The Dr. Hyman Show - How The Weedkiller Glyphosate Affects Your Body And How To Avoid It

Episode Date: March 11, 2022

This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens, Cozy Earth, and Eight Sleep.   Glyphosate is a popular pesticide that has a big downside—it’s destroying our health. It damages our good gut bacteria and may lead to leaky gut. Glyphosate also depletes glutathione, our master antioxidant and a cornerstone of our biology, and it dramatically impacts our sulfur, methylation, and detoxification pathways that have many essential roles for our health. And not only is glyphosate harming human health and the health of our future generations, it’s also destroying our ecosystems. In today’s episode, I talk with Dr. Stephanie Seneff, Ken Cook, and Dr. Zach Bush about why it’s important to be aware of the effects of glyphosate and make choices that reduce our exposure as much as possible. Stephanie Seneff is a Senior Research Scientist at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She has a bachelor's degree from MIT in Biology with a minor in Food and Nutrition Science, and a master’s degree, an engineer’s degree, and a PhD degree, all from MIT, in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Her recent interests have focused on the role of toxic chemicals and micronutrient deficiencies in health and disease, with a special emphasis on the pervasive herbicide, glyphosate, and the mineral, sulfur. She is the author of Toxic Legacy: How the Weedkiller Glyphosate Is Destroying Our Health and the Environment.   Ken Cook is president and co-founder of the Environmental Working Group, a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to protecting human health and the environment. He is widely recognized as one of the environmental community’s most prominent and influential critics of industrial agriculture and the nation’s broken approach to protecting families and children from toxic substances.   Dr. Zach Bush is a physician specializing in internal medicine, endocrinology, and hospice care. He is an internationally recognized educator and thought leader on the microbiome as it relates to health, disease, and food systems. Dr. Bush founded Seraphic Group and the non-profit Farmer’s Footprint to develop root-cause solutions for human and ecological health. His passion for education reaches across many disciplines, including topics such as the role of soil and water ecosystems in human genomics, immunity, and gut-brain health.   This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens, Cozy Earth, and Eight Sleep. Right now, when you purchase AG1 from Athletic Greens, you will receive 10 FREE travel packs with your first purchase by visiting athleticgreens.com/hyman. Get 40% off your Cozy Earth sheets. Just head over to cozyearth.com and use code MARK40. Check out Eight Sleep’s Pod Pro mattress or mattress cover and save $150 at checkout at eightsleep.com/mark. Full-length episodes of these interviews can be found here: Dr. Stephanie Seneff Ken Cook Dr. Zach Bush

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Glyphosate makes many, many other chemicals much more toxic than they would otherwise be because it disrupts the liver's ability to detoxify them. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Mark. I'm all about streamlining my daily health routine to be as powerful and yet simple as possible. And that's why I love AG1 from Athletic Greens. Because when it comes to my health, I want it all. I want my gut to function great, my brain to feel sharp, my immune system to be strong, my body to feel energized and able.

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Just go to CozyEarth.com and use the code MARK40 at checkout. That's CozyEarth.com, C-O-Z-Y-E-A-R-T-H.com with the code Mark40 and you'll check out and get the discount. I know you're going to love these sheets as much as I do. And now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, this is Lauren Fee and one of the producers of The Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. Sadly, the pesticide glyphosate is all pervasive. Glyphosate harms our bodies in numerous ways and can promote chronic health issues by causing leaky gut and leaky brain. It also interrupts the detoxification pathways and binds to minerals so the body can't absorb them. In today's episode, Dr. Hyman speaks with MIT

scientist Dr. Stephanie Seneff about the effects of glyphosate on the body, as well as with the president of the environmental working group, Ken Cook, on the background of glyphosate and why it's important for us to make wise choices to reduce our exposure to it. He also talks with Dr. Zach Bush about the quality of our soil and how our bodies have been affected by glyphosate. Let's dive in. When you are exposed to glyphosate, it seems to directly impact the microbiome by killing off your inner garden in ways that prevent it from actually protecting you in the way it's supposed to from disease. And the glyphosate seems to be responsible for increasing this widespread phenomena of leaky gut, which means that the barrier in the gut is broken somehow. And the proteins and the toxins from the bacteria and also food proteins leak, literally leak into your bloodstream, interact with your immune system and create a systemic response of inflammation.

