Glyphosate - A Global Health Threat, with Stephanie Seneff | The Empowering Neurologist EP. 127

that this chemical is i think the primary reason why the u.s healthcare system is such a mess you know we have by far the most expensive healthcare system in the world and we're getting really bad results in terms of life expectancy and all the different chronic diseases that we suffer from our health care system is failing and you know if we appreciate the fact that it's failing because we're really sick because we're being poisoned all the time it makes a lot more sense really well hello everyone i'm dr david perlmutter welcome again to the empower neurologist thanks for joining us we're going to have an interesting discussion today about a a topic that is really quite polarized in our modern health-related society and that is the safety of glyphosate glyphosate is the active ingredient it's an herbicide active ingredient in products like roundup that people may use around their homes to get rid of weeds but more importantly 150 million tons of glyphosate are applied to the crops in america that we we then consume you know it's been estimated then that that's one pound of glyphosate each year for every single person living in the united states so there are certainly individuals who want us to believe that glyphosate is safe most of them have some connection with industry and then there are certainly those who are calling out glyphosate as being a powerful health threat one of whom is dr stephanie seneff from mit who's written a new book that we're going to talk about today called toxic legacy how the weed killer glyphosate is destroying our health and the environment she's got a lot of data that we're going to talk about she's going to describe for us the mechanisms by which glyphosate is threatening how it affects the microbiome how it acts as a chelating agent a lot of different things that glyphosate does how persistent it is in the environment how it gets into not just the foods with that we eat but our drinking water and even the air that we breathe very interesting discussion uh put your seatbelts on for this one so here we go hello dr seneff how are you doing i'm doing fine how about yourself doing very well i just finished reading your book i want to um first thank you for taking the time to be with us thank you for the effort that it must have taken to create this work i think it's very very important i want to do everything we can to get as much of this information out to the world because i think it's so darn important i'd like to start off if we could uh by just asking you how how did you get started on your interest in glyphosate and you talked about the book but i want to share that with our viewers yes i mean it's quite interesting really i got interested in autism actually way back when i had my best friend at the time had a child who a young child got a dpt shot ran a high fever had a seizures a week later and was later diagnosed with autism kind of planted a seed in my mind about autism you know when the child was severely disabled many many years later 2006 2007 i was watching the numbers go up they were going up exponentially they still are so it's very nerve it's very sobering to think about the rates we're going to have in another 10 15 years if we just keep doing this so autism is a very serious problem and the government doesn't seem to want to pay attention to it they seem to think it's just you know we're diagnosing it more they they're ignoring the problem and i wanted to figure out what was causing it so around 2007 2008 i looked into the vaccines quite deeply as well as into all kinds of other chemicals in the environment i didn't think of looking at glyphosate because it's safe everybody knows it's safe it's roundup you know you don't think about it but it was just fortuitous and i was sort of frustrated because i was learning a lot about autism its relationship to the gut dysbiosis and the mineral imbalances and deficiencies and toxicities i mean it was clearly things were messed up in the in the autism way the kids the metabolism of the autistic kids is really disturbed and and i thought something's got to be doing this and i just don't know what it is and that was just by chance that i happened to be at a conference where professor don huber was giving a talk on glyphosate this isn't 2012. i think september 2012 he was a retired he is a retired professor from purdue university an expert in plant pathology plant physiology and he was warning the world about this chemical that we've been overlooking that's much more dangerous than we thought and he gave this two-hour presentation and talked about the soil bacteria the gut bacteria the same thing you know messing them up the chelating the minerals and preventing them from being taken up appropriately in the plant in the human so he was always drawing the analogies between what's happening in the plant what's happening in our body and he basically laid out the missing links for all the things i was looking at i was thinking maybe these kids are getting a lot of antibiotics and they're messing up their gut well glyphosate is a patented antimicrobial agent so you know it just fit like hand and glove and i was just amazed by that presentation and i immediately dropped everything else i was doing and just started reading everything i could about glyphosate and then everything i could about the diseases that are correlated with glyphosate and just started building the story and i've never stopped since then it's just been an amazing journey and i'm more convinced than ever that i'm right at this point and it's just you know astonishing that we could let a chemical like that go on for 40 years 45 years and not notice that it you know it's a primary cause it's not the only cause we have lots of chemicals i'm not saying it causes everything but it is a major player and mostly because it's um considered safe people use it carelessly people can use it in their lawn on the dandelions while the child's playing they don't really think much of it because they don't realize it's toxic but it's also all over the food supply and we love it because it makes our food so cheap and we've got this whole setup now with the way we do agriculture it's going to be very difficult to unravel so we're kind of in a bind once we acknowledge that this chemical is i think the primary reason why the u.s healthcare system is such a mess you know we have by far the most expensive healthcare system in the world and we're getting really bad results in terms of life expectancy and all the different chronic diseases that we suffer from