Biochemistry
Synopsis and excerpts from Toxic Legacy, a book about biochemistry and the most common herbicide in the world
While reading Toxic Legacy, I discovered a love for biochemistry — understanding what’s happening in terms of molecules. The depth of of known biochemistry is miraculous.
Stephanie Seneff brough together thousands of brilliant minds to write Toxic Legacy. There’s fifty three pages of citations. Dr. Seneff stood on the shoulders of giants to explain, in plain English, life’s biological processes at the molecular level. This book showed me the inner workings of the body and how it interacts with pesticides, as well as the inner workings of the profit-seeking machine that disrupts biology. What I’ve learned has reinforced my avoidance of wheat, sugars, factory meats and processed nonfood.
This book is not for the weak. It looks closely, very closely, at what the hell is actually going on. The question is, you really want to know?
I do.
I read on Kindle and do a lot of highlighting and reviewing — especially when the book is as dense with insights as this one. I emailed Dr. Seneff and she gave me permission to post excerpts. She also thanked me for spreading the word about glyphosate — a chemical that is patented as an herbicide, antibiotic and chelator.
There’s been exponential increases in allergies, food sensitivities, autism, diabetes, obesity and other chronic illnesses. We’re talking about massive increases. I want answers.
Climate change is mainstream. The sustainable energy solution — solar, wind and batteries — is being built out. Declining human health, driven in part by pesticide exposure, is the next frontier for largescale reconfiguration.
Nineteen billion pounds of glyphosate has been applied since 1974. In recent years, around 300 million pound per year has been applied in America.
Toxic Legacy Table of Contents:
Introduction
1 Evidence of Harm
2 Failing Ecosystems
3 Glyphosate and the Microbiome
4 Amino Acid Analogue
5 The Phosphate Puzzle
6 Sulfate: Miracle Worker
7 Liver Disease
8 Reproduction and Early Development
9 Neurological Disorders
10 Autoimmunity
11 Reboot Today for a Healthy Tomorrow
Appendix
Stephanie Seneff is a senior research scientist at MIT with four degrees from MIT. She writes, “I’d been on a dogged journey to identify environmental factors that might be causing the increase in autism among America’s children. Characterized by social deficits, repetitive behaviors, and impaired cognitive abilities.”
“In 2016, the prevalence of autism was about 1 in 40 children.”
In 2020, CDC estimates autism prevalence is 1 in 36. They also estimate that 1 in 6 children were diagnosed with a developmental disorder.
What’s more, 11% of Americans have diagnosed diabetes. 67% are on prescription medications. Around 30% of young people report having a mental health condition and around 25% Americans are on psychiatric medication. It’s estimated that 25-30% of Americans now avoid consuming gluten. Since 1990, the incidence of Celiac Disease has risen ten fold.
The 1990’s is when the use of glyphosate on crops began to take off, with the help of genetically modified crops that are glyphosate resistant. Food ingredients with the most glyphosate are wheat, corn, soy, chickpeas, lentils, oats, corn syrup and seed oils. It’s estimated that nearly all Americans are exposed to glyphosate.
Consumer Notice writes, “The volume of glyphosate applied to crops has increased 100-fold since the late 1970s. One study found glyphosate in more than 95% of the oat-based food samples.”
In 2020, Bayer announced it would pay over $10 billion to resolve outstanding lawsuits and unresolved claims regarding glyphosate in RoundUp.
In 2021 Bayer wrote, “To further reduce future litigation risk, we started the transition of our glyphosate products in the U.S. residential Lawn & Garden market to new formulations that have different active ingredients in 2023.” This does not mean the amount of glyphosate in the food supply will go down. In fact, it’s 2023 and glyphosate is still in residential RoundUp products.
The following is a supercut of Dr. Seneff’s book. The final section, Reboot Today for a Healthy Tomorrow, has the most actionable health advice.
Around half the cells of our body are microbes. It’s called the microbiome. Seneff says that glyphosate disrupts the human microbiome with the same mechanism it kills plants with — it’s called the Shikimate metabolic pathway. Glycine is an amino acid and fundamental building block for protein. Seneff hypothesizes that glyphosate substitutes for glycine during protein synthesis which then causes disruption in many areas.
Excerpts from Toxic Legacy
By the time I attended Dr. Huber's presentation on glyphosate, I had already learned a great deal about the complicated medical conditions that often accompany autism, including a disrupted gut microbiome, inflammatory and leaky gut, nutrient malabsorption, food sensitivities, vitamin and mineral deficiencies, and impaired methylation and sulfation pathways.
I was studying various metals and chemicals in the environment: mercury, fluoride, lead, aluminum, plastics, polychlorinated biphenyls, polysorbate 80, and other endocrine and carcinogen disruptors.
Glyphosate is the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup. Monsanto, a Missouri based company, was Roundup's original manufacturer. It was acquired by Bayer in 2018. Monsanto has touted glyphosate as remarkably safe because its main mechanism of toxicity affects a metabolic pathway in plant cells that human cells don't possess. This is what, presumably, makes glyphosate so effective in killing plants, while in theory, at least leaving humans and other animals unscathed.
But as Dr. Huber pointed out to a rapt audience that day, human cells might not possess the shikimate pathway but almost all of our gut microbes do. They use the shikimate pathway, a central biological pathway in their metabolism, to synthesize tryptophan, tyrosine, and phenylalanine, three of the twenty coding amino acids that make up the proteins of our body. Precisely because human cells do not possess the shikimate pathway, we rely on our gut microbiota, along with diet, to provide these essential amino acids for us.
They [microbes] use the shikimate pathway to synthesize tryptophan, tyrosine, and phenylalanine, three of the twenty coding amino acids that make up the proteins of our body. Precisely because human cells do not possess the shikimate pathway, we rely on our gut microbiota, along with diet, to provide these essential amino acids
When glyphosate harms these microbes, they not only lose their ability to make these essential amino acids for the host, but they also become impaired in their ability to help us in all other ways they normally support our health. Beneficial microbes are more sensitive to glyphosate, and this causes pathogens to thrive.
Gut dysbiosis is associated with depression and other mental disorders.
Source: Gut Microbiome and Depression: How Microbes affect the way we think https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.9966
Alterations in the distribution of microbes can cause autoimmune dysregulation and autoimmune disease. https://doi.org/10.4161/gmic.19320
RoundUp hit the market—and was declared safe—before much of this groundbreaking research on the human microbiome was ever conducted.
plants exposed to glyphosate take up much smaller amounts of these critical minerals into their tissues. When we eat foods derived from these nutrient-deficient plants, we become nutrient deficient, as well.
“GMO technology allows genes from other species (usually microbial genes) to be introduced into the genome of a plant … to produce glyphosate resistance, a gene from a bacterium … is inserted into the crop’s genome.” Page 11
12 percent of Americans tested positive for glyphosate exposure from 1993 to 1996, at least 70 percent of Americans test positive today. As high as that number sounds, it’s likely an underestimate. Of the several dozen patients one doctor in southern Oregon tested for glyphosate—most of whom were self-described health nuts who eat organic food—100 percent, including the doctor himself, came back positive. [13] People who eat a predominantly organic diet have significantly less glyphosate in their urine than people who consume mostly conventional foods, and people who are healthy have significantly lower levels of glyphosate in their urine than those who are chronically ill. [14] Still, glyphosate is nearly impossible to completely avoid.
Source: https://doi.org/10.4172/2161-0525.1000210.
1 - Evidence of Harm
While glyphosate would kill weeds indiscriminately, certain weeds were less sensitive—or became so over time. These “superweeds” begin to dominate an ecosystem, crowding out crops, requiring more and more glyphosate, or different herbicides entirely, to kill them off. The solution? Use more glyphosate! Since 1974, about 8.6 billion kilograms—some 19 billion pounds—of glyphosate have been applied worldwide.
https://doi.org/10.1002/fee.1985.
The amount of glyphosate used on GMO crops has increased dramatically over the past two decades. Given the hand-in-glove relationship between glyphosate and genetically modified crops, you might think it’s easy to avoid glyphosate by avoiding GM foods. In fact, the highest levels of glyphosate have consistently been found in non-GMO foods derived from wheat, oats, and legumes. Why? Because these crops are commonly sprayed with glyphosate as a desiccant right before harvest, causing the plant to drop its leaves and dry out so it is easier to harvest. Glyphosate forces the crop to go to seed as it’s dying, which synchronizes seed production and increases yield. Many other crops are desiccated with glyphosate, including barley and rye, and oily crops such as canola, safflower, sunflower, linseed and flax, that are used for vegetable oil production. At this point in the plant’s life cycle, it is not a problem if glyphosate kills it. In fact, that is the intent.
By law, glyphosate cannot be used on certified organic crops. Even if a food is certified organic, however, it doesn’t necessarily mean the food is glyphosate-free. Though organically grown foods usually test at much lower levels for glyphosate than conventionally grown food, it’s nearly impossible to avoid glyphosate in the soil, in animal manure, in rainwater, and in wind drift. Glyphosate-based herbicides have become so pervasive that even food from farms nowhere near where glyphosate is sprayed can be contaminated. When the FDA tested 28 samples of honey in 2017, 100 percent contained glyphosate.
https://doi.org/10.21423/jrs-v05n02p001
“The Environmental Protection Agency’s job is to evaluate and regulate pesticides to make sure they are safe for both human health and the environment. (Insecticides, fungicides, and herbicides all fall under the umbrella term pesticide.) The Food and Drug Administration’s job is to make sure chemical herbicide food residues don’t exceed the EPA’s safety limits. Since first registered with the EPA, glyphosate has been reviewed for safety once every 15 years.21 In 2016, the EPA declared that the Acceptable Daily Intake of glyphosate is 1.75 micrograms per kilogram of body weight per day.22 (The ADI adopted by the European Union is much lower at only 0.5 micrograms per kilogram of body weight per day.23) This means that, according to the EPA, a 150-pound person (68 kilograms) can “safely” eat 120 micrograms of glyphosate a day.”
a growing body of scientific literature strongly suggests that no amount of glyphosate is safe.