And all the diseases that you mentioned, cancer, liver disease, autism, heart disease, diabetes. I mean, these are all inflammatory diseases. So take us down that road a little bit more in depth about how glyphosate, despite it being claimed as safe by the food companies for humans, animals and the environment, why it's not safe and how specifically the evidence is mounting around how it's connected to these various diseases. And we see that even in courts, while this may not be played out in regulatory changes, it's being played out in the courts where 14,000 lawsuits have been filed against glyphosate. And there's been billions in settlements against the Monsanto bear now, which actually owns Monsanto. So can you talk more about the science of how much do we know? How well is this proven? Is this just hearsay or is there good data linking glyphosate with these problems? Yes. Well, when you start with the gut microbes, and of course,

glyphosate is a metal chelator. That was the first way that it was patented. And when it traps, when it binds to minerals, it makes them unavailable to the gut microbes. That's part of the impact of how it disrupts them. It hits on a particular enzyme called EPSB synthase in the shikimate pathway. And that's a very, very important biological pathway in plants. And it's also very common in the microbes in our gut. Something like a study showed 54% of the gut microbes would be affected by this specific problem of the chicken mate pathway getting disrupted. That pathway produces the aromatic amino acids. And those are three of the coding amino acids that go into the proteins. And we depend upon getting them from our food or from our microbes, micro production of them, because our cells don't

have that chicken mate pathway, they can't make those proteins. So they can become deficient. And those proteins, those amino acids are really critical. The aromatics, this tryptophan, tyrosine, and phenylalanine, they're super critical for our health. And for example, tryptophan is a precursor to serotonin and melatonin. And those are neurotransmitters that are extremely important for proper brain function. Melatonin, you know, sleep disorder is going up dramatically in step with the rise in glyphosate, because probably in part because of disruption of melatonin supply. And serotonin is the mood hormone.

You know, it's related to depression, violent behavior, its deficiency. And they come out of that shikimate pathway. Also thyroid hormone. It comes out of the shikimate pathway as well. The different one of the different amino acid tyrosine rather than tryptophan. And so thyroid hormone is going to be disrupted. Many studies have shown that glyphosate disrupts thyroid homeostasis. So the hormones are getting disrupted. The amino acids are being depleted. Also those enzymes go to B vitamins and niacin and riboflavin. Niacin and riboflavin are precursors

to molecules called NAD and FAD, which are very, very important for metabolism. And their deficiency is going to disrupt the mitochondria. And I think mitochondria can make energy, right? You can't make energy. Right, you can't make energy. Mitochondrial dysfunction is central to so many diseases and I think it's also central to glyphosate's effects on the body. If I had to say one thing, I would say mitochondrial dysfunction as a key feature of what glyphosate does.

And many papers have shown that it causes oxidative stress, it causes depletion of glutathione, it causes glutathione to be oxidized, which is important because glutathione is a really important antioxidant only if it's reduced. Wow. So that's just a lot you unpacked there. Let me see if I got this right. If you're exposed to glyphosate, it harmfully affects the bacteria in your gut that produce really important amino acids that regulate your gene expression. And the pathway it disrupts is a shikimate pathway. And that leads to abnormal gene expression and not

being able to actually do the things your body's supposed to do. And it also seems to deplete glutathione, which you mentioned, which is a critical molecule for regulating inflammation, detoxifying antioxidant. It's really the center of our biology. And if it disrupts that, we're kind of screwed. Right. Glutathione is so important. And we're seeing so many people talking about taking glutathione as a supplement, taking antacetylcysteine as a precursor to glutathione. Methionine is the core essential sulfur- essential sulfur containing amino acid and it is a precursor to cysteine which goes to the defiant methionine synthesis is disrupted uh by any coli by glyphosate there was a study that showed that so it prevents the microbes and also prevents the plants from

producing methionine from inorganic sulfur so this this gives you again, a deficiency in the sulfur containing amino acids. So we have a deficiency both in the aromatics and in the sulfur containing amino acids. And they're so important for so many things. It's just uncountable practically the ways that that would impact particularly your metabolism, of course, also protein synthesis, and of course, all the hormones that are affected and the B vitamins, all of those things are going to be affected by these disruptions by glyphosate. And you're an MIT scientist. This is not some crazy fringe idea. This is you're you're you're an evidence based scientist. It's looking at the heart of the data and coming to these conclusions. Why?

