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Old 02-13-2018, 09:18 AM   #7
pstinard
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Location: Urbana, IL USA
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Default Clarification

I may have gone off half-cocked in the following bit about phages and food safety:

Quote:
Originally Posted by pstinard View Post
I'm in danger of using all caps here, so bear with me: DO YOU KNOW WHAT PHAGES ARE????? Sorry about that, I had to get that out of my system. Phages are viruses, and although their DNA has been sequenced, not much is known about how they affect human health. Here is a link to a 2017 article on Phages in the Human Body: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5378999/. Among many other things this article states is that "the influence of the presence of phages in humans has yet to be evaluated." The article notes that phages are genetic scavengers, and pick up and shuffle genes around when they infect bacteria. They are notorious for moving around genes that affect resistance to antibiotics, bacterial fitness at causing infections, and virulence genes. Phages are used in genetic engineering laboratories for this purpose, and when they are, you have to use high biosafety protocols to prevent releasing them into the environment.

So Darwin's Dog Foods throws a bunch of phages into their dog food that are supposed to kill pathogenic bacteria and leave beneficial bacteria intact?? ARE YOU KIDDING ME??? What if the phages picked up a virulence gene from Salmonella and transferred it to the beneficial bacteria? Those bacteria wouldn't be so beneficial after all, would they? Admittedly, this occurs in nature all of the time, but I wouldn't go out of my way to do it.
I did a bit more reading, and evidently there are two types of phages: virulent and temperate. Virulent phages strictly destroy their bacterial hosts without integrating into their DNA and picking up bacterial DNA. Temperate phages do integrate into bacterial DNA and pick up and transfer bacterial DNA.

The type of phage that Darwin's Dog Food adds to their raw food to kill bacteria is the virulent type, so it is "Generally Recognized As Safe" by the Food and Drug Administration as a food additive, and indeed, it is sometimes added to human food products to reduce the bacterial count. Here is a link to a typical FDA notification about phages being Generally Recognized As Safe for human consumption: https://wayback.archive-it.org/7993/.../ucm345473.htm This particular notification is about virulent phages used to reduce the amount of Salmonella in food products, so it's probably fairly similar to what Darwin's adds to their dog food.

There's a lot of research out there about the differences between virulent and temperate phages, and there are some phages that can switch back and forth between types, but the FDA has accepted the results of studies that show that the types of virulent phage added to food to kill bacteria NEVER become temperate, and therefore are not a threat to food safety.

The addition of phages to human and dog food to reduce bacterial count is only a recent phenomenon (since 2006), so I wouldn't go so far as to say there could never be any danger, but the track record has been good so far.

Personally, I wouldn't knowingly eat food that has been treated with phages, but I suppose the old adage that what you don't know won't hurt you applies in this case.

But still, the bottom line that the addition of phages to raw dog food doesn't kill 100% of dangerous bacteria still stands.
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