our health care system is failing and you know if we appreciate the fact that it's failing because we're really sick because we're being poisoned all the time it makes a lot more sense really well gregory bateson once said that man is the only animal who will befoul his own nest a sure sign of madness i kept thinking about that quote as i was reading your book we had a lot to uh we had a lot to dig into and lay some groundwork here and you opened with autism i think for our viewers they're probably pretty used to our discussions of the relationships between what goes on in the gut and autism that there are obvious measurable changes in short chain fatty acids there are obvious fingerprints that take that are available of what the microbiome bacteria specifically look like what happens to specific species in the group clostridia for example we've talked in the past about at least in the animal model reversing symptoms of autism by using be fred the work of dr elaine ucla but let's just very carefully talk about glyphosate which apparently affects only plants and not human cells so i really want you to go through that that was the messaging that opened the door for glyphosate being safe for one and all let's use it around the globe let's modify the seeds to make them roundup resistant because glyphosate doesn't affect human cells right i mean that was the line that we were given and that sounds so beautiful we don't have the pathway we don't have the enzyme so there's a specific enzyme in a specific biological pathway really important to basically all the plants and we don't have any of that in our cells they don't have the genes for it they can't make that protein so how can we possibly be affected by glyphosate it's so wonderful because it's specific to this plant enzyme that we don't have and of course what you overlook is that our gut microbes have that enzyme use that enzyme to make essential amino acids for us the aromatic amino acids which are so important not just for building proteins which of course would be enough already but they're also the precursors to so many important biologically active molecules uh including all the neurotransmitters dopamine serotonin melatonin the skin tanning agent melanin thyroid hormone b vitamins and then there's also all kinds of um exotic molecules that the plants make that are that are beneficial to our health we need a plant-based diet you get all these wonderful polyphenols and flavonoids those things all come out of that pathway too so it messes up the the nutritional value of the foods that we eat and then it also messes up our gut microbiome which then disturbs so much of our metabolism and then we just get completely out of whack with so many different metabolic pathways so let me just if i can step that down just a little bit the message we were given was that this shikumate pathway which is what glyphosate targets in plants to get rid of weeds isn't an issue for humans because our cells don't contain that pathway that the glyphosate can disrupt however what you just told us was that bacteria that live within us that we depend upon to make our b vitamins and our neurotransmitters and to maintain the integrity of our gut lining just happened to have that pathway that is disrupted by this weed killer and therefore it really does represent a threat to us through that mechanism that's right and of course not only does it disrupt their ability to supply those things for us but it disrupts them so you have the particularly sensitive microbes which are the lactobacillus and the bifidobacteria those two are really you know the primary bacteria that get a whole you know they they take over the gut in the infant god the infant got it originally used to be almost all bifidobacteria back in the day when they were just drinking um breast milk and i wrote about that in my book it was quite amazing back 1920 1930 when they looked at the analyze they had almost pure bifidobacteria and but now they don't i mean they have all these other microbes because the bifidobacteria are really really hurt by glyphosate and there was a lovely paper that showed that they looked at all these different microbes and bifidobacteria were practically completely wiped out by the glyphosate in the experiments that they did whereas other you know pathogens like salmonella and plastidia are much more sturdy against glyphosate and so they get an edge and then they overgrow in the gut and get the you know get the inflammation the leaky gut all this follows your immune cells get in there and start doing stuff and messing you up you know and things get out of balance so what you said in the book is that the research uh makes it clear that the good bacteria if we can make that conclusion here that good or healthful or bacteria that are doing good things for our gut like maintaining the gut lining are more uh sensitive to glyphosate as opposed to pathogens so we're really selecting out bad bacteria when we are exposed to glyphosate but hey i'm not exposed to glyphosate am i i wish it were true you'd have to live on a different planet i think and you know maybe bhutan i've been had my eye on bhutan as a possible place to move to because they're mostly organic they're still you know eating the kind of food we used to grow back in in the early 1900s without without chemicals i mean it's very few countries that aren't you know america is a leader we we consume 20 percent of the world's glyphosate with four percent of the world's population so we get much more here per person than almost anyplace else in the world brazil might be a close second but we're interesting and when we look at uh urine evaluations of uh broad spectrums of population what do we find in terms of the percentage of individuals who actually show evidence of glyphosate i think it's probably quite high and i don't know the actual percentage numbers but you know there have been some studies that have come out and they've been studies that have very clearly linked the glyphosate i'm actually really surprised that they could see the signal in simply doing urine tests like you know a urine test on a population and there's one study i can give you a couple examples and one of them was liver disease and so glyphosate is clearly causing fatty liver disease which is an epidemic today going up dramatically and um and they and a study has shown that with rats with with our levels of glyphosate exposure below regulatory limits rats developed fatty liver disease in one of the experiments that they did humans they had this group of people they studied they had they put them into three categories severe fatty liver