Well, before we get into why the government hasn't figured this out yet, let's talk about other diseases and how good the evidence is. How good is the evidence around cancer, for example, or diabetes or autism or any of these autoimmune issues that you're talking about? Yeah, cancer is actually the hardest one to explain, and maybe the weakest one. In fact, I would say cancer, of course, evolves out of mitochondrial dysfunction, so eventually it causes it. Studies have shown that it enhances other chemicals' effects that would lead to cancer. In other words, a secondary effect. There are studies that have shown that. And there are also studies that have shown that it causes breast cancer cells in vitro to proliferate when they're exposed to extremely tiny levels in parts per trillion levels of glyphosate-induced proliferation in cancer cells. I think it does cause several different cancers, but it's a much

more difficult thing to explain than some of the other diseases. Liver disease is quite easy to explain, if you accept my theory, which we maybe should get into at this point, because that's crucial, my theory for its extremely unusual mechanism of toxicity. So just to back up for people, a liver is your detoxifying organ. And you hinted at how glyphosate interrupts sulfur metabolism, which is a critical part of our biology. And in functional medicine, there's a real focus on our sulfur biology because it's critical for detoxifying all the environmental compounds we're exposed to for metabolizing our own internal toxins and and people who have low glutathione which is the sulfur-based compound are sicker i remember reading one study that that if you looked at people who are hospitalized versus not hospitalized you know um if you if you have this general uh lower levels of glutathione based on a gene that is important regulating it you, 50% of the time you're going to be more likely to end up in the hospital.

So it's kind of a marker for overall health and well-being. And I personally have a lot of experience with glutathione because I had mercury poisoning and it gets very depleted. And I had to learn how to restore my sulfur metabolism and also something called methylation, which is the B vitamins because they're very interlocked. And when you think of your biochemistry, for those listening, it's like this big network of biochemical reactions. But right at the center of it is this two core systems that run all the time, literally every second, millions and millions of times a second, billions of times, probably called methylation and sulfation. And these pathways, I've written a lot about them in books and articles, but this is the key to health. It's the key to gene expression, to immune function, to detoxification, to cognitive function. I mean, it just goes on and on and on. So when this is screwed up,

it's not just like some sort of minor pathway that gets disrupted in human biology. It's a major pathway. So with that background, can you explain how glyphosate disrupts sulfur metabolism a little more clearly and explain what really the role of the sulfur is in maintaining health and why we should be terrified about glyphosate and sulfate. Right. I mean, I think glyphosate disrupts sulfate synthesis, sulfate activation, sulfate transport, and sulfate delivery. It disrupts every step of the way for sulfate.

And as you mentioned, mercury actually gets sulfated to detox it. If you can't sulfate the mercury, you're in trouble. I think that we have a systemic deficiency in sulfate in the glycocalyx, which is this in the lining of all the cells, like in the blood vessels. There's all this sulfate that populates these sugar molecules, complex sugar molecules in the lining of the blood vessels. Those need to be heavily sulfated to have the blood circulation work correctly.

And also for the cells to be able to receive signals and to bring in different things they're going to take in to digest it. It's just really central. Having enough sulfate around the exterior of the cell, it also gives the red blood cells negative charge, which is important for the zeta potential in the blood. There's just all these things that are connected to sulfate. And I talk a lot about sulfate in my book. It's actually been central to my understanding of where biology has gone wrong. And I felt sulfate was in trouble with autism and with heart disease many years ago, long before I knew about glyphosate. So the sulfate and the glyphosate really came together very nicely for me, for me to recognize how glyphosate is

causing autism and probably heart disease through sulfate issues. And as you mentioned, the sulfation, sulfation is very important for detoxing many of these fat soluble chemicals that they go to the liver. It takes the liver's job to detox them and it takes them up. It adds sulfate, oxidizes them, it adds sulfate. The enzymes that the cype enzymes that take that do that first step of detox are also suppressed by glyphosate. That's been shown in multiple studies. It suppresses the enzymes in the liver that modify these fat soluble molecules to make them to detox them and to make them water soluble so they can be removed through the urine. So what you're saying basically is when toxins