Scientists exposed albino rats to glyphosate and Roundup at the rodent-equivalent doses considered safe for humans, and then tested their microbiomes. The microbiomes of both the mother rats and their offspring were disrupted, the pups faring worse than the dams. The exposed rats showed fewer beneficial bacteria, such as Lactobacillus and Bifidobacteria, and more pathogenic ones—Prevotella, in particular, which is often associated with infections. Lactobacillus, normally the first species to colonize the gut, aid in metabolizing milk. Disrupting Lactobacillus allows pathogenic bacteria to gain traction. The glyphosate-exposed rats suffered many other negative health effects, including hormone problems and reproductive damage. Female rats also had abnormally high levels of testosterone.” https://doi.org/10.1186/s12940-018-0394-x.
Likewise, researchers in Spain have found that glyphosate crosses the blood-brain barrier and overstimulates neurotransmitter receptors in various regions of the brain, causing neuronal excitotoxicity, a pathological process that damages and kills neurons. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2017.10.051.
Scientists who study hormones in humans and other animals have found that endocrine-disrupting chemicals often have more dramatic effects at lower doses than at higher doses, defying the adage that “the dose makes the poison.”32 In fact, counterintuitively, glyphosate-associated birth defects are often more frequent with a lower-dose exposure during pregnancy.
exposure to low doses of Roundup leads to significant harm in rats. In a study that essentially repeated a study that had been conducted by Monsanto, Séralini’s team fed rats Roundup-treated genetically modified corn, but instead of stopping at three months, as Monsanto did, Séralini’s team continued the experiment for two years.34 This time frame is significant, because the agrichemical industry has devised an expedient rule that three months is sufficient time to demonstrate toxicity. While there were no obvious differences between the control group and the experimental group at three months, the female rats eventually developed massive mammary tumors, male rats experienced damage to their liver and kidneys, and both males and females experienced reproductive problems and early death. The first two male rats that died in the experimental group died a year earlier than the first male in the control group. Three times as many females in the group that ate Roundup-exposed corn died by the end of the two-year experiment as in the control female group.
One former Monsanto scientist, Richard Goodman, used his position on the journal’s editorial board to put pressure on the journal’s editor, a former Monsanto employee, to discredit the research. The journal’s retraction decision is almost comical: “Unequivocally, the Editor-in-Chief found no evidence of fraud or intentional misrepresentation of the data,” the journal editors explained. But it also said: “Ultimately, the results presented (while not incorrect) are inconclusive.”36 Scientific results are always open to further scrutiny. To retract a paper because its results are “inconclusive” is highly irregular. That Monsanto succeeded in its aggressive campaign to censor the research, and the journal issued a retraction in November 2013, demonstrates a disturbing level of industry control over scientific and public debate. In 2014, Séralini’s paper was republished in Environmental Sciences Europe.37
https://doi.org/10.1186/s12302-014-0014-5.
Cobalamin, which you might know of as vitamin B12, depends on cobalt as a catalyst. It’s an important enzyme in the body. It regulates many metabolic pathways, and it is vital for the normal formation of red blood cells and healthy nerve and brain tissue. Only a few enzymes depend on cobalamin, but each is essential for cellular function
Anthony Samsel is a unique scientist: brilliant, passionate, eccentric, and stubbornly self-sufficient. He had an illustrious career as a chemist in an Arthur D. Little think tank, and he holds many chemical patents. Now retired, Samsel lives on several acres of land in New Hampshire where he grows organic crops, providing most of the food for his family from his own small farm. Samsel also still works as a toxicology consultant.
we discovered that glyphosate not only makes beneficial minerals toxic, but that it also transports and delivers known toxic metals, such as aluminum and arsenic, to acidic areas of the body where it then releases the toxic cargo. In our research we found that glyphosate disrupts manganese, making it simultaneously deficient and toxic. https://doi.org/10.4103/2152-7806.153876.
glyphosate binding allows aluminum to be carried past the gut barrier and into the brainstem nuclei, where an acidic environment prompts the glyphosate to release it.
Stephanie Seneff et al., “Aluminum and Glyphosate Can Synergistically Induce Pineal Gland Pathology: Connection to Gut Dysbiosis and Neurological Disease,” Agricultural Sciences 6 (2015): 42–70, https://doi.org/10.4236/as.2015.61005.
“The last place we want aluminum is inside the brain.” p27
In December 2015, Anthony called me up to tell me of his excitement in his realization of the chilling idea that glyphosate might be disrupting protein synthesis through its role as an amino acid analogue of the coding amino acid glycine. I was skeptical at first, but once I started investigating this idea, it became clear to me that it could be the mechanism by which glyphosate is a diabolical and insidious disruptor of systemic metabolism in all living species.
The negative health consequences of glyphosate can be seen across multiple generations. It’s biopersistent and, in the United States especially, almost unavoidable. Supposedly safe limits for humans are based on outdated science.
all other industrialized countries are seeing life expectancy rates rise, ours declined from 2014 to 2017.69 For one of the wealthiest countries in the world, we have among the lowest life expectancy rates. Even the death rate among young people in America is going in the wrong direction.
On nearly every health indicator the United States ranks last or next-to-last among industrialized countries. We also use more glyphosate per capita than any other industrialized nation.
2 - Failing Ecosystems
“A fortunate minority gains luxuries and freedoms galore, but only by slaughtering, poisoning, and exhausting creation. So we bequeath you a ruined planet that dooms you to a hardscrabble existence, or perhaps none at all.”
William Ophuls, Apologies to the Grandchildren, https://ophuls.org/essays.
over the past two decades the use of glyphosate on core crops has increased dramatically.
Roundup Ready crops, including corn, soy, canola, sugar beets, alfalfa, cotton, and tobacco, are genetically modified by the insertion of a microbial gene that produces a version of the enzyme EPSP (5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate) synthase that is resistant to glyphosate’s effects. This is the enzyme in the shikimate pathway that glyphosate disrupts.
many non-GMO crops are also commonly exposed to glyphosate. These crops are commonly sprayed right before harvest, with glyphosate acting as a ripener or a drying agent. Particularly in northern regions such as Canada where the growing season is short, the goal is to force the crop to ripen before frost sets in.
Crops commonly treated right before harvest include wheat, oats, barley, sugar cane, sunflower seeds, and legumes such as chickpeas, lentils, and soybeans.
Like the United States and Canada, Argentina has seen a rapid rise in glyphosate use over the past two decades, along with the widespread adoption of genetically modified glyphosate-resistant soy crops, mainly for export.
radiolabeled glyphosate was added to undisturbed sand and clay. Scientists then analyzed samples, taken weekly for more than two years. They found that after 748 days, 59 percent of the glyphosate was still present.
Lars Bergström et al., “Laboratory and Lysimeter Studies of Glyphosate and Aminomethylphosphonic Acid in a Sand and a Clay Soil,” Journal of Environmental Quality 40 (2011): 98–108, https://doi.org/10.2134/jeq2010.0179.
glyphosate disrupts the cells of even the most primitive life forms in complex ways, causing them to abnormally increase production of some proteins and decrease production of others.
glyphosate is patented as an antibiotic. Many bacterial species in the human gut are sensitive to glyphosate, and the loss of bacteria caused from this antibiotic gives fungi such as Candida an opportunity to expand disproportionately.
a paradox in all this research: Pathogenic fungi that can metabolize glyphosate not only have a distinct advantage over other species in the human host but also protect the host from glyphosate toxicity by clearing the glyphosate. While there may be a future role for fungi in helping us heal glyphosate-damaged soil, the overgrowth of fungi leading to serious and potential fatal infections is cause for concern.
The shells of the glyphosate-exposed crayfish were also unusually soft. The damage these scientists saw to the blood cells and the increased oxidative stress have been linked to immune dysfunction. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this study, however, was the behavior of the crayfish. Prior to exposure, the crayfish congregated in social groups to share food. After exposure they “quarreled with each other to take shelter.”36 This behavior was not observed in the control group. Might this be due to serotonin deficiency induced by glyphosate’s disruption of the shikimate pathway in the gut microbiome? Serotonin is produced from tryptophan, one of the three amino acids synthesized by plants and gut microbes via the shikimate pathway. Glyphosate’s blockage of the shikimate pathway is believed to be the primary mechanism by which it kills plants. Most of the serotonin produced in the body is produced in the gut, and deficiencies in tryptophan in glyphosate-exposed food sources combined with impaired tryptophan synthesis by gut microbes could conspire to produce a systemic serotonin deficiency, which has been linked to aggressive, violent behavior.
Mirko Manchia et al., “Serotonin Dysfunction, Aggressive Behavior, and Mental Illness: Exploring the Link Using a Dimensional Approach,” ACS Chemical Neuroscience 8, no. 5 (2017): 961–72, https://doi.org/10.1021/acschemneuro.6b00427.
billions of bees are dying after being in almond groves, which are commonly treated with glyphosate.
When adult worker honeybees are exposed to sublethal doses of glyphosate, it decreases their short-term memory retention and disrupts the associative learning necessary for effective foraging.49
Glyphosate also disrupts the honeybee microbiome.52 Snodgrassella alvi is an important species in the bee microbiome. All strains of this species encode a version of the enzyme EPSP synthase that is sensitive to glyphosate. When worker bees were exposed to small amounts of glyphosate added to sucrose syrup for 5 days, they had lower numbers of the beneficial S. alvi, Bifidobacterium, and two Lactobacillus strains. At the same time, the glyphosate exposure made the bees more susceptible to the pathogenic bacteria Serratia marcescens. Bees with impaired microbiomes are more likely to abandon their hives and die from opportunistic infections.
