Gluten Intolerance And Glyphosate: A Modern Epidemic

Everyone has noticed the recent rise of gluten intolerance. Grocery store shelves are now lined with products which avoid using gluten in any form. But we still have little idea why this food allergy has swept through our population to produce such widespread problems. Articles associate it with celiac disease (sprue) and leaky gut, in which undigested food proteins are allowed to enter the blood stream, causing numerous inflammatory problems. 

Gluten sensitive friends and family of mine have tried eating USDA organic wheat products. Some have had positive results, others still cannot tolerate gluten from any source.

The symptoms of gluten intolerance resemble many other gut problems recently associated with foods, especially when people eat crops genetically engineered to resist weed killers. As crops became available to withstand the most popular herbicide Roundup, scientists noticed an increase in the agricultural usage of this product.

The Increase of Glyphosate Used in Agriculture

If you apply Roundup and it only kills weeds, why not use more of it? The manufacturer has denied this obvious marketing advantage, and the Environmental Protection Agency has ignored scientist’s protests, and recently moved to raise the allowable levels in all foods sold in the USA.

The common question now raised by independent scientists is this: Is the contamination of crops by the weed-killer Roundup, and its main ingredient, glyphosate, really as harmless as has always been claimed, ever since it was introduced by Monsanto thirty years ago?  Without detailed studies, why has it been regarded as harmless to humans?



How Glyphosate Kills Weeds

This simple chemical was first patented as an antibiotic because it is known to interfere with one of the life processes of all bacteria. The cell process (called the Shikimic Acid Pathway) does not even exist in human cell machinery, so glyphosate could never directly cause an antibiotic reaction within a human body.

But in bacteria and green plants, glyphosate prevents the cell machinery from manufacturing three very important amino acids — these are three essential building blocks of all our proteins. Glyphosate kills weeds by starving them of these amino acids and by weakening their natural immunity. They actually die from infections from a normally harmless soil fungus, according to agronomist, Dr. Don Huber. 

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