disease milder cases of fatty liver disease and no fatty liver disease three categories and they found a statistically significant difference between the levels of glyphosate in the urine of the people who had the fatty disease versus ones who didn't and even within that group the extreme cases versus the lesser cases there was a statistically significant difference in the level of glyphosate in the urine i was quite surprised by that because the urinary levels are measuring mostly what's happened over the last couple of weeks so you know if you've it's probably got a lot of variability so i was uh suspecting the noise would be too high to see the signal but that was not the case and there's another study that just came out amazing study in my opinion they looked at pregnant women and they measured the amount of glyphosate in the urine in the mid-pregnancy i think around four months time frame they measure the amount of glyphosate in the urine of these pregnant women and then they have a test and i didn't know about this test but there's a test you can look at the genitals of a girl a baby girl and you can measure a distance you know it's called the ana ano urinary it's the distance between the um anal genital distance there you go specific measure and that measure apparently links to uh testosterone exposure in utero and then they found the correlation between the amount of glyphosate and the uh and that distance in these baby girls and that having a big a long distance which means excess testosterone exposure during pregnancy is linked very strongly linked to polycystic ovary syndrome and that is a another epidemic that we're facing right now so many women are having trouble getting pregnant because of this uh pcos which often messes up your periods you know it's a very big disrupter of your endocrine balance that you see as an adult manifested by the exposure to testosterone testosterone in utero it's quite fascinating and it's a clear link because glyphosate disrupts cytochrome p450 enzymes that's been shown in route studies and aromatase is a cytochrome p450 enzyme and that's the enzyme that converts testosterone to estrogen so it's extremely clear how this would happen given glyphosate exposure so it all makes sense you know but it's um i mean you did a wonderful job in in at least uh mechanistically laying that out that that glyphosate does affect aromatase and as such would uh could lead to this uh hormonal disruption that you talk about with ever increasing uh incidence of pcos we see in our society now the number one cause of infertility right and uh with clear evidence as well that uh there's a strong microbial a microbiome disruption that's really quite common and interestingly uh that may just have a metabolic play as well we've seen some preliminary reports that re-establishing uh glucose sensitivity via a ketogenic diet has some a role to play there and it takes us back and the relationship i would just offer up is the role of of a good uh balance of organisms in the gut as it relates to metabolism we know that there's certainly dysbiosis that is characteristic of insulin resistance of type 2 diabetes with actual interventional research now treating type 2 diabetes at least one researcher in amsterdam using fecal microbial transplant with success reported success so it really is a powerful connection to the gut and the microbes with the damage to these organisms the particularly the the health helpful ones based upon targeting that chickamay pathway that they contain with glyphosate but there's another before we drop that before we get to the chelating aspects of glyphosate let's just talk a little bit more about the relationship through the microbiome and gut permeability and immune stimulation to the ever increasing incidence of autoimmune conditions i mean estimate that as many as 60 to 80 million americans have been diagnosed with a bona fide autoimmune condition we've talked on this program before about underlying chronic infections like lyme and other issues that may relate but i think you you have a card to play as it relates to this hand absolutely yes and i think it has to do with in part with certainly glyphosate but glyphosate messing up the body's ability to metabolize proteins it starts with that and and that's partly the gut microbes because the lactobacillus that i mentioned earlier they have several different enzymes that specialize in in separating proline from the other amino acids in the chain so uh casein and gluten are both have a lot of proline proline is a difficult amino acid to it's very um it doesn't want to detach and you need specialized enzymes to to pull it away from the other amino acids in the chain and these lactobacillus have all these specialized enzymes that we don't have so we rely on the lactobacillus to help us to break down the casein in milk and the gluten in wheat and so when the lactobacillus are being killed by glyphosate which they are severely affected by glyphosate they can't do that and so those proteins don't get broken down so you have these peptide sequences that survive the digestive process and those things are very allergenic so it causes a the gut to react by producing zonulin which is a an enzyme that opens up the gut barrier and there's actually a paper a couple papers showing that glyphosate causes this uh up you know up regulation of zonulin in the gut which opens up the barrier and causes what's called a leaky gut um the the cells separate from each other things can get through the cracks and in particular these peptide sequences that didn't get digested can get through the cracks of course the microbes can too so you get sort of stuff going into the blood that isn't supposed to be there and this causes alarm bells in the immune system so the immune cells cells start attacking these proteins and they develop antibodies to these peptide sequences and then through this process called molecular mimicry where the sequence in the bacterial you know whatever the the protein whatever protein in the food or from the bacteria that the um that the immune cells are reacting to um has a sequence that is very similar to a sequence in a human protein and then the immune cells that develop those specific antibodies they have they're nearsighted they don't quite recognize this isn't quite the right sequence sometimes it's actually exactly the same the sequence but even with a few you know errors it looks enough like the other one that it binds to that too but that happens to be some important human protein and when it does that attacks that protein it can cause a lot of nasty diseases that are autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis and celiac disease and hashimoto's thyroid thyroiditis and lupus and all those things name a few um the sequence was that they developed this um that glyphosate was developed originally patented as a chelating agent for for pipes that carried water then ultimately it was found it could be not ultimately but it was found that it was a powerful herbicide and then even after that uh it because based upon its ability to kill bacteria it was actually patented as a as an antibiotic uh but but having said that the sequence then was such that monsanto believed that to vertically integrate they would create plants that could be sprayed with glyphosate that would not be damaged and therefore farmers could spray their crops uh with this weed killer the crop the soy whatever it would be would survive and yet the weeds would die sounds like an amazing business plan to me but that said there is the sense that you know people will say well gmo foods are safe there's never been any uh real uh science to indicate that there's something wrong with gmo foods but doesn't that um kind of just sort of sidestep the whole glyphosate story i totally think that in fact when i first started studying glyphosate then i was aware there were all these active activists against gmos and i felt like they were missing the boat because the gmos are enabling the use of the chemicals and it's the chemicals that are the big problem i'm not saying the gmos i don't know themselves are harmless but i think the glyphosate is far more dangerous than the gmos that are designed to to protect the plant from it the actual gmo engineering is not nearly as damaging to our health as the effect that it has to allow the plant to be exposed to the chemical and the amazing thing is so first of all when they studied glyphosate to see if it was safe they studied it in isolation they'd have all these extra things they add to it in the formulation it makes it much more able to get into the cells much more toxic and number two when they study the gmos to see if they were safe they studied them without exposing them to glyphosate i was really shocked when i read that they they knew that if they exposed them to glyphosate they'd be toxic so they said well we'll just grow these things organically and then you know sure enough they didn't seem to have a problem but you know they missed the reason why they're toxic they totally left it out of the experiment i i i highlighted that in in the book with a big asterisk because again to show that the gmo plants uh feeding them to animals was safe they they did exactly what you said they didn't spray them with glyphosate and that's the issue they did they somehow felt that was they wanted to have a good study so they didn't the question is is the gmo safe it doesn't it's not asking the question is the guys that you're using on the gmo safe you know and i suspect they knew the glyphosate wasn't safe but they didn't want to find that out so they didn't want to formally find it out so is non-gmo necessarily going to tell you that there's no glyphosate residues on the wheat for example that's a loaded question isn't it you know it is i'm leading the witness here yeah the weed is amazing and actually you know when i started seeing the celiac disease and i was thinking it was going up i was thinking oh my god that's probably glyphosate and i knew it wasn't you know we just never been and they have a gmo wheat but the farmers refused to use it and i was you know so i was kind of puzzled how are they getting glyphosate in the wheat and then i realized i looked and i found that they spray the wheat with glyphosate right before the harvest to kill it they do it as a desiccant it works very well especially if you're up north so canada probably uses this technique more than we do they're facing a frost you know they've got to grab the crop before it gets ruined by the frost they can accelerate the rate at which it matures and they can get those seeds to come out when they spray it with glyphosate the plant as a last gasp it goes to seed synchronizes the harvest so everything goes to seed at the same time increases the yield and then it also makes the stubble easier to clear because it just kind of kills it quickly it dries out that's why it's called a desiccating agent works great you know the trouble is that the glyphosate goes right into the seed and you get really high levels of glyphosate in those crops that have been sprayed right before harvest is of course it's very recent you know right before the the seed is uh is taken as food is when it's getting all that glyphosate added to it so you get actually much higher levels on average of glyphosate contamination in these non-gmo foods that are sprayed right before harvest and that's been shown experimentally and again you know the a take home here for our viewers is yeah it's non-gmo whatever they say it says right on the label but that's not a guarantee that it's glyphosate free or that absolutely not no it's because glyphosate is used as a drying agent but what about if it says certified organic it's much better but it's still not a guarantee that it's free and they're not allowed to use glyphosate so if they're following the rules they're not putting glyphosate on those certified organic crops however glyphosate's in the rain it could be a neighboring farm where they're spraying it and drift is going to bring it over so it's impossible in this country i think to to guarantee that there's no glyphosate in your crop even when you are being conscientious about not using it probably the manure as well because i don't know i don't think they require organic manure for organic crops so if you're using manure that's derived from cows that are getting lots of glyphosate you're probably getting it in the manure circle of poison let's we i know you didn't really cover cancer very much in the book and there was plenty else to talk about but i think we to be fair let's let's just go with uh d wayne johnson here first oh i'd love to yes and uh tell us his story yeah it's very sad actually he um so he's a lovely man i've met him in person he's got a lovely family young family young boys and he was in his 40s when he was diagnosed with non-hodgkin's lymphoma his job was to manage schoolyards in california and he controlled the weeds in the schoolyards and these are children's schoolyards right by using glyphosate to control the weed so that's already you know like oh my god glyphosate you know with children but so he was using that glyphosate it was the only chemical he used in his job and he had had some trouble with his