 Mycobacterium peritoperculosis is not just a serious problem for the global livestock industry, but may be a trigger for type 1 diabetes, given that parity B bacteria have been found in the bloodstream of the majority of type 1 diabetics tested, presumably exposed to the retail milk supply as they can survive pasteurization. But what about the meat supply? Mycobacterium peritoperculosis has been found in beef, pork, and chicken. It's an intestinal bug, and unfortunately, fecal contamination of the carcass in the slaughter plant is simply unavoidable. And then, unless it's cooked well done, it could harbor living mycobacterium avium peritoperculosis bacteria. Meat-wise, ground beef may represent the greatest potential risk for harboring these peritoperculosis bacteria, as a significant proportion originates from cold dairy cattle, which may be cold because they have peritoperculosis and go straight into the human food chain. There's also a greater prevalence of fecal contamination in lymph nodes and ground meat, and the grinding can force the bacteria deep inside the burger. Given the weight of evidence and the severity and magnitude of potential human health problems, the precautionary principle suggests that it's time to take actions to limit human exposure to this pathogen. In 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? An attempt was made 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 hundreds of times higher rates than others? Yes, the more dairy populations ate, the higher the rates of type 1 diabetes, but the same was found for meat, lending credibility to the speculation that the increasing dietary supply of animal protein after World War II may have contributed to the increasing incidence of type 1 diabetes. And there was a negative correlation, meaning a protective correlation 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. And the increase in meat consumption over time appeared to parallel the increasing incidence of the disease. Now, you always have to be really cautious about the interpretation of these country-by-country comparisons, since just because a country eats a particular way doesn't mean that the individuals that get the disease ate that way. For example, a similar study looking specifically at the diets of children and adolescents between different countries supported the previous research about the importance of cow's milk and animal products and the cause of type 1 diabetes, but they also found that in countries where they tend to eat the most sugar, kids tend to have lower rates of the disease. Now, this didn't reach statistical significance since there were so few countries, but even if it had, and even if there were other studies to back it up, there are a million factors that could be going on, right? Maybe countries that ate the least sugar, ate the most high-fructose corn syrup, or something. You always got to put it to the test. If you analyze the diet of what people who actually got the disease ate, increased risk of type 1 diabetes has been associated with milk, sugar, bread, soda, egg, and meat intake. In Sardinia, where the original link was made between Para-TB and type 1 diabetes, a highly statistically significant dose-response relationship was found, meaning more meat, more risk, especially during the first two years of the child's life. So high meat consumption seems to be an important early in life cofactor for type 1 diabetes development, although we need more data. The latest such study, following thousands of mother-child pairs, found that eating meat during breastfeeding was associated with an increased risk of both preclinical and full-blown type 1 diabetes by the time their child reached age 8. They thought it may be the glycotoxins the AGEs found in cooked meat, which can be transferred through breastfeeding. But what can also be transferred through human breast milk are para tuberculosis bacteria, which have been grown from the breast milk of women with Crohn's disease, another autoimmune disease linked to para tuberculosis bacteria exposure.