes. Glycation and AGEs have also been linked to oxidative stress and inflammation in the body and conditions like diabetes, atherosclerosis (where plaque builds up inside the arteries), and neurological disorders. Highly processed junk food is usually heat processed, and that can lead to high levels of potentially harmful AGEs.
The body is able to clear AGEs in low levels, but the amount of those endproducts found in the modern diets isn’t at a low level. In addition to that, AGEs can impair the body’s function, leading to issues like diabetes or potentially food allergies. What we eat makes a big difference in our health, sometimes in ways we don’t even think about.
Flu Vaccine 29% Effective This Year, Down From 47% According to CDC
New numbers from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) found that the 2018-2019 flu vaccine registered the lowest vaccine effective rate since 2015. While flu effectiveness measured 47% in February 2019, the shot was less able to prevent cases of H3N2 that appeared later in the season, with vaccine effectiveness of 9%. The CDC has announced that the effectiveness of this season has been 29%, significantly less than the 40 percent or more recorded for the last three years.
The 2018-2019 Flu Season
Much like fire season, flu season now lasts longer than ever. Flu activity levels increased beginning in November and returned to normal levels in mid-April, making 2018-2019 the longest flu season in 10 years. This is a significant development that could have lasting implications for the flu shot. Healthcare practitioners are advised to vaccinate their patients by the end of October with many offices or locations giving the shot as early as September. The flu vaccine lasts from four to six months before it no longer provides protection. In fact, a 2018 study from researchers at Kaiser Permanente in Northern California found that the risk of getting the flu rose by 16 percent after twenty-eight days of being vaccinated. As of right now, flu revaccination later in the season isn’t recommended.
Over the last decade and a half, the flu vaccine has never been more than 60 percent effective. If a longer flu season becomes the norm, that effectiveness will likely decrease even further as immunity from the vaccine won’t last the whole season. The flu shot also comes with side effects ranging from headaches, diarrhea, loss of appetite, and fatigue to serious side effects like brain inflammation, convulsions, Bell’s palsy, paralysis of limbs, neuropathy, shock, asthma, wheezing, Guillain-Barre Syndrome, and other respiratory issues.
Anxiety Could Be Treated in the Gut, Says Observational Study
A recent observational study published in the journal General Psychiatry found that regulating the gut microbiome had positive effects on people with anxiety. In a review of 21 different studies that included controlled anxiety tests, 11 studies showed that regulating the intestinal microbiome produced positive results. The researchers conclude:
We find that more than half of the studies included showed it was positive to treat anxiety symptoms by regulation of intestinal microbiota. There are two kinds of interventions (probiotic and non-probiotic interventions) to regulate intestinal microbiota, and it should be highlighted that the non-probiotic interventions were more effective than the probiotic interventions. More studies are needed to clarify this conclusion since we still cannot run meta-analysis so far.”
After looking at 21 studies and the 1,503 people those studies consisted of, researchers found that regulating intestinal flora was a beneficial action 52 percent of the time. But what did their interventions look like and can that be applied in real life?
The interventions in the study were mostly divided into two different categories, probiotic and non-probiotic. The non-probiotic options consisted of regulating diet, like choosing a low FODMAP diet or using prebiotics like fructooligosaccharides or trans-galactooligosaccharides. Of the 11 studies that showed the positive effects of microbiome regulation on anxiety, 5 used probiotics and 6 relied on non-probiotic options, including diet.
Diet has a powerful effect on our microbiome, and that microbiome in turn greatly affects mood. Many of the hormones responsible for regulating our attitudes are produced in the intestinal tract, like serotonin. There is direct communication between our gut and our brain chemicals, and an unbalanced, unhealthy gut will correlate with mood shifts and fluctuations.
Non-probiotic interventions were the most effective method of anxiety treatment which includes the use of prebiotics. Prebiotics stimulate the growth of beneficial bacteria like Lactobacillus and bifidobacteria. These bacteria can be found in probiotics, but prebiotics work because they feed the bacteria and create an atmosphere where it can thrive. Because they are a type of fiber, prebiotics are also easy and inexpensive to obtain. Many foods are an excellent source of them, from raw vegetables and fruits (especially dandelion greens, onions, garlic, bananas, apples, and asparagus) to pulses like chickpeas, lentils, and kidney beans.
The gut has been called the “second brain” by many scientists and using that connections to treat mental disorders like anxiety is (pardon me…) a no-brainer. One of the benefits of the increased availability and advancements of research in the way we work is how it allows us to see how truly holistic our body is. Everything is connected, and that process starts in the gut. A healthy, thriving gut goes a long way in improving the health of the other systems in our body.