equipment so he had gotten actually a lot of he'd gotten sprayed with glyphosate in some incidents where the equipment wasn't working properly so he had very clear evidence of glyphosate exposure and really no evidence of exposure to any other chemical a lot of the times the farmers are exposed to so many chemicals each company blames the other chemical as the reason why they're sick and they all get off the hook and that's a game they play but here there weren't any other chemicals and that's part of why it was a very powerful story and and it was a jury trial and the jury awarded him a really a lot of money and most of it was damages because uh of monsanto lying about their product and and so um that was a huge part of the um of the award and it was something like well i've 283 million it says it's been a while it was been reduced i think to what was it kept getting reduced it got reduced immediately by the judge through some kind of rule regular rule about california's loss and then it's been an appeal you know these these cases never end there have been three now big uh cases with four people one of them was a couple both of whom had non-hashes lymphoma there's a harder man who the the heart of man i think was his name the second case and he just recently had a they went to trial on upper court and monsanto lost that's just brand new news i just heard about that hard harder man or something like that the second case but now the world health organization actually has gone forward and characterized glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen have they not yeah it's the um iarc international agency for research and cancer i think irc which is part of the who and they declared glyphosate of probable carcinogen actually back in 2015 and i think that's why these cases why the lawyers even dare to take these cases to court because it's always been the company works very hard to make sure papers don't get published that that you know show show their product in bad light and as long as those papers aren't published the lawyers don't have a legal case and so this is the the world health organization or a part thereof has declared glyphosate a probable human carcinogen such that we are still using 150 million tons on uh on our crops in america uh each year uh equal equivalent to one pound of glyphosate per uh human living in the united states so i i'm trying to labor through that disconnect the world health organization this is likely going likely causing cancer doctor stephanie cena is telling us that the incredibly increasing rates of autism may be related to glyphosate now affecting some estimates as much as one in 40 kids that are born i mean these are are individuals who are destined to require assistance for their entire lifetimes 140th of our population it's shocking numbers all of this is shocking and yet business as usual i i did a little um instagram clip from our hardware store a couple of weeks ago walked in they're having a sale and they had the roundup stacked to the ceiling you know in my neighborhood i watch people spraying it in their driveways and i have that problem too no gloves no mask nothing yes and from there where does it go right well so you know and it sticks around a really long time in the environment that's coming out more and more as well there's actually a lot of good news some good news from my standpoint in the last few years papers have been coming out left and right i think finally people are realizing this chemical is not trivial because i think because we were told it was so safe it was kind of stupid to study it right because why waste your money studying something that's safe but now that it's become clear that it's an endocrine disruptor it has effects at very low levels and it lasts a long time and so monsanto was kind of saying you know oh it's so great because that you get a lot of degrees really quickly gone in two weeks you know this is kind of the message we're hearing both in our body and in the soil goes away very quickly this is such a great chemical certainly not true and in fact there's a brand new study i just i just heard about it a few days ago that in canada where they um they studied glyphosate in the forest and they actually in the tissues of trees in the forest and they had sprayed it like 12 years ago and it was still there yeah so it lasts a huge long time under certain circumstances well i think that we have to present what the paradigm is one would think that here in in america that certainly there is some due diligence down on on these products before they're released upon the public and the reality is it's just the opposite they are innocent until proven guilty and it's up to people to show the risk things are released with no oversight and um you know i mean you think about what happened finally with lead uh you know it took so long but finally it happened that we finally the evidence was just so overwhelming that finally people did something but you know i guess you know to me and to many of the other people are listening have our ear to the ground the evidence right now with respect to glyphosate is profound and vast and yet it continues on business as usual i know i don't know what it takes to wake up the government and i would think the government would be really concerned about this especially the autism because when those kids grow up you know if we have one in 40 with autism as adults it's going to be a huge burden on this society and then meanwhile we'll have another crop of autistic kids coming up in the next generation it's just it's unthinkable that what that's going to look like and and for the government to not even notice that it's happening just is so puzzling to me they should be spending every dime they can get on trying to figure out what's causing this autism and in the book of course i write a lot about autism that is where i started and the more i look the more it becomes so clear you know there's all these papers now for example on propionate and propionate is a is a short-chain amino acid i mean short-chain fatty acid that is produced in the by the gut microbes and that is associated with autism in many different papers that appropriate if you even put propionate into the brain of a mouse you you get an autistic mouse so it's very clear it's connected yeah i think you're referring to the work of of dr derrick mcphabe in uh in canada and uh we've actually had him on the program and demonstrated those um those videos well which are quite compelling and you know uh to be fair propionate gets in in all of our brains as one of the three major short chain fatty acids is it's more the