What?! Eating Roundup? What the **** are you talking about?

Roundup is Monsanto’s name for their signature weed killer. Its principal active ingredient, called glyphosate (pronounced, glie-foe-sate), was patented in the early 1970s. Roundup is more than just a weed killer, it’s a system. A whole suite of crops have been genetically modified (GM) to be “Roundup resistant”.  That means that a gene from a bacterium that makes Roundup ineffective, has been transferred into certain crops, like corn, soy and canola (also called rape seed). If you spray Roundup on these GM plants they continue to grow, unaffected by the poison. As a result, an airplane full of glyphosate can fly over your field, let loose a blast of the stuff, and all the weeds in the field will die, while your corn, soy or canola continue to grow. This saves farmers time and effort, while, theoretically increasing yields because your crops aren’t competing with weeds for light, nutrients and water. (This theory has not, to my knowledge, been verified).  On the whole, it all sounds great! Right? Even better, initial tests by the producer suggested that animals and other non-target organisms are not affected by glyphosate. Not surprisingly, glyphosate has become the most widely used herbicide in the world. Even conservation organizations like The Nature Conservancy use it to get rid of pesky invasive plants in their preserves and restoration sites.

Well…maybe not so great. In the early 2000s researchers began documenting toxicity and developmental anomalies associated with exposure to glyphosate and glyphosate-containing herbicides in amphibians. Over the years glyphosate has been showing up in most of our crops and many foods. Several angry moms have reported on social media (take that for what it’s worth) that they hired a private laboratory to test for the presence of glyphosate in vaccines (yes, vaccines!). Their concerns were confirmed. They also claim that the federal government is either not releasing the data on glyphosate, manipulating glyphosate tests (i.e., throwing out results that exceed the standard) or refusing to do the tests needed to accurately determine the actual levels of glyphosate in our food and vaccines.

Increasingly, evidence has accumulated that this ubiquitous herbicide is a threat to human health. If you write to me (gkleppel@nycap.rr.com), I will send you a copy of a paper [Swanson et al. 2014, Journal of Organic Systems 9(2):6-37] showing that trends in glyphosate use track, nearly perfectly, trends in the incidence of autism, diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease and several cancers in humans. While the study reports correlative data (that is data showing that as x increases, y increases or decreases in proportion to x), which, in and of itself, does not imply causation, the number and strength of the correlations, most close 100%, should at least raise concern. In 2015, the World Health Organization labeled glyphosate a probable human carcinogen.

In 2014, I attended the Slow Living Summit, a conference in Brattleboro, Vermont, for farmers, activists and businesses interested in sustainability. I was sitting in a meeting being chaired by a vice president of Ben and Jerry’s, who casually mentioned (as if everyone knew this) that glyphosate is sprayed on wheat to facilitate harvest. “WHAT!?” I nearly fell off my chair. “Oh yeah,” He continued, “Glyphosate is a desiccant. You can’t harvest wheat unless it’s completely dry. Glyphosate is sprayed on the wheat to dry it quickly and allow it to be harvested sooner than if it dried naturally.” And, of course, once the toxin is on the wheat, you can’t wash it off, because the wheat has to remain dry if it is going to be used to make flour. Yikes! For a guy, who bakes bread for sale at farmers markets and who espouses a sustainability mantra, this is devastating! I immediately called King Arthur Flour, where I buy all of my non-organic flour (organic flour can’t have glyphosate in it), and confronted them with what I had learned at the Slow Living Summit. They assured me that they do not buy wheat from farmers who spray their wheat with glyphosate (or any other desiccant). I felt a little better, but I was still concerned about the relationship between glyphosate, disease and our food, particularly foods made with wheat (which is in a lot more than bread; try crackers, cookies, pizza dough, and breakfast cereals, to name a few).

For some time I had been suspicious about the rise in gluten intolerance in our society. All of a sudden, the “staff of life” was making people sick. It didn’t make sense. Of course, some of this might be associated with diet fads. There are more than enough of those to go around. And certainly a portion of the population is genetically celiac positive, but the rate of rise in gluten intolerance in our population seemed somehow too steep to be a fad or a change in our genome. That’s when I came across the work of MIT researcher, Stephanie Seneff, and her colleague Anthony Samsell, an independent research consultant from New Hampshire [Samsell and Seneff. 2013. Interdisciplinary Toxicology 6(4):159-184]. Samsell and Seneff made the case for glyphosate interference in digestion, particularly of gliadin, the difficult-to-digest protein in wheat that joins with glutenin to produce gluten in bread. They reported that when fish were fed glyphosate, their gut flora was destroyed and the fish developed symptoms similar to celiac disease. In humans, Samsell and Seneff reported a strong correlation between trends in glyphosate use and the prevalence of celiac disease. Furthermore, they found that the functioning of certain enzymes associated with digestion, are impaired in the presence of glyphosate. Impairment of these enzymes is also linked to the onset of certain cancers, and with the chelation of metallic micro-nutrients, making them unavailable to our metabolism.

A former student of mine told me that she has all sorts of stomach “issues”, including a real intolerance of bread. However, she added, she does not experience these problems, including eating bread, when she dines at our farm. The bad news is that glyphosate is in most of our foods and government agencies – FDA, USDA, EPA, CDC – are full of former chemical company executives. So, it’s unlikely that we’ll get much help from them. The good news comes from that student I just mentioned. With a little bit of care about where our food comes from, we can at least reduce our exposure to glyphosate and other dangerous chemicals. Organic foods will be mostly or completely free of them. Maybe bread baked with organic or glyphosate-free flour is more expensive (but so is gluten-free bread), but my guess is it’s a lot less costly than cancer.