come in the liver, they have to be detoxified by the liver. And there are enzymes that do that, that are like the helpers. What you're saying is that glyphosate screws up those enzymes, so those chemicals can't get processed down the assembly line of detoxification. Yes. And of course, then those chemicals become much more toxic. So glyphosate makes many, many other chemicals much more toxic than they would otherwise be because it disrupts the liver's ability to detoxify them. And of course, glutathione is part of that problem because a lot of things get glutathionated to get removed as well. There's methylation, glutathionylation, sulfation. These are all steps that are taking the liver to change these molecules into something that's less toxic.

And that process gets broken down by glyphosate. So it's really quite remarkable, all the things that it can do to disrupt your health. The sulfate, the whole sulfate story has, in part, it's because these shikimate pathway, because the shikimate pathway produces those aromatics. For example, serotonin gets produced in large amounts in the gut, actually, and also melatonin. They both are produced in large amounts in the gut. They are sulfated before they're shipped out. And then they arrive in the brain in a sulfated form.

So I think the serotonin is actually transporting sulfate to the brain. This is something I talk a lot about. There's all these molecules that get sulfated in transit, not just the toxic chemicals, vitamin D, cholesterol, various sex hormones. They're all sulfated when they're shipped out. And then all these aromatics that come out of the shikimate pathway.

So those molecules become deficient, which means that the sulfate transporters become deficient, which means that the brain doesn't get enough sulfate. And autism is very strongly linked to heparin sulfate deficiency in the brain ventricles. That's really been a core feature of autism that's been shown in both mice and humans. And I think it's just because there's not enough sulfate being delivered to the brain. And the body does something very interesting to get around that, which is quite fascinating and also quite disturbing, which is that it produces hydrogen sulfide gas in the liver, in the gut. The autistic children produce hydrogen sulfide gas, which then floats up to the brain

and then gets oxidized in the brain to make sulfate. So it's a way to transport sulfate, a very sneaky way to transport sulfate by turning it into a gas turning the sulfur molecule into a gas hydrogen sulfide it also makes the kids poops really smelly and stinky yes and it also gives them brain fog because the hibernation is is all involved with hydrogen sulfide gas and basically people go into hibernation because they've got hydrogen sulfide floating in their brain their brain is and then of course you have to have oxidizing agents to oxidize it to sulfate, which gives you the inflammations, the inflammatory process in the brain that's characteristic of autism, this kind of chronic low-grade encephalopathy that's

a feature of autism is because the autistic brain is constantly trying to make sulfate from hydrogen sulfide gas. Okay. Wow. This is just so much information. I'm just loving this. I think just to unpack a little bit for people, you know, when you eat foods with glyphosate, which is 75% of all or 70% of all crops

and often it's used on GMO foods like soy, but even non-GMO foods is used on like wheat. It is a whole host of different ways in the body that it screws things up, right? So what you're saying,

it screws up this pathway that makes the neurotransmitters that help regulate gene expression important for cognitive function. It disrupts glutathione, which is critical for detoxification. It regulates immunity and oxidative stress. It also affects protein synthesis and immune function and can create a leaky gut, destroy the microbiome. So you've got all these mechanisms, not just one, but many mechanisms by which glyphosate destroys human health.

Right. Yeah. And people say, how can one chemical cause so many diseases? I showed all those charts. Nancy Swanson was the first one who started doing those charts. I don't know if you saw those of rise into various diseases, strongly, absolutely, practically, perfectly correlated with the rise in glyphosate usage on core crops over time. And it was just stunning. And P-values are 0.00000000, several zeros before the first significant digit of the correlations between these two trends in disease versus the rise in glyphosate usage. And, you know, people would say, well, they would say correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation. And then they would say, how could one chemical

cause so many diseases? And I was wondering that myself, but now I understand how, and it is this metal, it disrupts the whole, minerals are completely messed up. Iron, manganese, zinc, they become both toxic and deficient at the same time because of its ability to bind to them and hold on to them and prevent the natural system from transporting them properly. And then it's the sugar mate pathway getting wrecked. And that's all these aromatic amino acids and all the derivatives that are so important for our health are getting reduced. And then it's actually the cytopenzymes in the liver. These have all been shown in multiple studies that it's doing this.