ratio and it absolutely gets right back to what you were talking about in terms of overgrowth of clostridium species with suppression of other species that would have otherwise created more of a balance in the short chain fatty acids just based upon that that yeah and then we blinked in the chain that shikamate pathway right and it's been shown experimentally that glyphosate causes the gut to be acidic and under acidic conditions you they've got microbes produce more appropriate protein and they produce less butyrate when you get a slightly i mean i'm sorry it's basic glyphosate makes the gut too basic so it's like 6.5 instead of 5.5 doesn't sound like a lot but it's a huge difference that is huge ph on a log scale yeah and it's um and it has a huge impact and butyrate is what the uh gut colonocytes those uh our cells that line the gut boundary uh depend on butyrate as a primary source of fuel that's their they love butyrate and butyrate goes way down when the ph goes up and that's just because which microbes like which ph the guys that like the acid can't make um can't live because it's too basic and then they're the ones who make the butyrate when it gets basic you get a lot of propionate you get that imbalance and then the propionate is very clearly connected to autism so it it works very beautifully as far as glyphosate has been shown to cause the ph to go up and then the acetic acid acetate also goes down so yeah i think we're just beginning to look at the epigenetic uh play of these of the shifts in the short chain fatty acid how they may affect gene expression um you know you're very vocal have been for years uh you wrote a series of papers uh describing the mechanisms back in 2015 with correlations to autism and other autoimmune conditions especially thyroid issues um what kinds of pushback have you experienced over the years a lot i mean i'm still labeled as a kook by some of some of the mainstream we should have an annual meeting yes it's uh you know uh they just think i i'm just crying you know calling crying fire irresponsibly i guess is the way to say it that i'm alerting people to a problem that doesn't exist and that that's bad because i'm you know misleading it's basically what disinformation you call it false news you know who's really manipulating the narrative here i mean we see how the narrative we saw it happen with sugar and fat in terms of medical messaging and now uh we're seeing how aggressively uh industry is manipulating the the whole narrative surrounding glyphosate and yet they've agreed to uh what is a settlement uh that they've allocated for the 100 000 lawsuits yeah 10 billion 10 billion um they're trying to put together a settlement for 10 billion dollars as a class action lawsuit and i think it's still struggling is there still some issues that they haven't quite signed it yet i think it's way too little i mean for the for what they've done and they're hoping to get off the hook as far as setting up some committee that's going to study and is going to find the glyphosate is perfectly fine and therefore nobody can ever see them again they're hoping to set up something like that and there's in the other side is seeing through that scheme and not letting them do that as far as the last time i checked on that it's hard to keep up with this political game there was a fair amount of literature that came out of i believe france showing the teratogenicity of glyphosate with that literature subsequently being suppressed or at least uh or buried or at least uh derogated to some degree right i mean of course it was i was actually very good timing for me when i first came back from that lecture and then it was ceralini in france professor ceralini and his team they've done some really great work and they had just published a paper which i read immediately after i got back from don huber's presentation and that paper was really what really clinched it for me it was like okay i'm going after this because it showed for the first time that low-dose glyphosate over the lifespan of the rats caused all kinds of problems and it and it was interesting because after three months the rats were doing okay they would had a control group in the exposed group and it was a low level of glyphosate which in the past they'd always done high level of glyphosate so they say well it's you know ridiculously low it's going to be perfectly fine but it wasn't so after three months the rats were fine they looked okay after four months they started to get sick and by the end of their life they had a shortened lifespan that the females had massive mammary tumors the males had kidney problems and liver problems they all had reproductive issues shortened life span i mean it was a mess after the entire life span experiment and that was when that was really kind of a holy cow experiment because that really exposed glyphosate as being something you need to worry about at low levels and and i think that paper was a milestone because after that paper there have been many and more and more recently as i said there have been many papers that have started to look at glyphosate at low levels they never did before there was always very high levels and glyphosate is an endocrine disruptor that's very clear at this point and now all these papers are coming out and showing a disruption of the hormone systems and all kinds of problems and even you know multiple generations epigenetic effects that show up when the pregnant rat is exposed to glyphosate at small levels doesn't even hurt the rat the pups are fine by the second third generation you start to see all kinds of problems it's really really fascinating epigenetic effects where it goes straight for the germ cells in the fetus so that's already the next generation and those germ cells remember that exposure in utero and then they act on it much later on and produce these offspring that have problems you mentioned uh in vitro study of human breast cancer cells being exposed to a dilution of glyphosate of one part per billion which billions eight trillion one one well i guess one drop in an olympic sized pool yes right that's quite a delusion and yet it accelerated their growth that's right that's right yeah it definitely encourages uh cancer cells to grow and there's another paper that showed that it it's a primer so when you have other known carcinogens if you also have glyphosate then those carcinogens become have their carcinogenic effect much faster in the presence of glycogen it's an enabler to cause other carcinogens to contact and that happens a lot with these chemicals they really are synergistically toxic which is another concern we