In 2005, scientists discovered that when outdoor ponds and surrounding areas were sprayed with Roundup, 96 to 100 percent of the tadpoles died in three weeks. Incredibly, 79 percent of juvenile frogs and toads on land died in just 1 day.61
They noted that the combination of glyphosate and arsenic is a potent endocrine disruptor,
“Grain-free” dog foods, often based on legumes such as lentils, chick peas, and fava beans as a source of protein, are becoming increasingly popular. The highest levels of glyphosate are consistently found in legumes.
3 - Glyphosate and the Microbiome
Glyphosate is considered so safe that no US governmental agency tests for it in food.
When scientists look at time trends in the United States for multiple diseases that are becoming more prevalent in the past few decades, and compare them to the time trends for the use of glyphosate over the same time period, they find stunning correlations between the rise in glyphosate use and the rise in Alzheimer’s disease, autism, diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, kidney disease, liver disease, obesity, pancreatic cancer, and thyroid cancer.
Nancy L. Swanson et al., “Genetically Engineered Crops, Glyphosate and the Deterioration of Health in the United States of America,” Journal of Organic Systems 9 (2014): 6–37.
Some dismiss the results of this research with the claim that “correlation does not equal causation.” Fair enough. But consider this: A p-value is a mathematical measure of the probability that a correlation between two curves could have occurred by chance. A p-value of 0.05 is considered significant. As Nancy Swanson and her team of scientists explain, “When correlation coefficients of over 0.95 (with p-value significance levels less than 0.00001) are calculated for a list of diseases that can be directly linked to glyphosate, via its known biological effects, it would be imprudent not to consider causation as a plausible explanation” [my emphasis].2 If exposure to glyphosate is indeed causing the decline in human health in industrialized countries, as I believe it is, we need to ask ourselves how.
Glyphosate’s effect on plants is to disrupt the shikimate pathway, a metabolic pathway that plants use to produce the aromatic amino acids tryptophan, tyrosine, and phenylalanine, which are the precursors to proteins, vitamins, and other kinds of bioactive substances such as pigments, hormones, and neurotransmitters.
54 percent of the species found in the gut carry a glyphosate-susceptible version of EPSP synthase.3 So while humans can derive these three aromatic amino acids from diet, the bigger issue is this: glyphosate kills anything that possesses the shikimate pathway, and that includes much of our microbiome—microbes we rely on for providing us with nutrients, aiding digestion, maintaining a healthy gut barrier, and promoting the development of a healthy immune system.
microorganisms collaborate to produce the B vitamins: thiamine (B1), riboflavin (B2), niacin (B3), pantothenate (B5), pyridoxine (B6), biotin (B7), folate (B9), and cobalamin (B12). It further reveals that these B vitamins made inside the body significantly augment B vitamins supplied from food. Our human cells are unable to produce these vitamins.
How Roundup residue in food affects mental health:
EPSP is an intermediary in the shikimate pathway, not the end result. EPSP is further processed by other enzymes to achieve the primary goal of the pathway, which is production of the three aromatic amino acids: tryptophan, tyrosine, and phenylalanine. Human cells do not have any of the enzymes of the shikimate pathway, including EPSP synthase. For this reason, our body depends on our food sources and on our gut microbes to produce these amino acids for us. This is why they’re called essential amino acids. These amino acids are not only essential for building proteins. They are also the building blocks of many other molecules that play a critical role in our biology, including many of the B vitamins; the neurotransmitters serotonin, melatonin, dopamine, and epinephrine; thyroid hormone; and the skin-tanning agent melanin.
The gut microbiome is a teeming collection of trillions of bacteria, viruses, and fungi that have made the human gut their home.
“Revised Estimates for the Number of Human and Bacteria Cells in the Body,” PLoS Biology 14(8) (2016): e1002533, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002533.
careful analysis suggests that they may match our own cells “only” one-to-one.5 Nonetheless, it is undisputed that their collective genome carries more DNA code than ours by a factor of at least 100.
C. A. Lozupone et al., “Diversity, Stability and Resilience of the Human Gut Microbiota,” Nature 489 (2012): 220–30, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature11550.
For most of the last century, the gut microbiome was pretty much ignored in research on the human body. I suspect this is partly because it was functioning well.
When we disrupt the gut we also risk disrupting the brain. Scientists now understand that the gut and the brain are in close communication. The signaling that takes place between the gastrointestinal tract and the central nervous system is called the gut-brain axis. Communication happens via the lymph system, via the blood circulation, and via the vagus nerve.7 A lot of this communication involves signals released by the microbes in the gut.8 This is why several of our modern diseases are now believed to have their origins in the gut, including Alzheimer’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), autism, depression, Parkinson’s disease, and rheumatoid arthritis, among others.
Gut microbes are essential for promoting the generation of neurons in the hippocampus, which plays a central role in brain development, or neurogenesis. Antibiotics can have a profoundly negative effect on this process.
Claudio Cristiano et al., “Interplay between Peripheral and Central Inflammation in Autism Spectrum Disorders: Possible Nutritional and Therapeutic Strategies,” Frontiers in Physiology 9 (2018) 184, https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2018.00184.
Intragastric treatment of mice with antibiotics caused clear deficits in brain function
cognitive impairment was specifically caused by gut dysbiosis.9 These results are disturbing: They suggest that antibiotics can damage the brain.
We know that C-section birth can disrupt the microbiome, leading to microbes in the child’s gut that more closely resemble the species that normally inhabit the skin. This can set up the child for a rough start in terms of achieving a proper balance in the gut.
Yan Shao et al., “Stunted Microbiota and Opportunistic Pathogen Colonization in Caesarean-Section Birth.” Nature 574 (2019): 117–21, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1560-1.
The majority of children with compromised brain function, including autism and autism-like disorders, suffer from gut problems.13 An inflammatory gut and a leaky gut barrier allow pathogens and toxic microbial metabolites to enter general circulation, which can cause a systemic inflammatory response, including inflammation in the brain.14 Chronic low-grade encephalopathy, or inflammation of the brain, is also associated with mood disorders and cognitive problems.
children with autism have more Clostridia in their gut, as well as different strains of Clostridia, than children without autism.15 There’s also a strong association between certain toxic metabolites produced by Clostridia and encephalopathy. Clostridia are less sensitive to glyphosate than other gut microbes like Lactobacillus and Bifidobacteria, leading some scientists, including me, to postulate that glyphosate is causing a microbial imbalance leading to the production of toxic metabolites that contribute to brain damage.
These mice were deficient in Bacteroides fragilis but replete with Clostridia species that were producing a metabolite called 4-ethylphenylsulfate (4EPS). The 4EPS metabolite was found to be 46-fold higher in the autistic mice than in controls. This metabolite is similar to p-cresol, which is known to be elevated in humans with autism.17 Treatment of the mice with a probiotic enriched in B. fragilis led to improvements in autistic symptoms, reduced expressions of anxiety, and produced drops in 4EPS blood levels. At the same time—and this is an astonishing finding—the scientists were able to induce anxiety in control mice, simply by exposing them to 4EPS. Brain health and immune system health are intricately intertwined. An unhealthy gut microbiome compromises both. Remarkably, the species B. fragilis, the deficiency of which is tied to autism, has also been shown to protect the host from viral infections.18
We know, without doubt, that a healthy gut microbiome—in both humans and mice—during the first few weeks of life is crucial for brain health. Mice with unhealthy microbiomes have a more acute stress response than normal mice. They show increased elevation of plasma adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) and corticosterone, both indicators of stress. But when the guts of these mice are reconstituted with Bifidobacterium infantis early on, their exaggerated stress response disappears. If improving their unhealthy microbial balance is delayed to a later stage in development, brain problems remain.19
Our health improves when we have more Lactobacillus and Bifidobacteria in our bodies, two classes of bacteria most sensitive to glyphosate.21
Our bodies make specialized enzymes that help digest our food. Glyphosate can infiltrate these digestive enzymes. So another cause of high pH following chronic glyphosate exposure is glyphosate infiltration into digestive enzymes.
Glyphosate may be disrupting the ability of trypsin and pepsin to digest proteins, as well as the ability of lipase to digest fats. With impairments in trypsin and pepsin, undigested proteins can make their way into the colon, where they are broken down by the gut microbiome, releasing ammonia.24
The surface of the gastrointestinal tract is made up of a single layer of tightly interconnected epithelial cells.
In 2021 scientists revealed that B. infantis strains with a complete capacity to metabolize milk oligosaccharides are now exceptionally rare in the guts of infants in the United States.29 In 1913, the infant gut was an “almost pure culture” of Bifidobacterium.30 Today, studies have found that the microbial mix in the infant gut is much more diverse and that infants excrete undigested human milk oligosaccharides in their feces in large amounts.31 Prior to 1980, studies showed a fecal pH that was less than 5.5, whereas after 1980 the pH had a value greater than 5.5, with the highest values (up to 6.5) appearing after 2000. Scientists hypothesize that this pH change is due to a dramatic reduction in Bifidobacteria species in the human gut in recent decades. Glyphosate was introduced into the food chain in 1975, and genetically engineered Roundup Ready crops were introduced in the mid-1990s. Bifidobacteria are among the most sensitive to glyphosate
The increase in C-section deliveries, the increased use of antibiotics, as well as the increased practice of formula-feeding also contribute to the loss of Bifidobacteria.36 Humans are caught in a vicious cycle. Most infant formula is contaminated with glyphosate. Soy formula from Brazil was found to have levels of glyphosate up to 1,000 parts per billion.37 Exposure to glyphosate from soy formula reduces the presence of Bifidobacteria and interferes with the process by which these bacteria maintain a healthy gut pH and a healthy recycling of mucins lining the gut barrier, as well as a steady supply of acetate to fuel the mitochondrial production of energy in the form of adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Many proteins rely on the last phosphate in ATP to generate usable energy to support enzymatic reactions, muscle contraction, ion transport, and other activities. Feeding soy formula to an infant is a triple whammy: The soy itself is an endocrine disruptor, the formula does not contain breast milk’s rich glycoproteins that maintain healthy mucins and support the growth of B. infantis, and the glyphosate in the soy disrupts the microbiome, further weakening its protective barrier.
the infection-causing bacteria Pseudomonas is among the very few known species that can fully metabolize glyphosate. This could be a factor in Pseudomonas aeruginosa’s emergence as a major problem in hospitals.40 On the other hand, a microbe that can metabolize glyphosate may well benefit its host by clearing glyphosate from the body. We simply don’t know. We don’t understand enough about the implications of tinkering with biological systems in this way.
