How the Weedkiller Glyphosate is Destroying Our Health
by Stephanie Seneff | Jun 11, 2021 | Glyphosate, Health Research
Introduction
The most common herbicide in the world, glyphosate is destroying our health. The United States has been using glyphosate in agriculture since 1974, and it is also popular as the formulation Roundup to control weeds in residential maintenance of lawns. Starting in the late 1990s, a breakthrough technology involving genetically modified crops allowed glyphosate to be sprayed indiscriminately on the crop without killing it. Glyphosate is considered to be a great boon to agriculture because it kills all plants except those that have been engineered to resist it, yet it is “practically harmless” to humans or to animals in general.
However, in recent years this rosy picture is beginning to unravel, and glyphosate is destroying our health. We had been assured that glyphosate affects a biological pathway in plants (the shikimate pathway) that does not exist in human cells, and therefore the chemical is very safe. However, our gut microbes do have this pathway, and they use it to make essential nutrients for the host that our cells can’t make. For many decades, toxicologists had not thought to study glyphosate at low exposure levels, assuming that the results would be negative. However, a seminal study by Prof. Séralini et al., published in 2012, revealed that exposure to low-dose glyphosate over the entire lifespan led to many toxic effects in rats, including massive mammary tumors in the females, liver and kidney damage in the males, and reproductive issues in both genders [1]. This study was retracted without justification under pressure from the industry but was soon republished in another journal [2].
Since 2012, and, increasingly, in the past few years, many studies are coming out showing that glyphosate is toxic to many animal species at very low doses (often below regulatory limits). A recent review study with over 200 references showed that glyphosate has many characteristics of a classic endocrine disruptor, causing multiple imbalances in hormones that lead to disrupted development and disease [3]. Glyphosate disrupted the hypothalamic-pituitary-thyroid axis in rats, and induced hypothyroidism in offspring from exposed rat dams. Glyphosate suppresses aromatase, a crucial enzyme for converting testosterone to estrogen, and this disrupts development in utero. Glyphosate induced teratogenic effects in tadpoles through disruption of retinoic acid signaling.
Glyphosate is Destroying our Health—Correlations with Diseases
Glyphosate usage in the United States has been rising steadily over time for the past two decades. A paper published by Swanson et al. in 2014 contained 19 figures showing stunning correlations between glyphosate usage on core crops over time and the rising prevalence in a long list of debilitating chronic diseases [5]. The diseases included diabetes, obesity, Alzheimer’s, dementia, autism, Parkinson’s disease, pancreatic cancer, thyroid cancer, hepatitis C, liver cancer, kidney cancer, intestinal infection, and inflammatory bowel disease, among others. Skeptics are quick to point out that correlation doesn’t always mean causation, but something is causing the alarming rise in all these diseases, and such perfect correlations cannot be found with any other environmental chemicals.
Autism
My main interest originally in studying toxic environmental chemicals was to try to determine what is causing the autism epidemic in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control claim that one in 54 12-year-old children in the United States suffer from autism today, an astounding number. Autism begins in the gut, and glyphosate clearly disrupts the gut microbiome, causing inflammation and a leaky gut barrier [6]. An overgrowth of pathogens such as certain species of Clostridia leads to toxic metabolites that disrupt dopamine metabolism in the brain, causing neuroexcitotoxicity [7]. Rats exposed to glyphosate early in life exhibit impaired cognition that is associated with defective development of synapses in the hippocampus [8]. Glyphosate suppresses cytochrome P450 enzymes, and this leads to many pathologies, one of which is impairment in vitamin D activation. Vitamin D deficiency is another causal factor in autism and is an epidemic in the United States today.
Cancer
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