Q & A | GMO SCIENCE

You Are What You Ate

Michelle Perro, MD, MPH — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 16:09:00 +0000

Theresa Marquez, host of Heartland Stories, is in conversation with Dr. Michelle Perro, Executive Director of GMOScience, co-author of “What is Making our Children Sick” and a veteran pediatrician with over thirty-nine years of experience in acute and integrative medicine. This podcast will address:

the gut health/microbiome
the links between COVID-19, the gut microbiota and glyphosate
what parents can do to keep their children’s microbiome healthy
the GMO science website (www.gmoscience.org)

“You are what you eat”, “Food is medicine”, “The soil health and your gut health are linked together”, are just a few of Dr. Perro’s quotes from this interview. She advises struggling parents with sick kids to eat chemical-free organic regenerative food, while also paying attention to the nutrient content of the food and making sure to add probiotic food early on.

Healthy Food, Healthy Children

Michelle Perro, MD, MPH — Wed, 31 Jan 2018 22:37:33 +0000

In order to reverse the current health crisis affecting children, we need to rethink our relationship with food and the type of medicine we support, says Professor Vincanne Adams.
Vincanne Adams, PhD is professor of medical anthropology at the University of California, San Francisco. Her research interests include the social studies of science, medicine, politics, and culture, and she has worked in Nepal, Tibet, China and the US. Together with a pediatrician, Michelle Perro, MD, she has written a book, What’s Making Our Children Sick? How Industrial Food is Causing and Epidemic of Chronic Illness, and What Parents (and Doctors) Can Do About It, which is available from Amazon.
The book traces the rise of chronic disease in a growing number of children and adults and places much of the blame on industrially produced food, including genetically modified (GM) crops and their associated pesticides. It also explains simple measures that we can all take to restore ourselves and our families to good health.
GMOScience asked Professor Adams what led her to write the book and how working on it has impacted her life.
Q: Why did you write this book?
When I first met Michelle and began to hear about her medical practices and theories of genetically modified (GM) foods in relation to gut health, I was fascinated. Her work touched on many aspects of the work I had done as a medical anthropologist. This included exploring how non-Western medical systems paid more attention to food and ecosystem-wide, holistic approaches to health. I had been writing and teaching for many years about the politics of science, the outsized role of pharmaceutical companies in medical research and clinical care, and how corporations and corporate influences directly and indirectly harm health. I’m trained as an ethnographer, so I’ve devoted my life to writing about the human effects of larger social and structural problems.
I have to confess that when I first heard Michelle talk about GM foods, I was, like many people, quite skeptical. So even though much of what she described in relation to her clinical practices and her perspectives on the failure of modern medicine to deal with chronic diseases was familiar, I was not sure of the science behind the GM food controversy. I started to explore more and to follow her lead into the literature, getting beyond the first layers of controversy. I was amazed at the way these formed a cataclysm of different problems: the failure of modern medicine to take food seriously, the problem of a rise in many chronic health problems, the holes in our regulatory system when it came to food safety and, of course, the controversy over GM foods.
Initially I thought it would be amazing to write a book about Michelle and her integrative practice. Her stories were fascinating and compelling. When I learned that she had for many years wanted to write a book herself, I decided it would be better to write a book together. It has been a great experience learning how to be a collaborator on such a project. It is part description of Michelle’s work and part critical interrogation of the predicament we face today in the face of industrial food.
For my part, I worked hard over the next years to learn as much as possible about the controversial science around GM foods, the empirical evidence on their safety, and the policies and regulatory environments of agroindustrial foods. As a committed ethnographer, I went with Michelle to meetings of organic and non-organic food industry advocates and to conferences of GM food proponents and critics. I read as much of the science as I could. I interviewed physicians and scientists about the phenomena that Michelle had identified. I shadowed Michelle in her clinical practice and together we interviewed her patients so that I could better understand the human and clinical story behind her ideas about these food-health connections. All this information has been collected in the book.
Q: Can you tell us something about how the book turned out and who it is aimed at?
The book offers original materials that connect the dots of our contemporary situation. Beyond the clinical cases, our book maps out the larger contexts and circumstances that have made these foods problematic. It covers how and why medicine tends to seek pharmaceutical over food-based health solutions; how new biomedical research on things like the microbiome, leaky gut or dysbiosis are still a long way from being incorporated into standard practice guidelines and how integrative doctors are breaking the mold; how agrocorporate investments in scientific research have made it hard for insights about the potential harms of GM foods and their associated pesticides to reach the light of day; and how we might think of a future medicine in relation to our ecosystem health – what we call ‘ecomedicine’. I am as much an activist about these problems as I am a documentarian.