Glyphosate is an antibiotic. It was patented by Monsanto in 2010 for use as an antibiotic to control microbial infections. When we are chronically exposed to glyphosate in our food and water, it is like taking low doses of antibiotics over an extended period of time.
Mice given antibiotics have a worse outcome when infected with the influenza virus. However, and this is significant, a fecal transplant from a mouse that has not been exposed to antibiotics restores gut health and increases lung resilience against the flu
This finding aligns with the study mentioned earlier that showed that Bacteroides fragilis protects the host from viral infections.
What does this mean? Chronic exposure to glyphosate, an antibiotic, may make humans more susceptible to the flu and other respiratory infections, including COVID-19.
A low pH of 5.5 favors butyrate production, which was fourfold higher at pH 5.5 than at pH 6.5.48 Glyphosate, by increasing the gut’s pH, reduces butyrate.
My notes: Gamma-Aminobutyric acid, or GABA, is the chief inhibitory neurotransmitter in the developmentally mature mammalian central nervous system. Its principal role is reducing neuronal excitability throughout the nervous system. GABA is sold as a dietary supplement in many countries.
Inflammatory bowel disease is one of the diseases rising in prevalence in the United States, in lockstep with the rise in glyphosate usage on core crops.
My notes: What’s the common denominator between, industrial grains, sugar and seed oil? Glyphosate residue from MonsantoRoundUp.
Glyphosate is never seen as the main cause of digestive disorders. Instead, doctors tell their patients that their disease is of “unknown origin.” But even if the proximate origin is a mystery, the underlying origin seems quite clear: In the war on weeds, our gut microbes are collateral damage.
In 1989, constipation affected 2 percent of the US population.56 Today, estimates range from 9 percent to 20 percent.57 The number of hospital emergency room visits for constipation rose 42 percent over just five years.58
Low butyrate starves the colonic mucosal cells, allowing toxic metabolites produced by bacteria and fungi to breach the leaky gut barrier and enter the general circulation.
Glyphosate is hurting our guts, preferentially killing the species of bacteria that we need the most. These are the microorganisms that help us with everything from digesting food to synthesizing chemicals that affect learning, memory, and mood. When glyphosate annihilates commensal bacteria, pathogenic bacteria and pathogenic fungi thrive.
glyphosate in agriculture, particularly cereal crops, has increased significantly in Finland since 1999.
While Finnish children eat glyphosate-contaminated foods, Russian president Vladimir Putin has been enthusiastic about turning Russia into the organic food capital of the world.71 Since 2015, Russia has refused to plant GMO crops, and since June of 2016 there has been a near total ban on the use of genetically modified plants in Russian agriculture. It is also illegal to import genetically modified food from abroad. With rich soil that hasn’t been ruined by industrial chemicals, Russia has resisted an agrochemical approach to food production. With less exposure to glyphosate in their food, water, and clothing, is it any wonder the children in Russian Karelia are healthier than their Finnish counterparts?
https://doi.org/10.1111/wre.12004.
4 - Amino Acid Analogue
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened. —WINSTON CHURCHILL
Researchers have tested over a thousand other molecules that appear to be similar to glyphosate in shape and biophysical properties, but none come close to suppressing EPSP synthase in the shikimate pathway as well as glyphosate.2 Why did these other chemicals fail? I suspect it is because they are not analogues of the amino acid glycine. As I’ll show you, glyphosate can potentially replace glycine in many crucial proteins and shut down their function, and this is what, in my opinion, accounts to a large degree for why glyphosate exposure is contributing to the rise in many diverse diseases.
Proteins can also be hormones or signaling molecules themselves, such as insulin, which induces glucose uptake by the cells; and enkephalin, a natural endogenous opioid.
My hypothesis is that, because glyphosate is disrupting protein function by swapping in for glycine at critical places, it is creating stress in the region around those specific susceptible glycine residues, causing an increased mutation rate at those spots.
“directed evolution,” whereby a living organism is able to recognize where environmental stressors are causing the most damage, and then tweaks those sections of the genome to try to find a solution.
If glyphosate continues to be a part of our environment, “successful” organisms will be those that acquire mutations within their genomes that lose vulnerable glycine residues and produce proteins that can still function properly.
Glufosinate is a naturally occurring amino acid analogue of glutamate. It is increasingly used as an herbicide in agriculture due to the appearance of glyphosate-resistant weeds.9
Chemical companies can use CRISPR technology to create designer variants of the plant’s original EPSP synthase in order to produce patentable glyphosate-resistant seeds that will not be considered GMO crops by regulators (because there was no insertion of a gene from a foreign species into the plant’s genome). Unless we do something to prevent this, we can expect to see even more glyphosate used on our food crops in the future.
In 1989, Monsanto researchers exposed bluegill sunfish to glyphosate and then used carbon radiolabeling to identify how much was present in the animals’ tissues. At first, only 17 to 20 percent of the radiolabel could be identified as glyphosate. After the researchers used a digestive enzyme to break down the proteins into amino acids, 70 percent of the radiolabel could be tagged as glyphosate. The researchers concluded that the glyphosate was initially hidden because it “was tightly associated with or incorporated into protein”24 [emphasis added].
W. P. Ridley and K. A. Chott, “Uptake, Depuration and Bioconcentration of C-14 Glyphosate to Bluegill Sunfish (Lepomis machrochirus) Part II: Characterization and Quantitation of Glyphosate and Its Metabolites,” Monsanto Agricultural Company (unpublished study), August 1989.
This conclusion should send a chill down your spine. The glyphosate had been taken into the tissue of the bluegill and become part of it. The implication is that glyphosate becomes part of the tissues of all the species of animals and plants that are exposed to it. Although the incriminating results of this research was never made available to the public, my colleague, Anthony Samsel, obtained a copy of the unpublished study from the Environmental Protection Agency via a Freedom of Information Act request. 25
Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Seneff, “Glyphosate Pathways to Modern Diseases VI: Prions, Amyloidoses and Autoimmune Neurological Diseases,” Journal of Biological Physics and Chemistry 17 (2017): 8–32, https://doi.org/10.4024/25SA16A.jbpc.17.01.
Glyphosate wasn’t a free molecule circulating in the tissue. It was an integral part of “Frankenstein” proteins that had replaced the animals’ own.
At least 5 million Americans currently have Alzheimer’s and an estimated 14 million Americans are projected to have the disease by 2060.37
K. A. Matthews et al., “Racial and Ethnic Estimates of Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias in the United States (2015–2060) in Adults Aged ≥ 65 Years,” Alzheimer’s & Dementia 15, no. 1 (2019): 17–24, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jalz.2018.06.3063external icon.
It is not a coincidence that the prevalence of chronic diseases such as Alzheimer’s have been rising in step with exposure to glyphosate. While we can’t blame every aspect of an illness on this pernicious chemical, we can surmise that it is contributing to the downturn in human health by disrupting our proteins. Dozens, if not hundreds, of proteins may be severely disrupted by glyphosate substitution for glycine. Many receptors depend upon glycine residues to attach to the cell membrane and receive a signaling molecule, such as insulin or low-density lipoprotein (LDL), which delivers fat molecules to the cells.40
glyphosate disrupts the shikimate pathway by substituting for glycine and disrupting or even destroying hijacked proteins, we have a model to understand how glyphosate can disrupt many other proteins by acting similarly as a biochemical imposter.
5 - The Phosphate Puzzle
The overwhelming and inappropriate immune response that sometimes occurs in patients suffering from an infectious disease like COVID-19 provides a good example. Signaling mechanisms in response to the coronavirus result in a phosphorylation cascade that ultimately causes immune cells to release signaling proteins called cytokines. A sudden and large release of cytokines is a cytokine storm—an out-of-control inflammatory response that can cause widespread tissue damage.
Cytokine storms are a consequence of immune deficiency, which, as we will see in chapter 10, can be caused or exacerbated by chronic glyphosate exposure.
In order to stay healthy, our cells need to have a balance between these free radicals and antioxidants. Oxidative stress happens when there are too many free radicals for the antioxidants to neutralize. Exposure to environmental pollution and radiation can contribute to oxidative stress. Oxidative stress, which has been linked to neurological problems in children and a host of other disorders, is associated with a decreased ratio of reduced glutathione versus oxidized glutathione, impaired catalase activity, mitochondrial dysfunction, damage to cell membrane fatty acids, and neuroexcitotoxicity.
A. Ghanizadeh et al., “Glutathione-Related Factors and Oxidative Stress in Autism, a Review,” Current Medicinal Chemistry 19, no. 23 (2012): 4000–5, https://doi.org/10.2174/092986712802002572.
Methylation is the attachment of a methyl group, CH3, to a molecule.
Methylation pathway impairment is commonly observed in children with autism. 33
S. Jill James et al., “Metabolic Biomarkers of Increased Oxidative Stress and Impaired Methylation Capacity in Children with Autism,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 80 (2004): 1611–17, https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcn/80.6.1611.
a central feature of autism is altered epigenetics due to disrupted methylation pathways. These pathways are modified in response to oxidative stress due to impaired antioxidant defenses. 34
Mostafa I. Waly, “Redox-Methylation Theory and Autism,” In The Comprehensive Guide to Autism, Patel et al. (eds.) (New York: Springer, January 2014).
