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.

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. "

Very interesting! Now would it have the same effect in humans? Would be interesting.

I see no reason to downvote this... weren't LGBTQ people arguing for the longest time that there is a biological causation? They may have finally found it, though it is not genetic like they hoped for. Either way it is interesting.

Unfortunately it's not all too uncommon these days to simply assume (project?) bigotry and treat innocent people like crap over that assumption.

> Now would it have the same effect in humans?

It's only studied in rats, so we basically don't know. I cannot access the original paper so I can't discern exactly how much fungus these rats were fed. Given what usually happens with such papers, it's probably an extreme amount. I wouldn't put too much credence into it.

It's still genetic, just not human genes ;)

The lowering of testosterone in the average male due to environmental and other factors definitely seems to correlate with a rise in the amount of LGBTQ. Of course society accepting them more and allowing them to come out is a big part too.

No doubt that eating clean, working out, etc seem to make you feel more masculine as a guy.

article is from 1987

and yet I'm hearing about it now for the first time..

The spurious "I'm just asking questions..." style rhetoric and a link to an embarrassing study leaves me unsure why this is the top comment on an article about gut microbiome?

The first study, the one which _narrator_ attempts to use to 'suggest ... linkage', between this fungus and 'homosexual behaviour' seems embarrassingly unworthy of being brought to people's attention. Is this comment intentionally made in bad faith?

The linked abstract fails to acknowledge the study covered 12 male and 8 female rabbits, or let on that the article itself is roughly a page and a half of prose nearly completely devoid of data and analysis.

Your SageHub link only provides the abstract, but does say two of the authors only ever authored one other article, which they again share, and the third author has only ever authored this one article.

Google Scholar[0] has both a link to the article[1] which is from 1987(!) and labels it as having only 3(!) citations.

Of the 3 citations, two are in German and so I am unable to speak on their contents, but each only have 1(!) subsequent citation.

The third[2] has 29 citations, which is a 300 page survey of "Advances in Rabbit Sciences", and only briefly references the effects of infertility on the female rabbits, completely ignoring the 'homesexuality linkage' claims, and uses the very soft language of 'possibly':

> Feeding female rabbits with mycelium from Fusarium roseum produces infertility, possibly due to contamination with the mycotoxin zearalenon, which has effects similar to those of estrogen (Nilsson et al., 1987).

[0] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C7&q=The+...

[1] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.96...

[2] https://air.unimi.it/retrieve/handle/2434/688722/1344505/Cos...

This comes with the assumption that oestrogen variations in humans will affect their sexuality. Being very active in the international trans community, I have witnessed humans with a wide array of oestrogens level and testosterone level.

For example, I know of trans women who maintain a pregnancy level of oestradiol, others who maintain themselves at post menopausal levels and some who do not take oestradiol at all.

Having an analytic mind and access to a huge population, I am always on the lookout for patterns. This is anecdotal but I have not noticed any pattern or relationship between sex hormone level and sexuality.

What I did notice is a relationship between libido and sex hormone levels. To me, that's what this study noticed in animals. I doubt this applies in humans. Contrary to animals, having a high libido will not mean that you will start sexual intercourse with every single mammal you can reach. There is a difference between animals having same sex intercourse and homosexuality in humans.

The rate of homosexuality is relatively constant with time and location. I doubt the same is true for that specific fungus. The gay uncle hypothesis is more compelling.

"Biological warfare Mass casualties occurred in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s when Fusarium-contaminated wheat flour was baked into bread, causing alimentary toxic aleukia with a 60% mortality rate. Symptoms began with abdominal pain, diarrhea, vomiting, and prostration, and within days, fever, chills, myalgias and bone marrow depression with granulocytopenia and secondary sepsis occurred. Further symptoms included pharyngeal or laryngeal ulceration and diffuse bleeding into the skin (petechiae and ecchymoses), melena, bloody diarrhea, hematuria, hematemesis, epistaxis, vaginal bleeding, pancytopenia and gastrointestinal ulceration. Fusarium sporotrichoides contamination was found in affected grain in 1932, spurring research for medical purposes and for use in biological warfare. The active ingredient was found to be trichothecene T-2 mycotoxin, and it was produced in quantity and weaponized prior to the passage of the Biological Weapons Convention in 1972. The Soviets were accused of using the agent, dubbed "yellow rain", to cause 6,300 deaths in Laos, Kampuchea, and Afghanistan between 1975 and 1981.[16][17] The "biological warfare agent" was later purported to be merely bee feces,[18][19] but the issue remains disputed."