Michelle and I had to make the book both convincing and scientifically sound yet at the same time legible and accessible to a wide public. The case studies from Michelle’s clinical work make the book very readable. Also, the case studies describe health problems that are currently suffered by a large number of people, such as allergies, gut problems, and behavioural disorders, so many readers will see their own experiences reflected in the patients’ stories.
All in all, I think that this book is written for a broad audience while not compromising on the quality of scholarship. I hope my academic colleagues will not only find it compelling and convincing but also that they will teach with it and share it with their networks.
Q: Was there anything that stood out or surprised you when you did your research for the book?
One of the things that surprised me about this project was how convinced I became that GM foods and their associated pesticides were a problem. When I began, I honestly didn’t initially think GM foods were as big a problem as Michelle and others made them out to be. However, the more I learned about the theories of chronic illness that were being talked about in the integrative medical world and the amazing assault-like campaigns to dismiss concern over these food technologies, the more I was convinced.
If I had to pick one most surprising insight about this work, however, it would be the degree to which attacks on scientific credibility have not only defined the work on this area, but also penetrated into the communities of opposition to GM foods. So in the first place, the ways in which the agrochemical industries have tried to silence anyone writing against these technologies, going way beyond simple questioning of the science to full blown character assassination, is to my mind evidence of their suspicion that the existing science alone is not convincing enough. Industry’s and industry-paid spokespersons’ steadfast and persistent campaigns to evade criticism and even questioning of the risks are stunning. At the same time, I’ve noticed that similar critiques of “the science” have trickled down into communities that are opposed to GM foods (based on evidence and not simply on politics). I find this fascinating.
Q: Have you made any changes in your own life (diet, etc) as a result of what you learned when writing this book?
Well, although I always felt that organic foods were probably better for me, I never really thought that eating non-organic was potentially dangerous. But now I certainly try to eat only organic. It is clear that harm from foods functions as more of a ‘carrying capacity’ or ‘toxic load’ issue than a straight ‘eat-this-and-you die’ set of measures. Even so, I pay more attention to gut health in general now.
Working on this book has also shifted my perspective on population health and my vision of a society whose health is impaired, or at least less than robust, for the simple reason that our nutrition is compromised. It starts with a variety of things that compromise gut health, from antibiotics to toxicants in the built environment (such as chemicals used in building materials and soft furnishings) and in body and hygiene products, and extends also to the health of the foods we eat. Going beyond the normal culprits like packaged and processed foods, how healthy are our real foods? Then, we need to talk about toxicants like pesticides in our foods, and foods that have been turned into pesticides via genetic modification. We really don’t know much about these in terms of their safety for humans but we have a considerable body of research based on animal studies that is pointing to risks.
Problems of gut health and compromised food systems don’t work to create acute health crises; rather they produce a slow-building low-grade set of chronic problems in the gut that work their way outward to the skin, the immune system, and the brain. Nearly everyone is dealing with some level of problem on this front, I find. Some are more extreme cases than others. When I began to notice this, I sort of panicked and realized that we need an “all hands on deck” approach to solving these problems. We are, as Michelle says, facing a generational crisis of failing health. Our kids are the canaries in the coal mine in this growing epidemic. Food is not the only reason our kids are sick with more chronic conditions than ever before, but it is perhaps the most important piece of the puzzle.
Q: Is there anything else you wish to say?
The problems we are facing in relation to the impacts of GM agroindustrial food technologies are not going to be solved by individuals changing their diets, although the market forces that could drive change should not be overlooked. These problems occur on multiple levels and in ways that require change in relation to policy, research, market systems and governance. We need to change both our concept of public health and the kind of medicine we practice. On top of this, we need to think about how planetary survival really may depend on organic solutions – the opposite of what GM food scientists and agrochemical companies have been saying for several decades. My hope is that this book will help people think about how a healthy body is really only possible in a healthy food environment. In order to bring that about, we need to rethink our paradigms about the relationships between health and food, food and soil, and our bodies and society, or what we call ecomedicine.
What’s Making Our Children Sick? How Industrial Food Is Causing an Epidemic of Chronic Illness, and What Parents (and Doctors) Can Do About It, by Michelle Perro, MD, and Vincanne Adams, PhD, is published by Chelsea Green and available from Amazon:

What’s Making Our Children Sick? And What We Can Do About It

Michelle Perro, MD, MPH — Fri, 26 Jan 2018 18:20:24 +0000

The California-based pediatrician Michelle Perro, MD has spent the past 20 years of her 37-year career treating children with complex health problems – and has earned a reputation for some remarkable successes. Together with medical anthropologist Vincanne Adams, PhD, she has written a book, What’s Making Our Children Sick? How Industrial Food Is Causing an Epidemic of Chronic Illness, and What Parents (and Doctors) Can Do About It. The book identifies industrially produced food – including genetically modified (GM) foods and their associated pesticides – as a major culprit in the current health crisis. It also recommends measures we can all take to restore our health and well-being. Dr. Perro is also the Executive Director of GMOScience.org.
GMOScience interviewed Dr. Perro about the new book and the discoveries she has made in her medical practice. An interview with Professor Adams will follow shortly.
Q: Why did you write this book?
I’ve always considered myself a ‘front-line’ doctor, whether attending in the Emergency Department or working in the clinic, with my focus on taking care of patients. Over the past two decades I’ve moved from the arena of acute care medicine into integrative medicine, with a personal story creating the impetus for the change. Many practitioners discover integrative care when their own children or they themselves fall out of the purview of conventional medicine. In my case, it was my son who fell ill. But more generally, over the past two decades I’ve observed a rapid decline in children’s health. Coupled with my becoming involved with work against spraying pesticides in California in 2006 and receiving a crash course introduction to genetically modified (GM) foods at that time, I recognized that what I was seeing in my patients correlated with the parallel introduction of GM food and increased pesticide usage in our food supply. Our children had become a science experiment and the results were not looking favorable for them.
I began working in an integrative clinic five years ago, caring for some of the most chronic, complex health challenges in children that I could ever imagine. The crux of the practice of holistic care is that it is individualized, and that requires taking a significant amount of time sorting out each patient’s history and working out a unique treatment plan. One day at the end of a busy clinic session, I came to the realization that there were a finite number of children that I could see in a day. And I became concerned regarding the multitude of children that I could not see, that didn’t have access to the type of practitioner that looked at toxic food and environmental poisons as being potential culprits in the decline of kids’ health. Nor did parents have the information on how to get the help their children needed. So I decided to write a book. I had a serendipitous encounter with Dr. Vincanne Adams, an extraordinary, brilliant medical anthropologist and author and together, we married the fields of clinical medicine and anthropology to create our book, What’s Making our Children Sick?
Clinicians look for patterns and I’ve seen so many children now with gut dysfunction that I can sort out the issues quickly. The most common disorders I see are related to gut function, specifically food allergies (along with other allergy-related diseases such as eczema and asthma), gastroesophageal reflux, chronic abdominal pain, constipation, and brain issues such as autism spectrum disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), learning challenges, behavioral and mood problems, and sleep disorders.
What people don’t often know is that the gut and brain health are inexorably linked. Unhappy gut, unhappy brain. Looking at some of the laboratory test results, common findings are food antibodies, including the life-threatening type (IgE antibodies), as well as IgG and IgA antibodies (which are often reported as ‘food intolerances’ but are indeed an immune reaction), low levels of digestive enzymes, and abnormal stool results. We also commonly find altered nutrient levels, heavy metal exposures, and chronic infections – but let’s stay focused on the gut.
We pediatricians deal with poop and pee most of our day. The majority of kids I see have abnormal findings in the poop. Often they have a low array of microbial diversity, early markers of inflammation (which can be a precursor to later autoimmune dysfunction), inadequate breakdown of fat and protein, and low levels of the important beneficial bacteria.
The bacterial composition of our gut (also known as the microbiome) is presently being actively researched and is at the forefront of medicine. It’s important for many of our body’s functions, including detoxification, production of vitamins and neurotransmitters, and helping the immune system work at its best (see our book for more information).
The key take-home point is that when patients change their diets to organic food, they get better. I’ve been asked by interviewers in the past to give examples of patients who got better by just switching to an organic diet and I’ve been unable to do that since I treat with many simultaneous therapies and often don’t know which one worked. (Remember, I’m not conducting a science experiment, but treating a patient!) My patients are also receiving herbs, supplements, and homeopathic remedies that I recommend, but what is remarkable is that family members who are not my patients also get significantly better, which I will discuss in the next section.