6 - SULFATE: MIRACLE WORKER
This ability to essentially “breathe” sulfur compounds has long been thought to be one of the earliest stages in the transition from a non-biological to biological world.
—DAVID WACEY, PhD
When life began on our planet there was very little oxygen in the atmosphere. On early Earth, hydrogen sulfide gas from deep-sea vents and volcanic eruptions was abundant. Adenosine triphosphate, the energy currency of life, was first made with sulfur rather than oxygen.1 Mitochondria can still oxidize hydrogen sulfide gas to make ATP using some of the same enzymes that metabolize glucose. As our cells’ powerhouses, the mitochondria will preferentially take up hydrogen sulfide gas in place of glucose if it’s present in the environment.
Steroid hormones are an important class of hormones that the body uses to maintain health. They include the stress hormone cortisol produced by the adrenal glands and the sex hormones produced by the adrenal glands, testes, ovaries, and placenta. Attaching a sulfate temporarily inactivates the hormone during transit and makes it more water soluble so it can easily travel through the bloodstream. In other words, sulfate is essential for distributing hormones throughout the body.
Cells in the skin produce cholesterol sulfate in response to sunlight, and this, too, circulates in the blood at relatively high concentrations. Vitamin D, which is actually a hormone, is derived from cholesterol, triggered by sunlight, and commonly sulfated in transit. Children with autism and other neurological disorders often have low serum cholesterol,6 low serum sulfate,7 and low serum vitamin D.8 This suggests that cholesterol, vitamin D, and sulfate are all important for brain health, and that sunlight exposure can help protect the brain. (It also suggests that slathering children in sunscreen may have unintended consequences that we are only beginning to appreciate.)
gut microbes produce the aromatic amino acids tryptophan, tyrosine, and phenylalanine in the shikimate pathway, which glyphosate disrupts. Tryptophan is a precursor to the neurotransmitters serotonin and melatonin. Phenylalanine and tyrosine are precursors to dopamine, adrenaline, and the skin’s tanning pigment melanin. Thyroid hormones that regulate metabolism are also derived from tyrosine. All of these hormones, as well as tryptophan itself, are commonly sulfated in transit.
Water science is dense and complex. One of its most important properties is the one that is least well understood. Beyond solid, liquid, and gas, water has what Gerald Pollack, PhD, a scientist in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Washington, calls a “fourth phase.” Also called gelled, structured, ordered, liquid crystalline, exclusion zone, or living water, the fourth phase of water is highly organized and electrically conductive, but not quite a solid. Think of the water in gelatin desserts. Water molecules are very small. The human body is over 98 percent water by molecule count but only 66 percent by mass. Most of the water in our bodies is in the fourth phase. Except for the water in our blood. The water in our blood needs to be fluid in order for our blood to flow smoothly through the blood vessels. Sulfate is essential for maintaining the fourth phase of water. When a water-soluble surface is populated with attached sulfate anions, the water adjacent to the surface actually organizes into a regular array of hexamer crystals. These six-branched crystals resemble the crystalline structure of ice, creating a firm gel instead of liquid water.
certain foods and spices, including coconut water, turmeric, and basil, increased the thickness of the barrier up to a certain concentration, suggesting that these foods may be good for protecting the integrity of the blood vessels. On the other hand, the glyphosate formulation Roundup, even at very low concentrations, decreased the thickness of the barrier.12 A thinner barrier can be more easily breached by toxic or highly reactive substances in the blood. A remarkable property of structured water is that it extrudes protons. The gel becomes negatively charged, creating a sort of battery that can supply electricity to the body.
[Taurine is] stored in particularly high concentrations in the heart, the liver, and the brain. This fact has posed a mystery to science. I believe that taurine’s most important role is as a stored form of sulfate, readily available in an emergency should sulfate levels become dangerously low.
I love biology. Sometimes it seems like a giant jigsaw puzzle. But jigsaw puzzles are static. The puzzle pieces stay where you put them. We need to remember that biological organisms are systems and that nothing in them works in isolation. Biology, then, is more like a three-dimensional interlocking gear puzzle.
Sulfate is arguably as important as oxygen. I’ve shown you how important sulfate is to our cells’ extracellular matrix, especially the endothelial glycocalyx, which lines the blood vessels. Sulfate’s ability to induce gelling of water also protects cells from attack by glycating agents (also known as sugars) and oxidizing agents (reactive oxygen species that are generated by defective enzymatic reactions).
My research has led me to conclude that glyphosate erodes the body’s ability to maintain adequate sulfate, mainly through its multiple effects on proteins susceptible to glycine substitution.
Systemic sulfate deficiency is a key factor in multiple modern diseases, including heart disease, neurological diseases, gut disorders, and autoimmunity.
7 - Liver Disease
Your liver may perform as many as five hundred functions, mostly related to metabolism, vitamin and hormone regulation, and detoxification.
The liver is also responsible for making sure your blood sugar doesn’t get too low. It responds rapidly by releasing sugar that is synthesized from nutrients such as lactate, proteins, and fats through a process called gluconeogenesis.
The liver also controls blood levels of certain vitamins and hormones. It activates vitamin D and metabolizes vitamin A, and also activates thyroid hormone by converting T4 to the active version T3. It’s also responsible for clearing T3 from the blood. The human liver is really a magnificent organ. It is the only organ in our bodies that is able to regenerate. When other organ tissue, like the heart, is damaged it is replaced by scars. Unlike every other organ in the body, when the liver is damaged it can be replaced with new liver cells.2 While prolonged exposure to liver toxins, the most famous of which is alcohol, can compromise the liver’s ability to regenerate itself, it is remarkably resilient.
glyphosate is markedly toxic to the liver, and that the liver is one of the first organs to be affected by glyphosate exposure.
We are exposed to many herbicides, insecticides, and environmental pollutants every day. Many people also take a wide range of prescription and over-the-counter medications, and many of these medications are known to be toxic to the liver. Nothing good comes of combining glyphosate with liver-damaging drugs.
Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), on the other hand, is a liver disease that is not caused by alcohol. It has become a global epidemic, and it is the most common cause of chronic liver problems worldwide.7 In the United States alone, an estimated 80 to 100 million Americans have been diagnosed with NAFLD. That’s equivalent to the entire population of Vietnam.
R. Loomba et al., “The Global NAFLD Epidemic,” Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology 10 (2013): 686–90; Michael Fuchs, “Managing the Silent Epidemic of Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease,” Federal Practitioner 36, no. 1 (2019): 12–13, https://doi.org/10.1038/nrgastro.2013.171.
Disturbances in liver function, like disturbances in the gut, can lead to disorders of the brain. When the liver can’t keep toxins out of the blood, the brain is subjected to more exposure.
feeding livestock glyphosate-contaminated genetically modified corn severely compromises their health. A postmortem examination of the livers of cows revealed “fat, large livers that were mottled and friable, or like sawdust inside.” After removing feed that had been sprayed with glyphosate the herd became much healthier.16
https://www.producer.com/livestock/glyphosate-on-feed-affects-livestock-vet/.
One of the most important molecules we need to stay healthy and disease-free is one that most people, even many health care professionals, have never heard of: glutathione. This molecule is a master of detoxification and a major antioxidant. I like to think of it as nature’s mop. Like a mop, glutathione combines with toxic molecules and ushers them out of the body. It also mops up free radicals that would otherwise damage tissues. Glutathione is almost universally found in living organisms. Bacteria, fungi, plants, animals, and humans all make use of it. Present in the liver in large amounts, glutathione is assembled from three amino acids: glutamate, cysteine, and glycine. Glutathione protects liver cells against oxidation damage. The liver, as it goes about its business of detoxifying fat-soluble toxins and toxic chemicals, needs lots of glutathione to keep it safe.
glyphosate could also get incorporated into glutathione, by substituting for the glycine residue it contains.
Plants consistently increase synthesis of glutathione in the presence of glyphosate, as do animals. But over time glutathione levels fall.
An explanation for this phenomenon is that glyphosate is substituting for the glycine in glutathione, preventing the glutathione from functioning properly. Glycine is the last amino acid in the tripeptide glutathione sequence. This would, theoretically, make it easy for glyphosate to substitute.
Glyphosate’s substitution for glycine in glutathione synthesis would kick off a futile cycle of synthesis and degradation.
We have also seen a sharp rise in chronic fatigue syndrome, a mysterious condition that baffles health care professionals. Chronic fatigue syndrome first emerged after glyphosate was introduced into the food chain. While experiments in laboratory animals produce clear and quantifiable effects, humans are admittedly more complicated. There are always a number of variables at play, so it’s difficult, if not impossible, to assert that Cause X produces Effect Y in humans. But a growing body of scientific literature shows that glyphosate is disrupting PEPCK in the skeletal muscles, causing impaired utilization of lipids as a fuel source and a reduction in their mitochondrial supply, leaving the muscles impaired in their ability to perform sufficient exercise and a general sense of physical exhaustion. Is it possible that we’re not so lazy after all, but that a combination of contaminated poor-quality food and overexposure to other persistent environmental poisons is what is making us fat and unhealthy? Is the slow kill, courtesy of glyphosate and other toxic chemicals, why so many of us feel so depleted so often?
The United States is the world’s largest producer of beef, supplying 20 percent of the world market
beef cattle spend only the first year of their short lives out in the open. After that, they are shipped to concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), where they are fed processed GMO Roundup Ready corn, supplemented with soybean meal, wheat middlings, barley, cottonseed, and sugar beets. These foods are often highly contaminated with glyphosate.
Ranchers feed the drug ractopamine to livestock to accelerate their growth.
At least 160 nations have banned the use of ractopamine, including Russia, China, Taiwan, and all the members of the European Union. Why? Because it acts as an adrenaline analogue. It can cause increased heart rate, tremors, headaches, muscle spasms, and high blood pressure.
