Herbicide Glyphosate and Its Effect on Humans

Human reactions to glyphosate have been presented by the Food and Drug Administration as completely harmless, based on the original application reports from the manufacturer.  Recent independent research has raised unanswered questions:

How does glyphosate in food affect our normal gut flora – bacteria which keep us healthy? If it kills so many microorganisms, what is it doing to the flora we depend on for digestion and for the synthesis of the amino acids we cannot make ourselves.

How does glyphosate on crop plants prevent essential minerals and nutrients from being made, thus reducing the nutrition we obtain from eating them? What other reactions does glyphosate have which might affect our health?

Deprives Essential Amino Acids

At MIT, Dr. Stephanie Seneff has been tracking numerous toxic factors which have entered our health picture during the last thirty years, and has published several recent articles and talks regarding the many effects of glyphosate. She and Dr. Samsel pointed out that if we humans cannot make those three amino acids, we must get them either from our food or from our normal gut bacteria. [3] In either case, the increasing use of glyphosate and its contamination in our food, all result in our being deprived of the amino acids from one or from both of these routes.

Kills Off Normal Gut Bacteria – Liver and Kidney Damage

First, Dr. Seneff describes the effect on our gut flora, which outnumber our own cells ten to one. Not only does glyphosate prevent the manufacture of the amino acids, but it causes our bacteria to create very toxic alternatives, which have an effect on our intestines “like a wrecking-ball.” The new toxins might normally be made less toxic by a healthy liver, but glyphosate ALSO inactivates the liver’s defense system (called cytochrome P450 enzymes, CYP).

These new toxins (e.g. m-cresol) kill off normal gut bacteria, but favor the very damaging overgrowth of pathogenic bacteria (Clostridium, C. diff.), causing massive disruption, diarrhea, cramps and even systemic illness.  The toxic effect on the gut lining is also a disaster: it becomes porous, allowing these toxins and undigested protein fragments to enter the blood, causing widespread inflammation, liver and kidney damage.   In extreme situations, agricultural workers exposed to higher glyphosate levels have died from kidney failure.   Please note, these reactions resemble many of those we originally listed, associated with gluten intolerance and celiac disease.



Depleted Minerals in the Soil

Regarding the second question, about nutrition from crops on glyphosate treated soils, we have fewer answers. Crop soils throughout the USA are now so contaminated with glyphosate, that many independent workers doubt we are getting an adequate supply of the minerals and amino acids we got thirty years ago. Buying only certified organic crops, which cannot be grown using herbicides like Roundup, may be a step in more complete nourishment, but most livestock are raised in confined conditions and fed perhaps questionable grains and crop byproducts.

We have no clear studies tracing glyphosate through crops and meats, so reasoned projections are impossible.

Glyphosate and Aluminum Toxicity

A more disturbing set of answers are emerging this year regarding the third question: what other direct health impacts might be traced to food contaminated with glyphosate? The tracing of damage to aluminum has once more become a priority, with suggestions that it accumulates with age. Some studies show it may damage the nervous system of people of all ages, but particularly the young whose systems are still developing and the elderly where repair mechanisms may be failing.

Aluminum, while the third commonest element in the earth’s crust, is seldom absorbed into the human body naturally because it has formed inert complexes with the earth’s minerals. Industry has, by elaborate electrolysis, converted these minerals into a common metal.

Aluminum’s synthetic compounds are also commonly found today in cosmetics, antiperspirants, baking powder and antacids.

If you question a physician about its toxicity, the most likely response would be: it never gets into the blood. That has been a good enough claim for our malfunctioning watchdog government agencies.

But now, along comes glyphosate, thirty years ago, in food. We have already discussed how it may make our intestines leak some large molecules into our blood. But the story with aluminum may be worse: glyphosate latches onto aluminum (“chelates it”) and then bypasses all the defense systems designed for keeping it out and tested for thousands of years.

Dr. Huber has explained that farmers now use glyphosate at harvest time to directly kill their grain crops. This unlicensed practice leaves large residues actually in the edible grains. Flour made from USA grown barley, wheat and rye may be heavily contaminated.

Aluminum Used as an Adjuvant in Vaccines

Please note an aspect of aluminum has also recently come to light through its use as an irritant in vaccines. The manufacturers and vaccine patent writers explain that in a vaccine without aluminum the foreign matter (antigen) will be ignored by your immune system, so you will never prepare antibodies or mount a defense for your future protection. So aluminum is then listed as a helper (“adjuvant”).

Of course in every inoculation, aluminum is accompanied by fragments of the disease organism against which immunity is to be developed, so the foreign protein reaction is thought to be well defined.

But in the case of your gut, with the coincidence of wheat-glyphosate-aluminum being transported from your gut into your blood as described above, experts now say the immune response will be to make up a new defense against any more gluten, since that is the foreign protein available at that time for any systemic response. In short, this coincidence of foreign toxins seems to make a perfect opportunity for a large portion of our population to become allergic to gluten, hitherto a beneficial grain protein.

Thanks to Samsel & Seneff’s work, we have a potential explanation for this recent epidemic. I may mention, there is also reason to suppose that the rampant food allergies to other items, completely unknown in my own childhood, have developed from aluminum in a similar way, as well.

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