never study them in in combination you know all the studies are in isolation well that said typically glyphosate is not really even generally available in and of itself it's generally part of a a mixture so how does that affect uh how it works in terms of some of the concerns yeah and that's some of sarlini's studies have shown that the formulation is hugely more toxic than especially acutely toxic that glyphosate by itself if you have if you design your experiment right glyphosate can't get into the cells and you don't see much of an effect but with those uh with the formulations they put other chemicals in there that enable the glyphosate to be taken up by the cells and these are sort of chemicals that disrupt the cell membrane open it up so the glyphosate can get in and then those chemicals are toxic in and of themselves and they make glyphosate much more toxic than it would otherwise be and when monsanto did its studies way back when it only studied glyphosate in isolation so they've learned how to make formulations over time that are more and more toxic to the weeds so they've introduced new formulations of roundup that have augmented you know stuff in there that makes it more toxic it's to the wheats and they're not thinking about maybe they are but they don't want to think about the possibility it might also make it more toxic to us you know i'm hopeful that our viewers are getting this because this needs to stop i mean we can't we can't let this continue this is you know as you mentioned toxic to us that's for sure but the implications at least for the rodent studies in terms of what's going to happen to future generations i think is gosh it's certainly uh worrisome let me let me shift gears for a moment and originally uh glyphosate was developed as a metal chelator and i think you spent quite a bit of time in your book talking about that there are some implications based upon how it chelates metals in terms of human health so first tell us what it means to chelate metals and then let's relate it to some concerns right it basically means that it binds very tightly to the metal and and holds it so that it can't do what it would normally do and we have all these minerals that we need in very small amounts trace amounts of manganese and zinc and cobalt you know all these wonderful minerals that are and they're often those minerals are both toxic and uh and deficient at the same time with glyphosate because glyphosate disrupts the whole transport system how you manage them the body has these sophisticated mechanisms you know carrier molecules like for example heme carries iron you know and and so and you have um cobalt you know cobalamin carries cobalt so you have these different ways of um taking these minerals and incorporating them into interesting molecules that can transport them and deliver them uh where they need to go effectively and safely because iron of course is very reactive if it's just out in the open but then you have iron like ferritin you have various molecules that specialize in transporting iron and delivering it to the various organ the organs and the various cells that need the iron to do their job all these enzymes that are these these minerals form are catalysts for various important enzymes and glyphosate basically binds really tightly to the enzyme to the to the metal and hangs onto it and that also changes the metals for example aluminum i think is a very serious worry arsenic and aluminum both of them they're at plus three they don't react they stay at plus three all the time other other guys the ones that move around and they're in their oxidation state the valence state from plus three to plus two you know like cobalt and iron they have interesting uh properties that help to make reactions take place but aluminum is basically a nerd in that sense it can't make reactions to take place but it could really mess things up because of that plus three charge and uh and it gets into places and binds to things like it causes alzheimer's disease it's also linked to autism you know there was a study that showed high aluminum in the autistic brain uh chris uh actually chris exley had a really interesting paper about autism brains postmortem where he showed unusually high levels of aluminum in the brain that's been linked to alzheimer's as well very clearly and so i actually wrote a paper about together with colleagues about the idea that glyphosate is com it's actually studies that show um theoretically the glyphosate would wrap up uh two glyphosate molecules would wrap would hide the plus three charge of the aluminum atom they would bind to the aluminum and form a circle around it like a cage and that would make a neutral molecule that would be very easy to cross the gut barrier because the plus three charge interferes with the aluminum's ability to get past past the barrier once you have the leaky gut and the aluminum molecule that no longer has the charge it can get passed much more easily and it can go into the brainstem and cause disrupt the brainstem nuclei that way there was a paper that was published from some sri lankan researchers who argued the same thing for arsenic being carried to the kidneys by glyphosate to cause kidney failure in agricultural workers in sri lanka so it's a principle that's you know applied to both of those metals arsenic and aluminum that have similar properties that glyphosate basically it drops it off when the and when the ph goes down so it carries it very tightly with the high ph and then when the ph goes down at the terminal watershed in the kidneys and in the brain stem uh it drops it off so both the aluminum and the glyphosate separated become very toxic at that point so dr seda we live in southwest florida we are downstream from lake okeechobee you know where this is going uh we're downstream from from big sugar uh which uses a lot of glyphosate we're seeing higher and higher levels of cyanobacteria all kinds of issues that we've never seen before what is going on and what is the risk that we are experiencing yes it's very sad what's happening there because florida has such a wonderful environment there for the birds and the manatees and the dolphins i mean all these uh wonderful species that are living in this now a very very toxic environment and i've been watching florida for quite some time and i believe glyphosate's a major player in that whole message you're seeing there with the cyanobacteria in fact i wrote an article together with jennifer margulis we published an article on the web on the topic of those manatees which you probably know the manatees are dying this year in record numbers in florida the