Georges Bories et al., “Safety Evaluation of Ractopamine: Scientific Opinion of the Panel on Additives and Products or Substances used in Animal Feed,” The European Food Safety Authority Journal 1041 (2009): 1–52, https://doi.org/10.2527/animalsci2002.80E-Suppl_2E28x.
Without ractopamine, the meat from these glyphosate-exposed animals is likely to be fatty and unpalatable. But with it, it is likely to cause harm to humans who consume it.
Humans with liver disease have higher levels of glyphosate in their urine than those with healthy livers. Glyphosate at doses below regulatory limits caused fatty liver disease in rats, and fatty liver disease is an epidemic among humans today, even among young people.
8 - Reproduction and Early Development
We have no treatments for improving sperm production in infertile men, and we have no idea about what is the cause of the condition. —PROFESSOR RICHARD SHARPE, reproductive
endocrinologist, The University of Edinburgh If you’re young and trying not to reproduce, getting pregnant might feel easy. But many women today delay pregnancy while they develop a career, and then find it a challenge to conceive when they start trying in their 30s. Conception is actually quite difficult.
9 - NEUROLOGICAL DISORDERS
The scientific research is now abundantly clear: toxic chemicals are harming our children’s brain development. As a society, we can eliminate or significantly lower these toxic chemical exposures and address inadequate regulatory systems that have allowed their proliferation. These steps can, in turn, reduce high rates of neurodevelopmental disorders.
—IRVA HERTZ-PICCIOTTO, PhD, environmental epidemiologist
In 2018, a 66-year-old man attempted to commit suicide by drinking Roundup. In the hospital, he was treated for glyphosate toxicity. But his condition progressively worsened.
he was diagnosed with acute toxic limbic encephalitis, an acute inflammatory response in the brain.
Alzheimer’s and autism have much in common. The diagnosis of autism encompasses a spectrum of disorders, from mild brain differences that some celebrate as neurodiversity to severe and devastating neurological damage. A complex disorder, autism is characterized by impairments in social interactions, a restricted repertoire of interests, stereotyped repetitive activities, and decreased cognitive ability. Between a quarter and a half of children with autism are nonverbal. Many will never live independent lives. The average life expectancy of a person with autism is only 36 years old.5 Researchers at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio found that women with multiple chemical sensitivities have three times the risk of having a child with autism, as well as with other neurological disorders.6 Children of these moms are also more prone to allergies. Multiple chemical sensitivities usually reflect excessive lifetime exposure to toxic chemicals.7 Norwegian researcher Olav Christophersen identified the accelerated rate of autism in the modern world as a canary in a coal mine. In 2012, when the rates were significantly lower, Christophersen argued that autism may pave the way to human extinction through a storm of mutations in our DNA caused by environmental toxins.
Olav Albert Christophersen, “Should Autism Be Considered a Canary Bird Telling That Homo sapiens May Be on Its Way to Extinction?” Microbial Ecology in Health & Disease 23 (2012): 19008, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3747741/.
Harm to Our Neurotransmitters Free glutamate is the most abundant excitatory neurotransmitter in the vertebrate nervous system, accounting for over 90 percent of the synaptic connections in the brain. The hippocampus, which was so damaged in the man who drank Roundup, is especially rich in glutamate receptors. These receptors are essential for learning and memory. The hippocampus depends more on glutamate signaling than do other parts of the brain. https://doi.org/10.1196/annals.1300.006.
There is no question that glyphosate disrupts glutamate.
the increase in autism since the 1980s is not just the result of better diagnosis. Instead 75 to 80 percent of the increase is real.
Nevison conducted a statistical analysis of 10 environmentally toxic substances most closely linked to autism to see how closely exposure to these substances mapped onto rising rates of autism among America's children.
Her research revealed that lead, PCBs, organochlorine pesticides, car emissions, and air pollution all had flat or declining trends. That is, by 2014, when Nevison published this research, exposure had sharply decreased.
Nevison identified only three toxic exposures that correlated strongly with autism: aluminum, polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs, which are compounds used as flame retardants), and glyphosate.
These are likely culprits. Aluminum is neurotoxic. When injected into the body as an adjuvant in a vaccine, it is engulfed by macrophages that transport it to stressed tissues, including the brain. 10 As for PBDEs, they disrupt the endocrine system. The association between exposure to PBDEs and impaired neurodevelopment has been studied extensively.11 And then there's glyphosate. There is no question that glyphosate is contributing to the rise in autism,
Dr. Kanner described it as an illness with gastrointestinal disorders and dietary issues with behavioral manifestations.21
Examining pesticides and herbicides, including chlorpyrifos and glyphosate, researchers found that pregnant women living within 1.2 miles of spray areas were 30 percent more likely to have children with severe autism.
The highest odds ratio was found for children exposed to glyphosate during the first year of life.
How Glyphosate Harms the Brain
How could glyphosate be disrupting brain development? In several pernicious ways: by causing disruption in crucial enzymes; causing glutamate excitotoxicity; inducing yeast overgrowth; inducing gut dysbiosis; inducing cobalamin deficiency and sulfate deficiency; provoking imbalances in short chain fatty acids; provoking mitochondrial damage; and provoking thyroid hormone deficiency, to name a few.
The brain's limbic system is mainly concerned with emotions, memory, personality, appetite, social, and sexual behavior.
Glyphosate induces neurotoxicity in the hippocampus by overstimulating NMDA (N-methyl-D-aspartate) receptors. 26
Overstimulated NMDA receptors cause the cell to take up too much of the amino acid and neurotransmitter glutamate. Glutamate is an excitotoxin: It can cause neurons to fire at such a rapid rate that they become exhausted and damaged.
it's not just the glyphosate-induced gut dysbiosis that's harming the brain, inducing depression, and fomenting anxiety.
It's also that glyphosate likely damages the hippocampus directly through glutamate excitotoxicity.
I believe that heparan sulfate deficiency in the brain is a core component of autism and Alzheimer's disease.
Harm to Our Neurotransmitters
Free glutamate is the most abundant excitatory neurotransmitter in the vertebrate nervous system, accounting for over 90 percent of the synaptic connections in the brain. The hippocampus, which was so damaged in the man who drank Roundup, is especially rich in glutamate receptors.
These receptors are essential for learning and memory. The hippocampus depends more on glutamate signaling than do other parts of the brain. 34 There is no question that glyphosate disrupts glutamate.
In 2014, Italian researchers found that Roundup caused glutamate to become neurotoxic in the hippocampus of rat pups.
We've known since 2006 that children with autism have higher concentrations of glutamate in their brains compared to healthy controls.36 They also have excess glutamate in their blood. A study comparing the plasma of 23 boys with high-functioning autism with the plasma of 22 healthy controls found that the boys with autism had statistically significant higher levels of glutamate in their blood (and lower levels of glutamine).37
Glutamate Toxicity
To understand how glutamate can become neurotoxic, we need to understand how it operates in the brain. As a neurotransmitter, glutamate is a powerful stimulator
Katherine Reid, PhD, is a biochemist and the mother of a girl with autism. Dr. Reid saw improvements in her daughter's autistic symptoms when she put her on an organic diet and eliminated gluten and casein.
Katherine Reid realized that products made with gluten and casein are often high in glutamate. Most parents don't know that glutamate is a hidden ingredient in many processed foods. It's used as a flavor enhancer
in the form of monosodium glutamate (MSG).
MSG is so popular in Chinese cooking that it's even added to some brands of salt. It's harder to eliminate dietary glutamate than you might expect. Glutamate hides behind many disguised names on food product labels, including "hydrolyzed protein," "autolyzed plant protein," and "yeast extract." Reid started to eliminate glutamate from her child's diet. After she switched her family to an entirely whole food, real food diet and eliminated all processed foods, her daughter made a full recovery.
Excess glutamate is a known factor in several neurological disorders, including depression.43 Abnormally high levels of glutamate lead to excessive oxidative stress in the brain, causing neuronal damage, particularly in the hippocampus. Food additives that contain excitotoxins such as monosodium glutamate and aspartame are "the taste that kills," according to retired neurosurgeon Russell Blaylock, MD.44
B12 deficiency can cause a host of health problems, including developmental delays, failure to thrive, reduced IQ, seizures, behavioral issues, and defects in fine motor control and gross motor movement.
Untreated B12 deficiency in infancy can lead to permanent disability. Cobalamin is pathologically low in the brains of autistic children, the elderly, and in people suffering from schizophrenia.48 In fact, levels of two forms of cobalamin, methylcobalamin (which is essential for methylation) and adenosylcobalamin, are up to three times lower in people with impaired brain function. Glutathionylcobalamin is even more dramatically reduced.49 I find this fact particularly significant, as it suggests a glutathione deficiency is linked to brain disorders. Independently of cobalamin, low glutathione and impaired methylation are known features of autism.
There is no question that low vitamin B12 is a compounding factor in glutamate toxicity linked to autism.
To their credit, Sally Pacholok and her colleague, emergency medical doctor Jeffrey Stuart, were able in some cases to reverse dementia- and even cure it by treating patients with vitamin B12.
Glyphosate Hates the Love Hormone
Oxytocin is often called the love hormone because it makes people feel good. This short neuropeptide is involved in inducing labor at the end of pregnancy and milk ejection from the mammary glands during breastfeeding, as well as in regulating complex social behaviors. It is a member of an ancient class of peptides dating back 600 million years.62
The final step in the synthesis of oxytocin is to cleave off most of the terminal glycine residue through enzymatic action,
Glyphosate substitution for the terminal glycine likely disrupts this final step
Oxytocin deficiency impairs social interactions. Children with autism are generally deficient in oxytocin. Treating them with supplemental oxytocin can lead to improvements in social interaction.63 Could it be that their deficiency is due to glyphosate swapping in for the terminal glycine residue?
