This is where One Health meets formulation strategy, but what is One Health?
Formulated in 2021 by the One Health High-Level Expert Panel (OHHLEP), the consensus definition of One Health states:
“One Health is an integrated, unifying approach that aims to sustainably balance and optimize the health of people, animals and ecosystems. It recognizes the health of humans, domestic and wild animals, plants and the wider environment (including ecosystems) are closely linked and interdependent.
The approach mobilizes multiple sectors, disciplines and communities at varying levels of society to work together to foster well-being and tackle threats to health and ecosystems, while addressing the collective need for healthy food, water, energy and air, taking action on climate change and contributing to sustainable development.”
The goal now is to make a unified One Health approach operational so stakeholders can better prevent, detect and control multidimensional health threats across human, animal, plant and environmental boundaries. Under the One Health Joint Plan of Action (2022–2026), the initiative focuses on strengthening global One Health capacity, reducing the risk of emerging zoonotic epidemics and pandemics, controlling zoonotic, neglected tropical and vector-borne diseases, strengthening food-safety risk assessment and communication, combatting antimicrobial resistance and integrating the environment into One Health.
Until now, One Health has focused heavily on reducing the risk of zoonoses, or animal diseases, and their spread to humans. This makes sense: Two-thirds of human diseases originate in animals, a reality clearly illustrated by the COVID-19 pandemic. A second major center of attention is antimicrobial resistance, driven in part by the widespread use of antibiotics in farmed animals. In 2017, 73% of all antimicrobial products were used in farmed animals, and demand for animal products continues to rise globally. While these two areas have attracted 70% to 75% of One Health funding, according to the French National Agency for Research, the concept is now expanding to integrate other dimensions, particularly environmental health.
Health is not merely the absence of disease, so One Health is not merely the containment of animal infections and antimicrobial resistance genes.
Environmental health is inseparable from human health
Human health cannot be separated from climate pressures or from broader questions surrounding human dependance on fossil fuels.
Air pollution from the burning of petrol and gas is associated with an estimated 3 million to 8 million deaths per year, or roughly one in 10 to one in five global deaths (Vohra et al., 2021; Lelieveld et al., 2019).
What’s more, forest fires account for about 1.5 million deaths annually and are increasing in number, size and frequency as climate change intensifies (Xu et al., 2024), even before considering the impact on wildlife.
Heat waves add another burden: High temperatures were estimated to cause about 500,000 deaths per year between 2000 and 2019 (Zhao et al., 2021), and recent European heat events underscore how quickly that risk is escalating. Since then, every year has grown hotter, and the June 2026 heat wave in Europe alone is estimated to have caused 20,000 deaths (+36% compared to seasonal baselines) (Michael Le Page, 2026).
Human health also cannot be separated from exposure to xenobiotics: chemical substances foreign to biological systems, such as synthetic drugs, pesticides, microplastics and other environmental pollutants.
Pesticides have been linked to cancer risk among farmers, and several have been classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as carcinogenic or probably carcinogenic to humans (Alavanja et al., 2004; Boulanger et al., 2017; IARC classification of carcinogens). A French cohort study also associated higher organic food consumption with lower cancer incidence over a seven-year period (Baudry et al., 2018).
Microplastics are another emerging concern: Patients with microplastics in their vascular plaques had a 4.5-fold higher risk of heart attack, stroke or death from any cause than those without, and microplastics were detected in 58% of artery plaques studied (Marfella et al., 2024). Exposure through food, water and air may contribute to inflammation and oxidative stress (Mohamed Nor et al., 2021).
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), often called “forever chemicals,” bioaccumulate in the liver, kidney and blood serum, where they can disrupt endocrine and cell-signaling pathways. In diabetic patients, higher PFAS levels, particularly PFOS, were associated with a 55% higher mortality risk (Wei et al., 2025), while exposure in an Italian population was associated with higher cardiovascular disease, cancer and mortality risk (Biggeri et al., 2024).
These studies are siloed, each focusing on a single xenobiotic threat, but the real-world exposure is more likely to resemble a cocktail.
Xenobiotics can not only directly impact human health when they return to our bodies, but also affect the environment, soils, plants and animals with which they come into contact. By disrupting microbiomes and biodiversity, they can further affect human health, creating additional pathways through which these compounds influence our well-being.
Glyphosate, for instance, is the world’s most widely applied broad-spectrum herbicide. Its direct effect on human cells is the subject of debate: Glyphosate is classified as “probably carcinogenic to humans” by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), whereas the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have concluded that it is unlikely to pose a carcinogenic risk at typical dietary exposure levels.
