EUROPEAN NATIONS ARE OUTLAWING MONSTANTO'S POISONOUS
SEEDS BUT AMERICAN 'GOV' PUSHES TO SAVE IT HERE
Monsanto’s
Roundup Herbicide May Be Most Important Factor in Development of Autism and
Other Chronic Disease
June 09, 2013 | 277,834 views
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.
In the interview above, Dr. Seneff summarizes the two key
problems caused by glyphosate in the diet:
· Nutritional
deficiencies
· Systemic toxicity
Their findings make the need for labelling 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
itsRoundup herbicide as
"biodegradable," "environmentally friendly" and claiming it
"left the soil clean."
Mounting evidence now tells us just how false such
statements are. I don’t believe that Monsanto is one of 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.
In the video above, Jeffrey Smith, author of the
bestseller Seeds of
Deception,says Monsanto, during some reflective moment, must have
asked “What would Darth Vader do?” Because what they’ve come up with is a way
of pretending that they’re beneficial and then insinuating themselves into the
food and agriculture industry, and now it turns out that what they have is
very, very dangerous.
Indeed, 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:
|
Autism
|
Gastrointestinal diseases such as inflammatory bowel
disease, chronic diarrhea, colitis and Crohn's disease
|
Obesity
|
|
Allergies
|
Cardiovascular disease
|
Depression
|
|
Cancer
|
Infertility
|
Alzheimer’s disease
|
|
Parkinson’s disease
|
Multiple sclerosis
|
ALS, and more
|
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 affectsbeneficial 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. So
to learn more, I urge you to listen to it in its entirety. It’s quite
eye-opening.
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, and
I have previously interviewed her about her groundbreaking insights into the
critical importance of sulfur in human health. Not surprisingly,
this latest research also touches on sulfur, and how it is affected by
glyphosate from food.
“[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,” the authors write.
“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 100,000—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 (starting at 10 minutes into the interview,
she gives an in-depth explanation of how glyphosate causes the many symptoms
associated with autism):
1. Gut dysbiosis
(imbalances in gut bacteria, inflammation, leaky gut, food allergies such as
gluten intolerance)
2. 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, please visit
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 themost
important factors in the development of a wide variety of modern diseases and
conditions, including autism. In summary, these detrimental effects include:
|
Nutritional deficiencies, as glyphosate
immobilizes certain nutrients and alters the nutritional composition of the
treated crop
|
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)
|
|
Increased toxin exposure (this includes high levels of
glyphosate and formaldehyde in the food itself)
|
Impairment of sulfate transport and sulfur metabolism;
sulfate deficiency
|
|
Systemic toxicity—a side effect of extreme disruption of
microbial function throughout your body; beneficial microbes in particular,
allowing for overgrowth of pathogens
|
Gut dysbiosis (imbalances in gut bacteria, inflammation,
leaky gut, food allergies such as gluten intolerance)
|
|
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
|
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
|
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, compr: #0869zero 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 labeled, 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.
Keep Fighting for Labeling of Genetically Engineered Foods
While California Prop. 37 failed to pass last November,
by a very narrow margin, the fight for GMO labeling is far from over. The
field-of-play has now moved to the state of Washington, where the people's
initiative 522, "The People's Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food
Act," will require food sold in retail outlets to be labeled if it
contains genetically engineered ingredients.
Remember, as with CA Prop. 37, they need support of
people like YOU to succeed. Prop. 37 failed with a very narrow margin simply
because we didn't have the funds to counter the massive ad campaigns created by
the No on 37 camp, led by Monsanto and other major food companies. Let's not
allow Monsanto and its allies to confuse and mislead the people of Washington
and Vermont as they did in California. So please, I urge you to get involved
and help in any way you can.
· No matter where you
live in the United States, please donate money to these labeling efforts
through the Organic Consumers Fund.
· Sign up to learn more
about how you can get involved by visiting Yeson522.com!
· For timely updates on
issues relating to these and other labeling initiatives, please join the
Organic Consumers Association on Facebook, or follow them on Twitter.
· Talk to organic
producers and stores and ask them to actively support the
Washington initiative.
No comments:
Post a Comment