Heavy Metals, Microbial Metallomics, and the US Obesity Epidemic: A Mechanistic Examination of a Population-Level Metabolic Disruption

This paper connected phosphate fertilizer contamination, heavy metal accumulation in the food supply, and the population-level metabolic disruptions driving the US obesity epidemic — bridging agricultural science, environmental toxicology, and microbial ecology in a single framework. It provides the cross-condition evidence linking cadmium and nickel exposure to insulin resistance, SCFA depletion, and gut dysbiosis patterns shared across obesity, type 2 diabetes, and metabolic syndrome. Without this paper, WikiBiome could not explain why the same metals appearing in multiple disease signatures trace back to a common environmental source.