Glyphosate's disruption of the gut microbiome likely suppresses the supply of tyrosine, leading to insufficient thyroid hormone production.
Women with poorly functioning thyroids, whose bodies cannot make enough thyroid hormone, are nearly four times as likely to have a child with autism.67
One of the most insidious toxic exposures, affecting virtually everything we humans depend upon for maintenance of biological homeostasis-the food we eat, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the microbes that work so hard for us, the minerals we require, and even the critical proteins programmed by our DNA is glyphosate.
It's possible that in our increasingly toxic world, neurological dysfunction such as autism might increase even in the absence of glyphosate. But there is no question that the many ways in which glyphosate disrupts biological systems, especially the myriad ways it affects brain development, are contributing to the rapid accumulation of synergistic toxicities that we are witnessing.
10 - AUTOIMMUNITY
Modern medicine asks what and how: what conditions do you have, and how do we treat them? But we should be asking why this is the first critical step toward prevention. If we don't know why something happens, we can't hope to stop it.
WILLIAM PARKER, PhD, Duke University School of Medicine
(CDC) estimates that 90 percent of the nation's health care expenditures are for people with chronic and mental health conditions. The percentage of the population affected by autoimmune disease has been steadily rising in the United States. Today at least 41 million American are suffering from autoimmune disease.4 What is an autoimmune disorder? It's when the body gets confused and treats its own proteins and DNA as if they were foreign molecules, causing diverse symptoms.
elevated prevalence of autoimmune disease in teachers and students who attended a moisture-damaged school. This was attributed to chronic exposure to toxic mold. I propose that glyphosate, too, is playing a significant role in autoimmune disease. My hypothesis is that, when glyphosate substitutes for glycine, it leads to a defective protein that may not even be released from the cell that synthesized it. When the protein misfolds, the body's immune cells mistake it as a foreign protein and develop antibodies to attack even healthy versions of the protein.
it's sometimes hard to get the body to recognize vaccine ingredients as foreign. People with healthy innate immune systems may never produce antibodies in response to vaccines.
people with impaired innate immunity can respond too well to vaccines. Vaccination can produce an excessive antibody response that can later lead to autoimmune diseases, through a process called molecular mimicry. This can happen when antibodies produced by the specialized B cells get confused. They attack human tissue because there is a peptide sequence within a human protein that closely resembles a peptide sequence in the antigen associated with the disease.
If dying cells and their debris are not efficiently cleared by the immune system, autoimmune disease can develop. This is because dead cells can release allergenic material, such as their own DNA, that then causes adaptive immune cells to produce autoantibodies that then attack other cells.
Glyphosate induces leaky barriers; and glyphosate has been shown in multiple studies to excite NMDA receptors, both by acting as a glycine analogue and by suppressing the clearance of glutamate from the brain's synapses.28 With excessive NMDA excitation, calcium builds up internally and eventually causes catastrophic failure of the mitochondria.
Celiac disease, colitis, and other inflammatory bowel conditions are becoming global problems. 32
Celiac disease is a digestive disorder that causes damage to the villi in the small intestine. It's caused by autoantibodies that develop against peptides derived from gluten, which is found in barley, rye, and wheat. Although there is no Roundup Ready wheat on the market, wheat is often highly contaminated with glyphosate because farmers use it as a desiccant on wheat crops shortly before harvest. There is no question that celiac disease is far more prevalent today. Samples of blood serum collected between 1948 and 1954, compared to samples collected today, reveal at least a fourfold increase in antibodies against gluten since then.33 An even larger number of people suffer from gluten intolerance without an explicit celiac diagnosis.
[on covid] Many of the hardest hit countries, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, and South Africa, make heavy use of glyphosate. Diabetes, obesity, and hypertension, diseases that are prevalent in the industrialized nations, are well-established risk factors for mortality from COVID-19. [41]Glyphosate use in the United States is highly correlated with the rise in these conditions. [42] It is becoming clear that a major factor leading to severe disease is an overzealous response by the adaptive immune system, leading to increased antibody production and a cytokine storm.[43] This response can be expected because of glyphosate's severe disruption of the innate immune system, which would ordinarily play a critical role in clearing the virus. Finally, there is increasing awareness that patients who recover from COVID-19 may develop autoimmune disease consequently, due to overproduction of antibodies to viral proteins that attack the host through the mechanism of molecular mimicry.44 Few researchers are talking about glyphosate in the context of SARS-CoV-2. But they should be.
Sources:
Nancy L. Swanson et al., "Genetically Engineered Crops, Glyphosate and the Deterioration of Health in the United States of America," Journal of Organic
Systems 9 (2014): 6-37. Katarina Zimmer, "The Immune Hallmarks of Severe COVID-19,"September 16, 2020, https:// www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/the-immune-hallmarks-of-severe-covid-19-67937; Shintaro Hojyo et al., "How COVID-19 Induces Cytokine Storm with High Mortality," Inflammation and Regeneration 40 (2020):37, https://doi.org/10.1186/ S41232-020-00146-3.Mariam Ahmed Saad et al., "Covid-19 and Autoimmune Diseases: A Systematic Review of Reported Cases," Current Rheumatology Reviews 2020 Oct 29 [Epub ahead of print], https:/doi.org/10.2174/1573397116666201029155856.
It's not just that we may be "too clean," as the hygiene hypothesis suggests. It's also that we are overmedicated and overexposed to heavy metals and other cell-damaging toxins, such as those from mold. Both medical and animal doctors have pointed to the overuse of antibiotics and over-vaccination as probable triggers for autoimmune disorders. But glyphosate, through its disruption of the gut microbiome and its insertion in place of glycine in diverse proteins, impairing their folding and their function, is also a major culprit.
Once you understand the mechanisms by which glyphosate is causing damage to human (and microbial) health, you see how the presence of glyphosate in living tissues can exacerbate health conditions that may have initially been triggered by something else. Autoimmune diseases are like a fire that the body is struggling to get under control. Sometimes they seem to go out - you can go for weeks or even months or years without symptoms and then they flare up again, causing debilitating problems and pain. What stokes the fire of these relapsing and remitting diseases? The conventional answer is "we don't know." But we do. We know that the more often life on Earth is exposed to glyphosate, the worse it is for all of us.
11 - REBOOT TODAY FOR A HEALTHY TOMORROW
You're doing better than you think. Even your willingness to ask questions, and to read a book like this, is a step in the right direction. We are up against Goliath. Because the truth is that there are powerful forces at play that profit, enormously, from making people, including children, very sick.
Glyphosate is a global threat, and we cannot be satisfied until it is banned worldwide. The agrichemical industry's persistent deniability of harm is nothing short of criminal. Manufacturing plants where glyphosate is being synthesized need to be shut down. Research dollars need to be spent on projects that investigate how to get glyphosate out of drinking water, out of rivers and oceans, out of soil, and out of our bodies.
Sometimes the burden to the body is so great it results in infertility. Even when it doesn't, later generations can be harmed by exposures their parents or even their grandparents experienced when they themselves were young.
If you're like me, it's hard to fathom that entire industries, or even whole sectors of the economy, could be predicated on human sickness. It's simply hard to believe.
the pharmaceutical industry, and most of the medical establishment, make the bulk of their profits from treating symptoms of chronic illness. The pharmaceutical industry has experienced tremendous growth in the past 20 years; the research, production, and distribution of medication is so lucrative that it generates $1.25 trillion in revenue in a single year 2 Autoimmunity alone is a $108 billion industry.3 There is little incentive to identify and correct the root causes of chronic disease or empower people to keep from getting sick in the first place when there's so much profit to be made. Quite the opposite, in fact. The pharmaceutical industry thrives when America is unhealthy. Vibrant good health harms its bottom line.
we must focus on improving the soil and the nutritional value of food rather than just on yield. Small organic farmers are the superheroes of the twenty-first century, as are the health advocates, political activists, and lawyers who are fighting Bayer AG and other chemical companies and urging lawmakers to stop turning a blind eye.
We have the individual and the collective responsibility, as well as the power, to stop the worldwide use of glyphosate.
As the "sick care" sector serves its own ends to keep people chronically ill, many alternative medicine practitioners are finding new ways, or rediscovering ancient ways, to help people heal using foods, herbs, and other natural products instead of synthetic drugs that disrupt biological pathways.
The biochemistry of our bodies is marvelous and miraculous. Much of the damage caused by glyphosate and other chemicals is reversible.
Eat Real Food
The most important step you can take toward a long and healthy life is to eat wholesome, nutritious, real food.
Wherever you buy your food, do your best to have the bulk of your diet be whole real food instead of packaged food-like substances. Even when packaged products are labeled as organic and GMO-free, they still aren't necessarily healthy foods. Broken down into basic nutrients like sugar, flour, and oil, packaged organic food leaves out all the complex organic molecules and many of the micronutrients that offer many benefits to health,
The gift of lifelong good health is a marathon, not a sprint.
Garlic, which is a food you should be eating often, contains allicin, an organosulfur compound that gives garlic its unique odor and is associated with many health benefits.
Cruciferous vegetables contain sulforaphane, an unusual organic compound that contains two sulfur atoms. Broccoli sprouts contain a high concentration of sulforaphane.
Sulforaphane is produced only in the seed, so a single broccoli sprout contains as much sulforaphane as a full-grown plant. In 2009, a team of researchers in Italy found that sulforaphane leads to an increase in glutathione in neurons, protects them from oxidative stress, and reduces indicators of apoptosis.5 Parkinson's disease is associated with the loss of dopaminergic neurons. Sulforaphane seems to help safeguard these neurons. Indeed, a more recent study on humans suffering from schizophrenia confirmed that people with schizophrenia have low levels of glutathione in the brain. This study also found that supplements with sulforaphane increased brain glutathione.
