Rome―All evidence suggests that the microbiome, an emerging concept referring to the complex ecosystems made up of and by bacteria and other microorganisms, has powerful explanatory value for matters related to human, plant and planetary health.
To contribute to the scientific debate, and to stimulate and guide more of it, experts at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) have produced four new publications, and one focusing on soil health, and three scientific reviews of how micro plastics, pesticide residues and veterinary medicines may impact the safety of our food supply.
“The reviews that were done on pesticides and veterinary drugs, as well as on micro plastics reveal that from a methodology perspective, a lot still needs to be done to strengthen and systematize the way research is structured so that this promising field can indeed be integrated in the way we shape food standards,” said FAO Senior Food Safety Officer Catherine Bessy.
Broadly, a microbiome is the community of bacteria, fungi, archaea and other microorganism and their theater of activity, which includes their interactions with each other and their respective environments. Microbiomes exist within and across all ecosystems, in plants, animals, soils, forests, oceans and, importantly, in humans.
All vary enormously in composition and functions and over space and time but research, aided by technological advances in genomic sequencing, points to some broad patterns that may correlate to health or dysfunction for their hosts and host ecosystems. A growing corpus of evidence suggests that gut microbiome may be associated with many health and nutrition outcomes, including child stunting, obesity and overweight, cognitive functions, immune functions, among others.
Establishing causation is elusive, not least as so many domains and functions of the microbiota in any given habitat or intestine remain unknown. One common theme to the new FAO reports is that microbiome research needs a more harmonized framework. FAO News
The review recommend organizing a series of meetings with risk assessors and multidisciplinary microbiome experts to reach consensus on definitions and establish research standards and knowledge gaps, said Carmen Diaz-Amigo, a FAO food safety specialist who helped prepare them.
Pesticide residues
While FAO, working with the World Health Organization, has over the past 60 years produced an ample corpus of normative work on the risks pesticide residues pose to human and crop health, less is known about the impacts of long-term exposure to lower dose levels on the gut microbiome and health.
FAO experts have produced ‘The impact of pesticide residues on the gut microbiome and human health,’ a systematic review of recent scientific work done on this topic.
Only a few pesticides have been included in microbiome research so far, and most of the studies have selected controversial ingredients such as glyphosate and chlorpyrifos–both of which command lengthy sections of FAO’s report.
While pesticide exposure in rodent models has resulted in alterations of the gut microbiome and the animal’s homeostasis in the vast majority of cases, demonstration of causality has so far been limited, often due to experiment design.
One reason is that there are essential aspects of the microbiome that experts do not yet understand or even know about. Thousands of newly identified microbial species are waiting for a name, and the metabolic pathways of most of what is found in fecal metagenomes, a key empirical tool, remain unknown. FAO News