dolphins are also suffering from actually alzheimer's disease they're getting dementia and i think that those are both connected to the glyphosate the glyphosate is used on the sugar cane it's also used in the waterways to control invasive weeds and it's used on the on the beautiful homes that have these gorgeous yards they're using glyphosate too and all that glyphosate is getting into the waterways the cyanobacteria actually are really smart they can completely metabolize glyphosate and use its phosphorus atom as a source of phosphorus and that really promotes their growth they're clearing the glyphosate in the process of growing but then they're creating a you know a food source that really messes up the entire food chain they block the sun because all this algae grows you know with the cyano bacteria provide nutrition they make the nitrogen sources that allow the algae to grow and then you get this massive algae grow overgrowth which blocks the sunlight and then the plants underneath can't get enough sun they can't grow but they're also being exposed to glyphosate as well so the manatees eat these plants that can't grow because the sunlight is blocked but also because the plants are being exposed to glyphosate and then the manatees are getting exposed as well and they're getting sick and dying it's a very very sad story well we know we have a manatee or a family of manatees that lives right in i would say our backyard but right outside the seawall but you mentioned in the book how one study demonstrated that what may be related here is a chemical called bmaa right that is produced by the cyanobacteria that's found to accumulate in many of the dolphins that are dying and washing up on beaches when they post mortem look at their brains so you know this bma has there are some researchers and at least one clinician that i'm aware of uh they that feel that bma may be playing a central role in things like lou gehrig's disease i would say possibly contributes to alzheimer's and humans but if you're a follower of dr dale bredesen as am i you realize there are many factors that can tip the brain over to being a feed forward event as it relates to neuronal degeneration but that said in the just a couple minutes that we have left let's spin this so we can know what we can do i mean where do we start what can we do to protect ourselves and even more importantly uh after we're protected then what can we do to support you and to get the word out that this has to stop right now the obvious thing is to buy only certified organic food when you shop at the grocery store and luckily in the united states it's becoming more and more available i've been watching whole foods luckily we have a whole foods near our house and we buy almost all of our groceries there we buy everything organic certified organic and their supply is getting bigger and bigger over time and that's really nice to see so we're getting the message the united states is not able to make enough we have to import a lot of our certified organic food because our farmers are not producing it we need to fix that and i'm hoping that the farmers will start to see that first of all that they're getting sick because they're being exposed to these chemicals and then to think that if they could convert their farm to certified organic they could make they could sell their product for more money and they would be a lot healthier so i'm hoping that there will be motivation on the part of the farmers to change their ways through consumer demand and so i think the best thing anybody can do personally is to switch to a certified organic both for them their own health and their family's health but also for um to encourage the farmers to grow certified organic food well the the threat of toxins on farmers i think it was talked about multiple times in in the book uh but the one that really i i remember most is how you how your grandfather was found oh that was so tragic yes i remember that very well i was 14 years old and uh he he was so he had uh a farm and he grew peaches and apples we went there several you know times to visit i always enjoyed his farm they had pigs and peaches and apples and it was quite fun we would sell the fruit at the apple stand on the highway and you know it was a fun childhood experience for me but he was found dead on his tractor with a bag of ddt that had broken open and uh that that was he and he was in his early 50s when that happened so that planted a seed in my brain at a very young age and then i read rachel carson's book silent spring shortly after that it came out right around the time when i was 14 years old and i read that book and so i think that it had a deep deep impact on me the combination of my grandfather in that book was probably what led me to where i am today well we're grateful that it did uh you know that there's uh an upside to that painful experience and and uh trying to right the wrong great to see you again and uh congratulations on the on the new book and um i'm certain this is going to really move the needle and it needs to move the needle and you know there are so many of you out there now um that are working towards this goal we've interviewed jeffrey smith a number of times he's been great yeah he's terrific and um i just want to thank you for joining us today it's been my pleasure thank you so much for having me and thank you for the work you do to help to get the message out thank you talk soon bye bye bye-bye well we learned quite a bit today didn't we about glyphosate and you know you may wonder uh what we do moving forward i think dr sen have certainly outlined an action plan for us and i am going to be on the side of the science on this one indicating that i truly believe uh that doing our best for example to buy organic foods and to continue to do our very best to avoid exposure to glyphosate especially as it relates to what we might use around our homes is extremely important i do believe like dr seneff that this is a clear and present danger a danger of significant importance threatening not only our lives directly but the uh the whole vitality of the biosphere so hope you enjoyed the program today i know i learned an awful lot thanks for joining me i'm dr david perlmutter bye for now [Music] you

Channel: DavidPerlmutterMD

Views: 79,510

Keywords: david perlmutter, dr. david perlmutter, grain brain, dr. perlmutter, brain maker, chemical, food, nutrition, organic, pesticide, health, preventative, concern, study, science, medical, doctor, research, america, agriculture

Id: Z8xuyoKZv4s

Length: 52min 13sec (3133 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 28 2021