ROUNDUP
Monsanto’s Roundup Herbicide May
Be Most Important Factor in Development of Autism and Other Chronic Disease
Stes de Necker
Article written by Dr.
Mercola
In recent weeks, we've learned some very
disturbing truths about glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto's
broad-spectrum herbicide Roundup, which is generously doused on genetically
engineered (GE) Roundup Ready crops.
GE crops are typically far more contaminated
with glyphosate than conventional crops, courtesy of the fact that they're
engineered to withstand extremely high levels of Roundup without perishing
along with the weed.
A new peer-reviewed report authored by
Anthony Samsel, a retired science consultant, and a long time contributor to
the Mercola.com Vital Votes Forum, and Dr. Stephanie Seneff, a research
scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), reveals how
glyphosate wrecks human health.
Dr. Seneff summarizes
the two key problems caused by glyphosate in the diet:
Nutritional deficiencies
Systemic toxicity
Their findings make the need for labeling
all the more urgent, and the advice to buy certified organic all the more
valid.
The Horrific Truth about Roundup
In 2009, a French court found Monsanto guilty of lying; falsely advertising its Roundup herbicide as "biodegradable,"
"environmentally friendly" and claiming it "left the soil
clean."
Mounting evidence now tells us just how false
such statements are. Monsanto has not been labeled as the most evil
companies on the planet for nothing. The company has done absolutely nothing to
improve their worldwide influence on human and environmental health. What they've come up with is a way
of pretending that they're beneficial to the
food and agriculture industry, and now it turns out that what they have is
very, very dangerous.
According
to Dr. Seneff, glyphosate is possibly "the most important factor in the
development of multiple chronic diseases and conditions that have become
prevalent in Westernized societies," including but not limited to:
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Autism
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Gastrointestinal diseases such as inflammatory bowel
disease, chronic diarrhea, colitis and Crohn's disease
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Obesity
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Cancer
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Infertility
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Alzheimer's disease
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Allergies
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Cardiovascular disease
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Depression
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Parkinson's disease
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Multiple sclerosis
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ALS, and more
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How
Glyphosate Worsens Modern Diseases
While Monsanto insists that Roundup is as
safe to humans as aspirin, Seneff and Samsel's research tells a different story
altogether. Their report, published in the journal Entropy1, argues that glyphosate residues, found
in most commonly consumed foods in the Western diet courtesy of GE sugar, corn,
soy and wheat, "enhance the damaging effects of other food-borne chemical
residues and toxins in the environment to disrupt normal body functions and
induce disease."
Interestingly, your gut bacteria are a key
component of glyphosate's mechanism of harm.
Monsanto has steadfastly claimed that Roundup
is harmless to animals and humans because the mechanism of action it uses
(which allows it to kill weeds), called the shikimate pathway, is absent in all
animals. However, the shikimate pathway IS present in bacteria, and that's the
key to understanding how it causes such widespread systemic harm in both humans
and animals.
The bacteria in your body outnumber your
cells by 10 to 1. For every cell in your body, you have 10 microbes of various
kinds, and all of them have the shikimate pathway, so they will all respond
to the presence of glyphosate!
Glyphosate causes extreme disruption of the
microbe's function and lifecycle. What's worse, glyphosate preferentially affects beneficial bacteria,
allowing pathogens to overgrow and take over.
At that point, your body also has
to contend with the toxins produced by the pathogens. Once the chronic
inflammation sets in, you're well on your way toward chronic and potentially
debilitating disease. In the interview above, Dr. Seneff reviews a variety of
chronic diseases, explaining how glyphosate contributes to each condition.
The
Overlooked Component of Toxicity
The research reveals that glyphosate inhibits
cytochrome P450 (CYP) enzymes, a large and diverse group of enzymes that
catalyze the oxidation of organic substances. This, the authors state, is
"an overlooked component of its toxicity to mammals." One of the
functions of CYP enzymes is to detoxify xenobiotics—chemical compounds found in
a living organism that are not normally produced or consumed by the organism in
question. By limiting the ability of these enzymes to detoxify foreign chemical
compounds, glyphosate enhances the
damaging effects of chemicals and environmental toxins you may be exposed to.