If you soak in a tub of Epsom salt (magnesium sulfate), you absorb sulfate through your skin. Even better is to bathe in natural hot sulfur springs. Absorbing sulfate through the skin bypasses the complexities of sulfur metabolism in the gut, which can be especially problematic in the presence of chronic glyphosate exposure.
Glutathione and vitamin C are important antioxidants in both the liver and the blood, as well as other parts of the body. As you know, glyphosate disrupts the supply of glutathione in the liver, as does acetaminophen.
Glutathione is found naturally in some foods. Asparagus, avocados, okra, and spinach are some of the richest dietary sources. But you can also boost your glutathione levels by eating foods that are rich in sulfur-containing amino acids, such as taurine, cysteine, and methionine.
Good options include nuts and seeds, as well as beef, cheese, chicken, duck, eggs, fish, pork
Eating foods that are rich in vitamin C will reduce your need for glutathione, because vitamin C is also an effective antioxidant. Many fruits, particularly grapefruit, lemons, limes, and oranges, are rich in vitamin C.
Vegetable sources are, too. Broccoli, Brussels sprouts, and kale, as well as herbs and spices such as parsley and thyme, are surprisingly rich in vitamin C.
A plant-based diet reduces your ability to get adequate amounts of sulfur-containing amino acids. Just as worrisome, cobalamin is completely absent in a plant-based diet. And there is no taurine in a plant-based diet unless you enjoy the edible seaweed
I encourage you to eat plants, lots and lots of plants, I don't think a strictly vegan diet promotes health, well-being, or longevity in most humans.
Factory-farmed cows confined to small pens are fed predominantly GMO Roundup Ready corn and soy products. These animals suffer for their entire lives. They're then herded through a chute to be weighed, put into holding pens, and taken to a kill floor. A cow that's frightened before it is butchered has so many stress hormones in its bloodstream that it can affect the taste and the color of the meat. And, as I mentioned in chapter 7, American cattle farmers frequently administer ractopamine, which is so dangerous it's been banned by more than 160 nations, to their farm animals to keep the meat lean. Factory farming is not beneficial to our health or our planet's ecosystem.
Humans are unable to digest grass, so any beef derived from grass-fed cows is a way for humans to indirectly convert grass into a food source.
Grazing cows have a much better life than factory-farmed cows.
The vegan equivalent of a hamburger is not a healthy or sustainable option compared to hamburgers made from natural grass-fed beef.17 One brand of vegan burgers, the Impossible Burger, is made by growing genetically modified yeast, which has been engineered to produce a soy-based vegetarian heme product called soy leghemoglobin. This is not something humans have evolved to eat. The engineered molecule is added to soy in order to produce a vegan burger with a meaty taste. But soy monocropping using chemical-based agriculture is not good for the planet. Despite the hype, major advertising, and a state-of-the-art interactive website, eating an Impossible Burger is not superior, ecologically, to eating a grass-fed beef burger.
best to avoid Frankenfood like this.
While both the Impossible Beef burger and the Beyond Meat burger contain glyphosate, the watchdog organization Moms Across America found 11 times as much glyphosate, which is made with Roundup Ready soy, in the Impossible Beef burger.
The Importance of Sunshine
People who live in places with little sun have a higher risk of many chronic conditions, including multiple sclerosis, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, autism, Alzheimer's disease, and age-related macular degeneration.20 When a team of Swedish scientists analyzed the behavior of nearly 30,000 women in Sweden, following them for almost two decades, they found that the women who lived longer and had fewer heart problems were the ones who spent more, not less, time in the sun. Those who actively avoided the sun had a twofold higher mortality rate compared to those who actively sought sunlight exposure.21
get out in the sunlight every day for at least a half hour, even more if you have dark skin, without sunscreen or sunglasses.
Humans evolved in a world where the sun was always available, and biology never ignores a chance to capitalize on an energy source. The skin is essentially a solar-powered battery.
Sunlight is translated to energy by the extraordinary physical properties of water. Infrared light grows exclusion zone water by at least fourfold. 22
UV light energizes water molecules to mobilize protons and electrons.
The electrons induce the production of superoxide from oxygen. Sulfur is oxidized by superoxide to produce sulfate
Vitamin D is a signaling molecule. When you get it from the sun, you also get a boost in cholesterol sulfate. If you take vitamin D in supplement form, you don't get the concomitant increase in cholesterol sulfate. So the vitamin D essentially signals with a false message, causing cells to respond inappropriately, which may negate some of the potential benefit.
Malignant melanoma is a lethal form of skin cancer. Over the past 50 years, incidence of melanoma has risen faster than that of almost any other cancer.26 Melanoma accounts for the majority of deaths from skin cancer. Over this same time period, the use of sunscreen has skyrocketed.
The main justification for the widespread use of sunscreen is to protect us from skin cancer. Yet increasing usage correlates strongly with increasing rates of the deadliest form of skin cancer.
Zinc oxide (ZnO) nanoparticles are commonly found in sunscreens. They work by helping to block UV rays. But ZnO is cytotoxic to human cells grown in culture, even in the absence of sunlight exposure.27
When Dr. Exley investigated aluminum-containing sunscreens he found that their use could result in about 200 mg of aluminum on the skin with each application.29 WHO recommends reapplication of sunscreen every 2 hours, which means a day at the beach could result in as much as a gram of aluminum applied to the skin.
Aluminum readily penetrates the skin barrier and is absorbed into the bloodstream. It is synergistically toxic with glyphosate. Both aluminum and glyphosate contribute to blocking synthesis of sulfate.
Aggressive sunscreen use may be one reason for the epidemic of systemic sulfate deficiency.
Play in the Dirt
Playing in the dirt enhances well-being, both for children and grown-ups. In the cultures around the world where people live hardy, healthy lives well into old age, nearly everyone has a garden. Growing your own food, coaxing flowers into bloom, and touching the soil are all healthful activities.
Both the soil microbiome and the gut microbiome have deteriorated in recent times, due to industrial-based agriculture and reduced human contact with healthy soil.
Studies have shown that grounding, or earthing, can alleviate symptoms of chronic stress, inflammation, sleep disturbance, cardiovascular disease, and hypercoagulation of the blood. 31
The earth is a giant negatively charged ball, and when you walk barefoot on the ground, electrons move freely into your body. Especially effective is to walk barefoot in the shallow water of a sandy beach on a sunny day. The ocean air is rich in sulfur, and the water provides excellent conductance to enhance the effects of grounding.
There's a reason you feel calmer, more peaceful, and more alert at the beach.
Soil is an inoculant that provides a renewal of beneficial microbes.
nonnatural frequency disturbances may interfere with sleep. It's best to turn off the internet access in your phone, tablet, or computer at night.
We don't think of ourselves this way, but we humans are electric.
There are thousands of biochemical reactions normally occurring in our
EMF
bodies every second. Our neurons relay signals via electric impulses, our hearts are electrically active, and our digestion is based on biochemical reactions via the rearrangement of charged particles.
over 25 years of research, Pall has demonstrated that overexposure to EMFs can harm the nervous system, the endocrine system, and even our DNA. Pall's research shows that electromagnetic fields activate voltage-gated calcium channels and induce calcium uptake into neurons, leading to neurotoxicity.
Martin L. Pall, "Electromagnetic Fields Act via Activation of Voltage-Gated Calcium Channels to Produce Beneficial or Adverse Effects," Journal of Cellular and Molecular Medicine 17, no. 8 (2013): 958-65, https://doi.org/10.1111/ jcmm. 12088.
put your phone in Airplane mode before going to bed. Have your children dock their electronics outside of their bedrooms. Unplug appliances when they are not in use. The microwave oven in your kitchen is also a source of EMFs, so quickly walk away after you turn it on.
Glyphosate needs to be banned. We need a global commitment to regenerative farming practices. And we need to attend to and nurture the land, ecosystems, and organisms that have been harmed by our shortsighted and greedy practices.
the best way to cure any disease is to prevent it in the first place. Of course, it would be better if you had been eating organic your whole life, growing food in your own garden, and staying away from packaged junk food. Of course, it would be better if you had never been exposed to DDT, glyphosate, lead, aluminum, or other toxic chemicals.
But if you've spent your whole life eating conventionally and ignoring your health, don't despair. Our bodies, like the Earth, tend toward healing when we support them. It's never too late to start anew.
Appendix
Weston A. Price Foundation (www.westonaprice.org): A nonprofit organization that promotes eating traditional, nutrient-dense foods.
The Institute for Functional Medicine (www.ifm.org): Functional medicine addresses the root causes of diseases; and functional medical practitioners seek to heal the whole person, not just prescribe a certain medicine for a specific illness.
Sustainable Agriculture Conference (www.carolinafarmstewards.org/sac): A farmer-driven membership-based nonprofit that has hosted an annual conference for over 35 years.
Moms Across America (www.momsacrossamerica.com): An activist organization founded by Zen Honeycutt, a mother of three, to educate and empower moms about healthy eating and healthy communities.
EcoFarm Conference (eco-farm.org): An annual conference sponsored by EcoFarm, an ecological farming association whose mission is to nurture safe, healthy, just, and ecologically sustainable food systems.
Toxic-Free Future (toxicfreefuture.org): This science-forward nonprofit champions using safer products, chemicals, and practices in order to better the health of humans and the planet.
AutismOne (www.autismone.org): This parent-centered nonprofit gives support to families affected by autism. Their annual conference includes medical doctors, researchers, and health practitioners on the cutting edge of treatment for the prevention of and recovery from autism. [which is actually environmental poisoning, epigenetic changes, microbiome dysbiosis, immune, endocrine and metabolic malfunction, vitamin and mineral deficiencies and toxicity overload]
NutriGenic Research Institute
(www.nutrigeneticresearch.org): An institute that researches nutrition and studies how the environment interfaces with epigenetics, as well as what role epigenetic factors play in human health.