"wheat flour"

"Since fungi are well-known as producers of mycotoxins, it has been reasonable to attribute these changes to. the increased growth of fungi. In an earlier study the authors were able to show that blueberries from artificially fertilized forest land make hens infertile in that after eating these berries they laid eggs without shells or with defective shells. In large doses the blueberries were so toxic that all the hens died."

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusarium

"General description 3-Acetyldeoxynivalenol is a trichothecene mycotoxin, secreted by Fusarium species. It stimulates the activation of c-Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK)/ p38 mitogen-activated protein kinases and prevents protein synthesis. 3-Acetyldeoxynivalenol is a weak inducer of apoptosis. Application 3-Acetyldeoxynivalenol has been used in a study to compare the ability of two fungi to improve wheat growth, decrease root colonization of Fusarium, and withstand mycotoxins. 3-Acetyldeoxynivalenol has also been used to induce and study anorexia in mice."

wheat - again, anorexia

https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/GB/en/product/sigma/a6166

did someone say this stuff is used in packaging?

THat is a bold claim. The share of people in the US identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender has risen from 3.5% in 2012 to 5.6% in 2020. Not very constant if you ask me.

Sauce: https://www.statista.com/statistics/719674/american-adults-w...

I think this growth is more plausibly explained by changes in public tolerance of homosexuality making people more comfortable declaring something than a commensurate increase in mould in food...

Thing is, we literally have no idea. There was the "hide this" aspect, truly and surely. But we have never, even today, had an accurate, truthful rendering of numbers.

So the numbers could have risen, fallen, been the same.

One thing I will say, stating it's always been the same over all human history seems flawed. Even if it's genetic, genes change in populations over time.

"Relatively constant" doesn't mean "5.0%". It means it's always been present (which is true as far as we can tell, it's even present in other mammals), and it's always been a small minority.

More important still, regardless of what the actual level is, we haven't seen any evidence of sudden outbreaks of homosexuality in populations reliant on a particular contaminated source of food, or apparent decline in homosexuality following stricter controls on food storage, or any of the sorts of things you'd expect if homosexual attraction was generally cause by exposure to particular foodstuffs

(cf the leaded gasoline and criminality hypothesis, which sounds pretty speculative but gets more plausible when people start modelling data on regional levels and controlling for other causal factors)

To be fair, studying homosexuality from the perspective of "it's not natural/genetic" can end a career. Seriously.

Yes, which is why this guy studying rabbits as livestock in 1987 was the last guy to even try.

There's several anecdotal reports on YouTube of people doing gut cleanses and then losing their homosexual urges[1]. They said it was worms or parasites doing it, but I couldn't find any evidence for a possible casual link. I started digging around in pubmed for something else related and found these citations and started connecting dots. While replying in this thread, I just discovered the one about the vegetarians having more fusarium in their gut than standard diet eaters. There are a couple of random threads on internet forums asking why the LGBTQ people are more likely to be vegetarian. The rabbit hole grows! My guess would be the heavily processed food in standard diets probably has a lot more anti-mold preservatives in it or something like that.

Absolutely nobody who values their career will ever follow up on this hypothesis, so I just throw it out there for open discussion when it's on topic. Btw, I do some independent alt health research, but I have no credentials so I'm not worried that I'm never going to get a grant again for even coming up with this idea. I couldn't get one in the first place.

[1]https://youtu.be/2mG7DbMQ_gM

You'd be amazed how many citations can be found for research into possible causes of homosexuality conducted since 1987.

You will forgive me for suggesting that searching for citations to support a YouTube video in which an individual whose description of his "homosexual urges" is straight out of a Jack Chick tract shills for the parasite cleanse services of a naturopath who not only "cured" him of his homosexuality but discovered the medical profession had misdiagnosed his friend with Stage IV lung and bowel cancer when actually she just had "demonic" parasites too may not be a fruitful use of your time for reasons other than lack of grant availability.

The searches for the causes of homosexuality, as far as I'm aware must satisfy two criteria. 1. They are determined before birth and 2. Sexual orientation is immutable after birth. This is kind of like the dogma that amyloid plaques are the only cause of Alzheimer's and specific identifiable genetic mutations are the only cause of cancer. Both have been research dead for years, yet they keep getting grant money.

Because I am a nobody hobbyist I can come up with whatever theory I want and look for evidence for it in the medical literature.

Sure this guy is a religious guy, but he's just reporting a personal experience. No credentials needed for that really.

