Hacker News Reader

Zearalenone is a known mycotoxin that is routinely screened for in food production, so the exposure risk for people who consume commercially produced grains is minimal. Additionally although the toxin is heat stable, the fungal spores if present are destroyed by cooking.

So you’d have to consume non-heat-treated raw infected grains, and ignore the other symptoms of mycotoxin poisoning, as it’s not the only toxin Fusarium moulds produce.

View on HN

Fusarium is a regular component of the gut microbiome according to the study below, especially and overwhelmingly in, I kid you not, vegetarians!!! I'd imagine the raw food trend in vegetarianism would exacerbate this. I did not expect that! This rabbit hole goes extremely deep! If it gets established in the gut microbiome, it would be generating regular small amounts of zearalenone and people so infected would not experience full blown mycotoxin poisoning like say an immunocompromised person.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5411236/

"Finally, Suhr and colleagues examined 16 [fecal] samples from 15 vegetarians, while Hallen-Adams et al. used the same methodology in the same laboratory to isolate and sequence fungal DNA from 69 samples from 45 people on a conventional Western diet.22,23 The distribution of fungi differed considerably between the 2 groups (Table 2). Plant pathogenic Fusarium was detected in all but 2 samples from vegetarians (14 samples; 88%), while it was only detected in 2 samples from participants on conventional diets (3%). Malassezia and (presumed) foodborne Penicillium and Aspergillus were also present in more than 50% of vegetarian samples but much rarer in conventional diet samples. "

Reply on news.ycombinator.com