(Don't?) Eat Poop

As one of the country's top communicators on food safety issues, Doug Powell of KSU's Food Safety Network has a simple and memorable message, "Don't Eat Poop." However, one physician in New York has written an opinion piece suggesting humans may need to increase their immunity by ingesting a little more poop after all.

In this Barfblog post, Powell discusses this disturbing article with exactly the opposite message. The headline: "Eat Crap: Why Americans should ingest more excrement. "

The author, New York City physician Kent Sepkowitz, notes the spinach-related E. coli outbreak of last year and writes:

Since then, the United States has seen at least four additional food-borne outbreaks: salmonella in peanut butter and in spinach, botulism in canned chili, and the current Topps Meat Co. recall of 21.7 million pounds (40,000 cows' worth) of E. coli-tainted ground beef. Those with an insatiable interest in E. coli O157:H7 (along with the lawyers who traffic in this corner of the human misery market) can keep up-to-date here.
With every outbreak, the same question sounds: Why can't we keep the food chain clean? The annual numbers aren't small, nor are they decreasing. By one estimate, about one-fourth of Americans get "food poisoning" of some type each year, 300,000 are hospitalized, and a few thousand die. The perps remain the same—E. coli, listeria, salmonella, and all the rest. Why is this public-health problem so difficult to solve? This is America, after all, replete with wondrously harsh chemicals that can kill anything. Why can't we scrub away the bacteria our guts don't get along with?

Maybe we are taking the wrong approach. Rather than trying to make our food and water ever cleaner, we should focus instead on making sure it's dirty enough to assure our good health.

Rather than frantically throwing money at new ways to eradicate the pathogens that reside in shit, we should fund the boring scientists who focus on untangling the intricacies of the gut's immune system. Labs, answer this: How much shit can we safely eat and, as importantly, how much must we eat to remain healthy?

TK: Powell says "Don't Eat Poop" and this guy says, "Eat more poop." I know what I want to do. One of Powell's readers brings up a good point: natural selection may be a reality, but we don't want to practice it on our kids. Here is Powell's take on the piece:

While there is some truth in the doctor's comments, humans just aren't smart enough to figure out who is genetically susceptible to the various nasties out there. Maybe the population's immunity can be increased by exposure to some cryptosporidium or salmonella or whatever, but individuals are gonna die. We're gonna lose a few. And we don't know who those few are.
So while we're figuring that out, we have a responsibility to use the science we know to reduce the number of people who get sick from the food and water they consume. And don't eat poop