Sorry, Your Gut Bacteria Are Not the Answer to All Your Health Problems
Since we are busy dispelling health myths this week, we might as well bring this one forward as well. Healthy gut bacteria colonies are … healthy - but they won’t cure cancer. While discussing the effects of statins and memory with my cardiologist recently he reminded me of the placebo effect, and that up to forty percent of people will experience perceived improvements. That’s with “perceived” being the operative word in most cases, so please don’t expect some superfood or gut bacteria to cure your ills, unless you are just interested in changing your perception.
The hype has kicked off a gold rush. Big food companies—including Nestle, PepsiCo, Monsanto, and General Mills—have funded gut bacteria studies, and some have even opened centers to develop foods that interact with the microbiome, such as probiotics. According to Transparency Market Research the global probiotics market is expected to reach an astonishing $45 billion by 2018.
At a 2012 Institute of Medicine forum called The Human Microbiome, Diet, and Health, Susan Crockett, former vice president for health and nutrition at General Mills, spoke about the “amazing things” the food industry could do to help people maintain a healthy microbiome, in the same way cereals helped Americans increase their fiber consumption. Baby formula, other industry reps suggested, could be enhanced to more closely match the bacterial profile of breast milk and weight-loss products could harness the microbiome to speed up metabolism.
Agribusiness firms, including Monsanto, AgBiome and Bayer CropScience, are looking into how bacteria can help farmers. Last year, Monsanto acquired Agradis, a private agricultural research firm studying how microbes can produce bigger plants. Monsanto also partnered with a company called Novozymes, which is developing microbial-based pesticides.
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