There is however a stronger scientific consensus that it impacts the human microbiome composition and gut-brain axis. In particular, glyphosate may reduce Lactobacilli populations and interfere with their beneficial roles in tryptophane and serotonin metabolism, potentially contributing to inflammation and anxiety (Lehman et al., 2023, Caceres-Chacon et al., 2025). Emerging research has also linked glyphosate-caused alterations in the gut microbiome to diseases such as Crohn’s and Alzheimer’s diseases (da Cunha Ignacio et al., 2024).
The effects of xenobiotics on wildlife also have tangible economic consequences. Millions of growers worldwide depend on pollinators for agricultural productivity— an ecosystemic service valued at an estimated US$ 361 billion in 2009. Exposure to neonicotinoids, for example, reduced bee visits to apple trees by 36%, implying direct impacts on crops yields and economic losses (Stanley et al., 2016).
A 2025 publication showed that pesticides can volatize into the atmosphere, contaminate cloud water and subsequently return to the ground as rain. Half of rainwater samples analyzed contained pesticide concentrations exceeding the European drinking-water limit. If the right of some to use pesticides implies that others can no longer drink rainwater or use it for organic farming, this raises fundamental questions about how such externalities are distributed. The freedom of one person ends where that of another begins.
“The health of soil, plant, animal and man is one and indivisible.
Sir Albert Howard, a father of the organic movement.
One Health provides a framework for examining these externalities and assessing the human, environmental and economic costs of agricultural and industrial practices. When those costs outweigh the benefits, the case for change becomes clear.
Microbiomes as a gateway into One Health
The microbiome offers an excellent gateway to understanding the continuity between human health and the natural world.
First, it challenges the notion of the human body as a self-contained entity. Our identity is an amalgamation of human and microbial cells, with microbial ancestry extending back to our mitochondria and viral heritage embedded deep in our DNA (Philosophy in the petri dish). The microbiome makes tangible the continuity of our health and our exposures to the microbial worlds of food, nature and other animals.
Second, the evolution of the hygiene hypothesis illustrates how our relationship with microbes shapes health. The original idea—that childhood exposure to infection could protect against allergies and auto-immune disorders later in life—evolved into the old friend hypothesis, which shifted the focus from infections themselves to the exposure to beneficial microorganisms. More recently, the biodiversity hypothesis has broadened this perspective: Human health may depend not simply on contact with a handful of beneficial microbes but on regular interaction with the microbial diversity of natural environments.
Third is the understanding that microbiomes are dynamic and interconnected ecosystems that continually exchange microbes and microbial functions. The human gut microbiome is shaped by vertical transmission from mother to baby and by physical contact between people, while food provides an important interface with plant and soil microbiomes (Berg et al., 2023). The soil microbiome, a reservoir of 10 times more diversity than the gut microbiome, is considered a key source of microbes for intestinal diversity (Blum et al., 2019).
Soil is therefore a key primary source of a healthy intestinal microbiota of humans.
Blum and colleagues
Why does this matter for the supplement industry?
Food supplements began as a means of complementing nutrients that people were not obtaining in sufficient quantities from their diets. As the nutritional quality of some foods has declined, with micronutrient levels reported to be substantially lower in modern crops than in those grown in the 1940s (Mayer et al., 2021), supplementation became increasingly important. More than 2 billion people worldwide are estimated to suffer from deficiencies in key vitamins and minerals (WHO, 2006). What would the numbers look like if they also included people exposed to xenobiotics or living with dysbiotic microbiota?
All of these questions connect food, food supplements, farming and health in ways that are increasingly difficult to ignore. Research comparing nutrient density across farming systems points to higher levels of minerals and beneficial plant phytochemicals, including polyphenols and antioxidants, as well as a more favorable omega-6/omega-3 ratio in regeneratively grown crops (Montgomery et al., 2022). One factor appears particularly important: soil life.
The soil food web supports fertility, fights erosion and improves soil water retention—functions that are becoming increasingly valuable as climate stress intensifies.
Mycorrhizal fungi can extend the effective reach of plant roots by up to 1,000-fold, while providing an enzymatic toolbox that helps plants absorb minerals present in the soil but otherwise unavailable to them. Soil bacteria also contribute through biological nitrogen fixation, phosphate solubilization, improvements in soil structure and stimulation of induced systemic resistance, the plant’s own immune system.
These functions have direct implications for the quality of the botanical raw materials on which the food and nutraceutical sectors rely. They also affect the resilience and security of supply chains in an increasingly unstable global environment.
The growing number of conferences devoted to One Health reflects a broader recognition of these connections, and the industry is beginning to catch up. As the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, “We are full of the cosmos but empty of one thing: some kind of separate identity. Your consciousness is also the consciousness of the Earth.”
Taking care of ourselves means taking care of the Earth—and ultimately, the reverse is true as well.
Nina Vinot is a symbiologist and science communicator passionate about microbes, symbiosis, and the connections between human and planetary health. With a background in agronomy, nutrition and probiotics, she explores the invisible relationships that shape life and our world.
