Food-Chain Spirochetes: A Unified Hypothesis for Parkinson’s and Dementia Risk

Rates of Parkinson’s disease (PD) and dementia have risen globally to near-epidemic proportions. Conventional explanations including aging, toxins, genetics, and protein misfolding describe aspects of pathology but do not fully account for the synchrony of recent increases across regions. This paper explores whether chronic microbial persistence in modern food systems, particularly high-speed poultry-processing environments, may represent an underrecognized upstream contributor to PD and dementia risk. Publicly available data from the Global Burden of Disease study and FAOSTAT meat-consumption records indicate that PD incidence has increased alongside poultry consumption, especially in regions using high-throughput, chlorine-based processing such as the United States and China. In the United States, PD and dementia trends rise in near-parallel with poultry consumption, with a multi-year lag consistent with long prodromal intervals. In contrast, Israel shows stable or declining PD rates despite substantial poultry consumption, coinciding with kosher processing practices and long-standing post-BSE feed restrictions. These patterns support a microbial-ecological hypothesis in which biofilm-forming spirochetes persist through chemical sanitation, enter the food chain, and chronically stimulate gut-brain inflammation. This hypothesis paper is intended to stimulate empirical testing; all associations described are ecological and do not imply individual-level causation.