Not only is Mycobacterium avium paratuberculosis (MAP) a serious problem for the global livestock industry, but it also may trigger type 1 diabetes, given that paraTB bacteria have been found in the bloodstream of the majority of type 1 diabetics tested who presumably are exposed through the retail milk supply as the bacteria can survive pasteurization. But what about the meat supply? MAP has been found in beef, pork, and chicken. It’s an intestinal bug, and unfortunately, “[f]aecal contamination of the carcass in the abattoir [slaughter plant] is unavoidable…” Then, unless the meat is cooked well-done, it could harbor living MAP.
In terms of meat, “ground beef represents the greatest potential risk for harboring MAP…[as] a significant proportion originates from culled dairy cattle,” who may be culled because they have paratuberculosis. These animals may go straight into the human food chain. There also exists greater prevalence of fecal contamination and lymph nodes in ground meat, and the grinding can force the bacteria deep inside the ground beef burger. As such, “given the weight of evidence and the severity and magnitude of potential human health problems, the precautionary principle suggests that it is time to take actions to limit…human exposure to MAP.” At the very least, we should stop funneling animals known to be infected into the human food supply.
We know that milk exposure is associated with type 1 diabetes, but what about meat? Researchers attempted to tease out the nutritional factors that could help account for the 350-fold variation in type 1 diabetes rates around the world. Why do some parts of the world have rates hundreds of times higher than others? Yes, the more dairy populations ate, the higher their rates of childhood type 1 diabetes, but the same was found for meat, as you can see at 2:07 in my video. This gave “credibility to the speculation that the increasing dietary supply of animal protein after World War II may have contributed to the reported increasing incidence of type 1 diabetes…” Additionally, there was a negative correlation—that is, a protective correlation that you can see at 2:26 in my video—between the intake of grains and type 1 diabetes, which “may fit within the more general context of a lower prevalence of chronic diseases” among those eating more plant-based diets.
What’s more, the increase in meat consumption over time appeared to parallel the increasing incidence of type 1 diabetes. Now, we always need to be cautious about the interpretation of country-by-country comparisons. Just because a country eats a particular way doesn’t mean the individuals who get the disease ate that way. For example, a similar study looking specifically at the diets of children and adolescents between different countries “support[ed] previous research about the importance of cow’s milk and [other] animal products” in causing type 1 diabetes. But, the researchers also found that in countries where they tended to eat the most sugar, kids tended to have lower rates of the disease, as you can see at 3:18 in my video. This finding didn’t reachstatistical significance since there were so few countries examined in the study, but, even if it had and even if there were other studies to back it up, there are countless factors that could be going on. Maybe in countries where people ate the least sugar, they also ate the most high fructose corn syrup or something. That’s why you always need to put it to the test. When the diets of people who actually got the disease were analyzed, increased risk of type 1 diabetes has been associated with milk, sugar, bread, soda, eggs, and meat consumption.
In Sardinia, where the original link was made between paraTB and type 1 diabetes, a highly “statistically significant dose-response relationship” was found, meaning more meat meant more risk, especially during the first two years of children’s lives. So, “[h]igh meat consumption seems to be an important early in life cofactor for type 1 diabetes development,” although we needed more data.
The latest such study, which followed thousands of mother-child pairs, found that mothers eating meat during breastfeeding was associated with an increased risk of both preclinical and full-blown, clinical type 1 diabetes by the time their children reached age eight. The researchers thought it might be the glycotoxins, the AGEs found in cooked meat, which can be transferred from mother to child through breastfeeding, but they have learned that paratuberculosis bacteria can also be transferred through human breast milk. These bacteria have been grown from the breast milk of women with Crohn’s disease, another autoimmune disease linked to paraTB bacteria exposure.
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