But that's not all. Dr. Stephanie Seneff has
been conducting research at MIT for over three decades.
She also has an
undergraduate degree in biology from MIT and a minor in food and nutrition.
"[W]e show how interference with CYP
enzymes acts synergistically with disruption of the biosynthesis of aromatic
amino acids by gut bacteria, as well as impairment in serum sulfate
transport,"
"Consequences are most of the diseases
and conditions associated with a Western diet, which include gastrointestinal
disorders, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression, autism, infertility,
cancer and Alzheimer's disease. ... [T]he recent alarming increase in all
of these health issues can be traced back to a combination of gut dysbiosis,
impaired sulfate transport, and suppression of the activity of the various
members of the cytochrome P450 (CYP) family of enzymes."
The
Roundup-Autism Connection
For the past 30 years, Dr. Seneff has been
passionate about teasing out potential causes of autism, after seeing what it
was like for a close friend whose son was diagnosed. She points out the clear
correlations between increased glyphosate use over recent years (the result of
genetically engineered crops causing weed resistance, necessitating ever-larger
amounts to be used) and skyrocketing autism rates.
The rate of autism has risen so quickly,
there can be no doubt that it has an environmental cause.
Our genes simply cannot mutate fast enough to
account for the rapid rise we're now seeing.
The latest statistics released by the CDC on
March 20 show that 1 in 50 children in the US now fall within the autism
spectrum2,3, with a 5:1 boy to girl ratio.
Just
last year the CDC reported a rate of 1 in 88, which represented a 23 percent increase since 2010,
and 78 percent since 2007. Meanwhile, I remember when the incidence of autism
in the US was only 1 in 10,000—just short of 30 years ago!
Dr. Seneff identified two key problems in
autism that are unrelated to the brain yet clearly associated with the condition—both
of which are linked with glyphosate exposure.
Gut dysbiosis (imbalances in gut bacteria,
inflammation, leaky gut, food allergies such as gluten intolerance)
Disrupted
sulfur metabolism / sulfur and sulfate deficiency
Interestingly, certain microbes in your body
actually break down glyphosate, which is a good thing.
However, a byproduct of this action is ammonia,
and children with autism tend to have significantly higher levels of ammonia in
their blood than the general population. Ditto for those with Alzheimer's
disease. In your brain, ammonia causes encephalitis, i.e. brain inflammation.
Another devastating agent you really do not
want in your body is formaldehyde, which a recent nutritional analysis
discovered is present in genetically engineered corn at a level that is 200
times the amount that animal studies have determined to be toxic to
animals. Formaldehyde destroys DNA and can cause cancer.
Other research backing up the Roundup-autism
link is that from former US Navy staff scientist Dr. Nancy Swanson. She has a
Ph.D. in physics, holds five US patents and has authored more than 30
scientific papers and two books on women in science. Ten years ago, she became
seriously ill, and in her journey to regain her health she turned to organic
foods. Not surprisingly (for those in the know) her symptoms dramatically
improved. This prompted her to start investigating genetically engineered
foods.
She has meticulously collected statistics on
glyphosate usage and various diseases and conditions, including autism. A more
perfect match-up between the rise in glyphosate usage and incidence of autism
is hard to imagine... To access her published articles and reports, anyone can visit
her Website, Sustainable
Pulse4, a European website dedicated to exposing
the hazards of genetically engineered foods.
When
Food Is Poison
What the biotech industry, spearheaded by
Monsanto, has managed to do is turn food into poison... quite literally, and in
more ways than one. Here, we're just talking about the effects of Roundup.
There
are plenty of indications that the genetic alteration of a crop itself can pose
significant health concerns. So with the vast majority of GE crops, you have no
less than two potentially hazardous factors to contend with, glyphosate
toxicity being just one part of the equation.