I'm afraid if you're credulous enough to believe a guy claiming that a particular quack's "parasite cleansing" service not only cured him of 24/7 anal sex obsession (which is totally how real gay people feel) but also his friend of late stage cancer is a real life data point and not transparently false advertising for said quack's services, you're probably not in a position to cast aspersions on the quality of medical research, and not because medical research is above criticism. No, you don't need any credentials to testify that you have personally experienced parasite cleansing miraculously curing homosexuality and ailments apparently mistakenly identified as late stage cancer in YouTube video. Nor do you need to have ever been homosexual, or to have the slightest idea what's involved in cancer diagnoses.

Trust me, it's entirely possible to get funding for research into post natal causes of homosexuality and the last high profile study on genetics reached the rather unfashionable conclusion that the most obvious candidate "gay genes" not only had little explanatory power but were more to do with sexual openness in general than homosexuality per se in a blaze of publicity with no career-limiting consequences whatsoever. Please don't mistake professionals' lack of faith in the veracity of stuff like Jennifer Daniels' patient testimony for rigid adherence to their own dogmas.

You are of course free to use your time how you want, and there's value in pursuing unconventional theories, but the ability to screen out palpable nonsense is pretty fundamental to that.

Dolphins have a rather non-mammalian gut microbiome yet have observed homosexuality. The correlations aren't there.

The issue is threatening the freedoms of a group by treating their sexual orientation pathologically. Even referring to homosexual "outbreaks" is pretty troubling to me. Humans are capable of some awful things with very little perturbation.

It can, but there are a lot of people studying causes of homosexuality nevertheless.

And even if there weren't, if the back-of-the-envelope evidence points in the opposite direction (if there's any correlation at all between homosexuality and fungi in foods, it's that we're observing more people declare themselves to be homosexual in populations eating commercially produced and processed food screened for zearalenone which is the opposite of the expected result if zearalenone is the causal factor, and "outbreaks" of homosexuality amongst groups with shared diets simply aren't observed) it's not a theory with much in its favour.

People can also choose for themselves within the constraints of their biological predilection. Society becoming tolerant then becomes subject to sexuality fads, and the percentage of people is identifying openly with sexuality of any stripe will fluctuate around a baseline.

The percentage of people who are genetically, intrinsically, unchangeably bound to a particular identity will reveal itself over time so long as culture remains tolerant. To correct for fads and fashion, we'll probably need a few centuries.

Absent sufficient data, confounding factors will make any assertions about external factors affecting sexuality impossible to falsify.

We'll have reverse engineered the brain, and genetic influence on behavior and personality, long before we've collected enough data to empirically correlate sexuality accurately enough to validate hypotheses like "mold is making people hay."

I know a lot of people feel more comfortable coming out now which is a good thing, but to add some anecdata to this...I know, and have heard of, a large number of people who claim to be gay or bi and by every indication are not. Not that their sexuality is my concern, but a few of them are obviously just posturing or something. I don't know if they've attached virtue to certain sexualities, or maybe they need to feel like they're a minority so they aren't "oppressors" (they're all whites, of the concerned variety), or if they got invested in gay culture and feel like they belong to it, or if they fetishized it or whatever but it's weird. I literally had one woman tell me, who proclaims her bisexuality every chance she gets and paints her nails rainbow colors on pride day, say that sex with women was gross...sorry lady, but I don't think you're a bisexual...

Is there a word for this? It's like the label of something has taken on more importance in their minds than the meaning behind it.

Interesting, I haven't heard of this before. Aren't almost all of those nuts/grains roasted before they're consumed? That should kill off any mold spores.

Even if you kill the spores, there can be toxic compounds produced by the fungi that won't be denatured by heat and end up being consumed.

There is a strong raw food movement among vegetarians.

I'm guessing your premise is that Estrogen or Estrogen mimicking food in the diet is the cause of homosexual?

search: 'estrogen mimetic foods' @DDG : <https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q='estrogen mimetic foods'>

If so, will you kindly explain 'gay Penguins'

search: 'gay penguins' @DDG : <https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q='gay penguins'>

> I'm guessing your premise is that Estrogen or Estrogen mimicking food in the diet is the cause of homosexual?

No that’s not their premise and that’s not what’s being said.

Hmm... From the poster 'narrator' : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31106210

>a potent estrogen mimetic which was linked to homosexual behavior<

Did you read this?

Stop twisting the parents words to fit your narrative.

They didn't claim that the mycotoxin is the sole cause of homosexuality, just that it may be a cause. There can be a myriad other causes, and this particular link is also not certain.

My first post : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31107367

Was in reply to 'narrator' : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31106210

The context tree has been changed by the Mods, moving my first post to : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31107427

No 'Twisting' on my part.