The cytopenzymes in the liver getting suppressed, which is cytochrome P by 50 enzymes, which is stage one detoxification depressed. And then this inability for the gut microbes to convert inorganic sulfur into organic sulfur, which is going to give you methionine. And methionine, of course, is the methylation pathways. It's the sulfation pathways. Those are all going to be disturbed because of deficiency in methionine. And instead, is the methylation pathways. It's the sulfation pathways. Those are all going to be disturbed because of deficiency in methionine. And instead, the sulfur gets reduced to hydrogen sulfide gas, which then causes all these other problems. Wow. So it just jams up your biochemistry.

It's bottom line. It's just like throwing sand in an engine, basically, right? Right, right. Yes. Amazing. And there's a few other things I want to sort of touch on, which is glycine. Glycine is important. And it does affect our protein synthesis. And tell us how our body has swapped out glyphosate for glycine and what that what that does.

Yes. And that's a central topic of my book. That's almost the point of my book is to try to convince the audience that that's true. Because I've gotten, I've been saying this, Anthony Samson was the first one who suggested to me that might be happening, that it's substituting for glycine during protein synthesis. And at first I was skeptical because it has an extra piece attached to its nitrogen atom. It is a complete glycine molecule and it does disrupt glycine in various ways, that's known. But it also potentially could be substituting for glycine during protein synthesis. And there's no reason to stop it. It turns out because proline is a coding amino acid that also has an attachment to its nitrogen.

And it's still able to find there's another linkage that the nitrogen can hook up with the other because the amino acids have to hook up in a chain and the nitrogen is involved in the hook. They're like paper dolls holding hands and the nitrogen needs to hold hands. It has something in the way, another molecule in the way, but if there's enough room around, it can fit. So it turns out there's specific circumstances under which it will substitute. And this gets a little complicated in terms of the science, but it's quite, quite interesting because the enzyme in the shikimate pathway that gets disrupted by glyphosate has a glycine residue at the site where it binds the phosphate piece of phosphoenolpyruvate. So that enzyme binds that molecule at a place where glycine is highly conserved. And if you take that glycine out and replace it with alanine, which is just an extra methyl group, very small change, glyphosate can't

affect it at all. All of a sudden, it's completely immune to glyphosate once you remove that glycine. And they've shown that it is at that place where that glycine is that it disrupts the protein. They've shown that that's the spot. And they know that they can either remove that glycine or they can crowd it. They can put in other amino acids close by that will crowd the glycine and then the glyphosate won't fit anymore. So the argument they say is that glyphosate is replacing the substrate PEP. What I say is that it's replacing the glycine. So we have a very different view of how that enzyme is getting disrupted. If you say it's displacing the glycine, and if you say it can displace the glycine in other enzymes that have the same property, and there are many, many enzymes with very important functions that have glycine at a place that's highly conserved that binds phosphate, even that binds PEP, the same substrate.

And I suspect it's affecting many of those enzymes. It's that particular group of enzymes that are getting extremely disturbed by glyphosate and that have enormous roles in metabolism. And that's how you're going to get mitochondrial dysfunction, all kinds of things. Hey, everyone, it's Dr. Mark. You probably figured out by now that I'm super passionate about getting regular deep restful sleep. It's a foundational piece for optimizing metabolism, brain function, and pretty much our health as a whole. One hack that has made such a huge difference in my own sleep was keeping my bed nice and cool. And that's one of the reasons I love the ProPod cover from 8sleep. For me, the most common reason for waking up in the middle of the night is getting too hot. Even with the AC crank, sometimes my bed just gets really

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After it had been planted and it popped up, you could spray that field and kill all the weeds, but the crop would survive. That's the genesis of why we have so much Roundup in our world now, used on, as you say, hundreds of millions of acres. It's in air in the Midwest during the spray season. It comes down in the rain. It's everywhere. I liken it to, in a way, sort of the OxyContin, right? It was something that, at the beginning, had some merit, obviously, for therapeutic treatment of severe pain. And this was not the worst weed killer molecule out there, glyphosate. There are others that are worse.