Q: Are there any stand-out cases that were especially important or educational for you?
One of my cases involved a severely autistic five-year old boy and his parents, from the Central Valley of California, a food-growing region that is heavily sprayed with pesticides. The dad had only 20% of his kidney function remaining, which is a very ominous situation that often leads to the need for dialysis. Several family members who are also neighbors residing in the same area were already receiving dialysis. The dad’s nephrologist (kidney doctor) thought it was some ‘genetic’ disease. I treated the child with supplements, herbs, and homeopathic remedies and he got markedly better over two years. However, the cornerstone of treatment was that the entire family switched to organic food. This was difficult for them because they lived in a heavily-sprayed area and shopped mostly in stores that didn’t stock organic food. Switching to organic food was also a stretch on their budget, but they stopped eating out and dad took his home-cooked, organic meals to work. The dad also decreased his intake of takeout and processed foods, but the majority of his dietary change was switching to an organic diet.
Over the next eight months, the dad’s kidney function returned to 80% normal. He was not my patient, in the sense that no other treatment was offered to him other than changing to an organic diet (which by definition is non-GMO).
When he went for his follow-up appointment with his nephrologist, she was shocked by the return to near-normal kidney function. When he explained how he did it, she stated that it was “impossible”. I was so profoundly affected by this patient and his family, as well as his physician’s response, that I felt compelled to tell their story in our book. I carry this story with me to share with others and show them that even the most serious illnesses can be reversed. It gives people hope.
Q: You’ve read a lot of research studies on the health effects of GMOs and pesticides. What links do you see, if any, between what’s occurring in your patients and what’s evident in the studies?
I’ve felt frustration over the past two decades over the lack of research on the effects of GM foods and their associated pesticides on human health. I’ve had to extrapolate data from rats, chickens and pigs to treat patients!
But several animal studies caused light bulbs to switch on in my head. The first was in 1999, when I viewed the histopathology slides of the work of Dr. Arpad Pusztai, a European scientist. His research examined rats fed GM potatoes compared to those fed non-GM potatoes.^{^[1]} (For more information on these studies, please see the book, GMO Myths and Truths, which holds a prominent place on my bookshelf.) When I saw the intestinal disruption of the villi in the rats (fingerlike projections in the gut lining responsible for nutrient absorption), it brought to mind the explosion of intestinal permeability that I was seeing in my child patients. This is not to say that we can extrapolate the findings of one study on one GM food to all GM foods: each GM crop is different and needs to be studied separately. But Pusztai’s study helped me get started on the scientific journey of learning more about the effects of these new foods on health.
The second ‘aha’ moment was viewing the gross pathology found in the study on pigs carried out by Dr. Judy Carman and Howard Vlieger.^{^[2]} The stomachs of pigs fed GM soy and corn, their typical diet, were compared to those fed non-GM soy and corn. The visual difference of the extensive inflammation in the GM-fed pigs compared to the normal stomachs of the non-GM fed pigs was shocking and supported my suspicion that many of the gut disorders I refer to above were being caused by GM foods and/or their associated pesticides.
I’ve questioned over the years whether the problems suffered by my patients are caused by the genetic modification process, the pesticides that the GM crops express or are grown with, or a combination of these factors. One of very few studies to address this question – Arpad Pusztai’s study on GM potatoes – found that the GM potatoes were unexpectedly toxic, but the non-GM potatoes spiked with the insecticide that the GM potatoes were engineered to express were not. This shows that something about the GM process made the potatoes toxic and that with this particular GM food, the problem was not with the insecticide engineered into them.
However, detailed testing of this type, which can identify which of several different components of a GM food is responsible for a certain effect, is not generally done with GM crops before they are commercialized. So we are still very much in the dark regarding the precise cause of those effects from a GM diet that have been found in animal studies.
Two further independent studies that helped improve and alter my practice were based on work led by Prof Gilles-Eric Seralini and some followup research led by Dr. Michael Antoniou, on rats fed GM corn. Prof Seralini’s team concluded that there were toxic effects to the liver and kidney of rats fed GM corn and an ultra-low dose of the glyphosate-based herbicide (Roundup) that it was engineered to be grown with, when tested separately and together.^{^[3]} So this research suggests that toxic effects were caused by both the genetic modification process and the Roundup herbicide.