As discussed above, glyphosate has a number
of devastating biological effects. So much so that it may very well be one of the most important factors
in the development of a wide variety of modern diseases and conditions,
including autism. In summary, these detrimental effects include:
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Nutritional deficiencies, as glyphosate immobilizes certain
nutrients and alters the nutritional composition of the treated crop
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Disruption of the biosynthesis of aromatic amino acids
(these are essential amino acids not produced in your body that must be
supplied via your diet)
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Increased toxin exposure (this includes high levels of
glyphosate and formaldehyde in the food itself)
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Impairment of sulfate transport and sulfur metabolism;
sulfate deficiency
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Systemic toxicity—a side effect of extreme disruption
of microbial function throughout your body; beneficial microbes in
particular, allowing for overgrowth of pathogens
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Gut dysbiosis (imbalances in gut bacteria,
inflammation, leaky gut, food allergies such as gluten intolerance)
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Enhancement of damaging effects of other food-borne
chemical residues and environmental toxins as a result of glyphosate shutting
down the function of detoxifying enzymes
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Creation of ammonia (a byproduct created when certain
microbes break down glyphosate), which can lead to brain inflammation
associated with autism and Alzheimer's disease
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How
to Protect Yourself and Your Family from This Systemic Poison
It's important to understand that the
glyphosate sprayed on conventional and genetically engineered crops actually
becomes systemic throughout the plant, so it cannot be washed off. It's inside the
plant. For example, genetically engineered corn has been found to contain 13
ppm of glyphosate, compared to zero in non-GMO corn.
At 13 ppm, GMO corn contains
more than 18 times the "safe" level of glyphosate set by
the EPA. Organ damage in animals has occurred at levels as low as 0.1 ppm.
If that's not reason enough to become a label reader to avoid anything with
corn in it, such as corn oil or high fructose corn syrup, I don't know what
is.
You'd also be wise to stop using Roundup
around your home, where children and pets can come into contact with it simply
by walking across the area.
Until the US requires genetically engineered
(GE) foods to be labelled,
the only way you can avoid GE ingredients is to make whole, fresh organic foods
the bulk of your diet, and to only buy 100% USDA certified organic processed foods. Meats need
to be grass-fed or pastured to make sure the animals were not fed GE corn or
soy feed.
Last but not least, do not confuse the "natural" label with organic standards.
The natural label is not based on
any standards and is frequently misused by sellers of GE products.
Growers and
manufacturers of organic products bearing the USDA seal, on the other hand,
have to meet the strictest standards of any of the currently available organic
labels. In order to qualify as organic, a product must be grown and processed
using organic farming methods that recycle resources and promote biodiversity.
Crops must be grown without synthetic pesticides, bioengineered genes,
petroleum-based fertilizers, or sewage sludge-based fertilizers.
What
Are GMOs?
GMOs are a product of genetic engineering,
meaning their genetic makeup has been altered to induce a variety of “unique”
traits to crops, such as making them drought-resistant or giving them “more
nutrients.” GMO proponents claim that genetic engineering is “safe and
beneficial,” and that it advances the agricultural industry. Some scientists claim that
GMOs help ensure the global food supply and sustainability.
Genetic
engineering is NOT the safe and beneficial technology that it is touted to be.
The Grocery Manufacturers Association
(GMA)—Monsanto’s Evil Twin—is pulling out all the stops to keep everyone in
the dark about what’s in your food. For nearly two decades, Monsanto and
corporate agribusiness have exercised near-dictatorial control over American
agriculture.
For example, Monsanto has made many claims that glyphosate in
Roundup is harmless to animals and humans. However, recently the World Health
Organization (WHO) had their research team test glyphosate and have labeled it
a probable carcinogen.
Public opinion around the biotech industry's
contamination of our food supply and destruction of our environment has reached
a tipping
point.