What made it so bad was the greed to take it from a certain market level to a mass market level, multi, multi billion dollar market level where it was used everywhere and abused. Then they started using it at the end of the growing season for other crops that weren't genetically engineered to resist it, like wheat and oats. So they would spray wheat and oats right at the end of the season when it had grain on it. And that's probably why you got your 50th percentile, because when they did that late in the season, it was right there in the final food. And when that went to the miller, it stayed in. And when it went to the baker, it stayed in and it came out.

It's in hummus. We found it there. It's in Cheerios. Yeah. People don't realize it's the number one top product that contains glyphosate. The most amount is hummus. Yeah. Which is crazy.

It's bizarre, right? And people are eating it to get healthy. Right. And so, cause it was used on, you know, used on, on, on chickpeas at the end of the growing season to make the harvest easier and it's cheap. And so so all of these abuses, first of all, those end of season abuses, which probably account for most of the dietary exposure, the Biden administration should just go in and say no more post harvest or, you know, end of harvest use of glyphosate. That would immediately lower a lot of the exposure that we, you know, we experience in the food supply. But it really, it's a story about mistakes we make

over and over again in agriculture, where lunging for that big market, growing as much corn as you can, growing as much soybean as you can, and have the pesticides and fertilizers to go with, everybody makes a lot of money. As long as the system's working, but the accountability for the environment and health is close to non-existent. So for glyphosate, what we're saying now is, look, at minimum, we should end all of this late season use that gets it in our food. And then we should dramatically reduce use in residential and home situations where it's sprayed oftentimes by groundsmen. These are a lot of the cases that are the subject of the litigation now. They're spraying it out of backpack sprayers around their properties and so forth. That needs to end. We need to put very tight controls on that, if not banning the compound altogether. And then for agriculture generally, I think we need

investments in systems that don't require this uh heavy use of roundup they're they're available and out there but they're starved for money farmers you know like all the rest of us we you know we we do the things that we do if someone told me this the camera here on this uh computer was was carcinogenic and i couldn't use it anymore i'd be i'd be concerned right so but these are tools. We can fix the tools. We can fix the tools. That's what we need to have the leadership

at the federal level to do because the companies won't do it themselves. And what we've learned from so many of these cases you mentioned is there's consideration now of a multi-billion dollar, like a $12 billion settlement of thousands of cases where people have developed cancer. They've gone to court and said it was caused by glyphosate.

And they've won a lot of these court cases. What we really need to think through is that if going forward, we can avoid some of these chemical exposures and reduce that cancer incidence. And if we can make sure that when these suits are settled, they direct Monsanto, now Bayer, to make some changes in how this chemical is used in the economy, we'd be much better off. But the real thing that has broken through here is when we, from the discovery in these lawsuits, we've realized that Monsanto knew a long time ago that there were problems with this chemical. They didn't tell anybody. They hid the information, but that has come out now in juries. And that's really what gets men on juries upset. It's not the toxicity

per se. It's that they were lied to, right? and I think that behind many of these chemicals, PFAS chemicals to Teflon chemicals, many of the pesticides we worry about behind them as a story of, of companies knowing there were problems and not, not being required to, or not, you know, not complying with the duty to report and explain that this is toxic stuff. They knew that, but they didn't tell us. Now, the Environmental Working Group has been really at the forefront of highlighting these chemicals, doing the research on them, bringing this to light to policymakers. And maybe you could share a little bit of the successes that you've had around getting rid of these chemicals in our food, water, air, agriculture, because I don't think there's

been any other group that has been as effective in using science and data to change policy as the environmental working group. Oh, well, thanks. Well, and I know you're, you start with science yourself. So I really appreciate the compliment coming from you, Mark. No, we've gone about it in a number of ways. One way is we do research and present it to federal agencies. We take it to Capitol Hill and make the case, hey, look, this chemical is posing risks that shouldn't be accepted. We need to fix our regulatory system. We need to enact stronger laws.