Recent followup studies led by Dr. Antoniou used cutting-edge “molecular profiling” (transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics) analytical techniques to examine tissues taken from the rats in the Séralini experiment.^{^[4],^[5]} These studies showed that an ultra-low dose of Roundup fed over a long-term two-year period caused kidney and especially liver damage, resulting in Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD). NAFLD now affects 1 in 4 American adults and is also becoming a problem for children.
Q: What shocked or surprised you most in your ‘journey of discovery’ on these topics?
I was shocked first by the fact that these findings were unreported and unknown among health practitioners. Second, I was shocked by the vehemence of the attacks on scientists whose work questions the safety or efficacy of GM foods and their associated pesticides (some of the scientists who led the studies I mention above are cases in point). Such attacks are not only ethically wrong, but discourage others from questioning the effects of industrial food on health. Third, I was shocked that many of these findings were known to the regulatory agencies that were designed to protect the public from the untoward effects of new products on health. But these agencies succumbed to the pressure by big agribusiness and failed to do their job. And last but not least, I was shocked to find that there are no human studies on the effects of GM food on health. Additionally, there are no human studies on the health effects of combinations of toxins. Understand that if there is a leaky gut, not only do foods cross before they are completely broken down, but other microbial toxins and environmental toxicants can also cross into the bloodstream. The effect of this chemical and GMO soup on health has not been addressed.
Q: What are your recommendations for anyone who thinks that something in their diet might be causing or exacerbating their health problems?
The global advice I give to my patients is to try to eat an organic diet based on whole foods, avoiding processed food as much as possible, with the realization that on some days there will be suboptimal eating. We don’t strive for perfection, but to do the best we can. Then they can see the health benefits for themselves, from within a few days to a few weeks. It’s helpful if they can find an integrative practitioner or holistic nutritionist to advise them on how to eat, taking into account our modern food supply.
Families often raise the issue of cost since organic food is more expensive than non-organic food. (Remember, food grown with agrochemicals in the US is subsidized; organic food is not.) However, once they make the switch and start cooking at home and eating out less, most families report that they are under budget.
What I do worry about when making these changes for families is giving moms more work. They are often the ones carrying the weight regarding their children’s care. I request that everyone get in the kitchen and prepare and cook the family meals. The literature shows that kids do better when eating meals together with parents, especially when they helped to make those meals.
Q: What would you say to people who say that GMOs and pesticide residues present in food have been shown to be safe and are approved by regulators, and that you are misleading the public and health practitioners?
I advise them to do their own research. Unfortunately, agribusiness runs several prominent websites that are slick, polished, and convincing. I give my families other sites to look at, as well as the actual research papers, for those that are so inclined. The intention of GMOScience is to offer digestible bites of information from unbiased sources on the effects of GM food and pesticides, with a specific focus on health. This stuff can be confusing! However, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I ask families to try their own home experiment, change their diets and see how they feel!
Q: Is there anything else you wish to say?
My hope for this book is to reach those individuals who are concerned about the current epidemic of illness and want to help change this ominous course. I support readers to question our book and do their own investigations. I’m hopeful that parents will engage in meaningful dialogues with their own pediatricians and that together we can create positive change. I’m fully confident that we can restore our children and ourselves to our natural state of good health.
What’s Making Our Children Sick? How Industrial Food Is Causing an Epidemic of Chronic Illness, and What Parents (and Doctors) Can Do About It, by Michelle Perro, MD and Vincanne Adams, PhD, is published by Chelsea Green and available from Amazon.
References

Ewen SW and Pusztai A (1999). Effect of diets containing genetically modified potatoes expressing Galanthus nivalis lectin on rat small intestine. Lancet 354:1353–4. ↑
Carman JA et al (2013). A long-term toxicology study on pigs fed a combined genetically modified (GM) soy and GM maize diet. Journal of Organic Systems 8: 38–54. ↑
Séralini GE (2014). Republished study: long-term toxicity of a Roundup herbicide and a Roundup-tolerant genetically modified maize. Environmental Sciences Europe 26(14). http://www.enveurope.com/content/26/1/14/abstract ↑
Mesnage R et al (2015). Transcriptome profile analysis reflects rat liver and kidney damage following chronic ultra-low dose Roundup exposure. Environmental Health 14(1):70. ↑
Mesnage R et al (2017). Multiomics reveal non-alcoholic fatty liver disease in rats following chronic exposure to an ultra-low dose of Roundup herbicide. Scientific Reports 7:39328. ↑

Top image: Michelle Perro (left) and Vincanne Adams (right) with their new book.