We need to take action in regulatory agencies. And we've had considerable success on a number of chemicals, like the perfluorinated chemicals, the Teflon chemicals. We're instrumental in getting federal action on a few of those. Much more needs to be done. Chlorpyrifos, our work in the 90s helped take it out of a lot of uses, particularly around the home. And there are many other examples. That's a pesticide. That's a pesticide. Chlorpyrifos is a bug killer, an insecticide. So pesticides are weed killers, bug killers, rodenticides that kill rats and stuff. In that mix, the insecticides and fungicides tend

to be some of the most toxic. And we've worked on all of those as well as Roundup. But you know, the real thing that's changed, Mark, and it's been exciting to see it. We don't know exactly where it's going to go. Because the internet allows us to engage with so many people simultaneously and get feedback from them and inform them at a pretty low cost point. We don't have to go through a front page story in the New York Times to get information to people anymore. They can come directly to us. They can come to your podcast and so forth.

That has begun to build an awareness in people that companies are beginning to listen to. I mean, it's behind the growth in organic food and agriculture, certainly behind efforts to clean up personal care products, the work we've done, rating cosmetics and cleaning products and so forth. What I'm excited about now is that we no longer have to just rely on the government taking action as the first step. We can start with consumers taking action to protect themselves and their families, companies starting to listen to that. And we often then find the companies come with us to Capitol Hill and say, you know, it's time to change the playing field, add some tough new rules. Our consumers want it.

The market's demanding it. Let's take action. So it's instead of really saying that the market is substituting for the government, it's really market forces that can be harnessed to support civil action, to support change at the regulatory level and the legislative level. We're seeing just this year we had almost two dozen chemicals banned in California from personal care products. We had the agreement of the industry to do it. They were outmoded. Some companies still use them, but not the majority. Consumers were rejecting them in the marketplace. And so we came together with the Trade Association for the cosmetics industry and worked together to get those banned. It's different than the way it worked when I was coming up as a lobbyist where you'd take science to Capitol Hill. You'd hear feedback from bipartisan people of goodwill. They'd pass a law. They'd pass regulations after the law.

And industry would comply. It doesn't work that way anymore. Now, science comes out. Consumers see it first in many cases. They start changing their behavior. Companies pay attention. When they pay attention, they realize that maybe they need to go to the government because if they're doing the right thing and other companies are sneaking by and doing the bad

thing, they're at an economic disadvantage for what they're trying to do the right way. So it's just shifted the dynamics in some interesting ways. So your personal behavior can matter, not just for your own health, but when you add it up in the marketplace, it creates a demand for better behavior from companies and that's translating into policy slowly. Now, that's exactly what I want to talk about next, because EWG is not only focused on the hard work of bringing science to policymakers and getting various chemicals banned or regulated. You created an interface with the consumer, which has actually been among your most successful efforts, because you could bang your head against the wall a long time in Congress and the White House and agencies,

and you realize that by going directly to the consumer and providing them with tools to understand what they were exposed to and how to avoid those chemicals, that it creates the demand, which then drives the free market businesses to change their supply, which then wants them to change the regulation. So it's this beautiful virtuous cycle. First thing that we did was study gut lining because we had come, John Gilday had done a lot of work around, you know, deep reading and understanding of glyphosate, which is the roundup, you know, active compound herbicide, most ubiquitous chemical that we spray in the world, over 4 billion pounds a year now into our soil systems, water system around the world. And so this molecule was ever-present in his mind.

And one of the main things that this molecule was becoming recognized to be capable of was destroying barriers. And so it could break down the gut barrier, it could break down the blood-brain barrier, kidney tubules, and this would lead to a leaky sieve event and the chronic inflammation in the population. And so, of course, the debut in 1976, and then the spraying directly of wheat in 1992, and then the GMO crop, a Roundup Ready genetic modification in 1996, you can see that the uptick in chronic disease, autoimmune disease, inflammatory conditions of neurologic degenerative conditions, all of these upticking with every introduction. And the ground zero seemed to be in this protein

destruction of the tight junctions. These are the Velcro-like proteins. As soon as we put this one- That's what people call leaky gut, right? Leaky gut, leaky brain, leaky kidneys. And the symptoms tend to be bloating, poor digestion, poor energy level, fatigue after meals, cravings, poor sex drive, poor sleep quality, brain fog, short-term memory loss, and then inflammatory conditions of vascular disease, diabetes, metabolic collapse, OPC. All of that is set up by the breakdown of the single protein, which is so interesting that ground zero is like boiled

down simply. The Velcro that holds all of those cells together is called tight junctions. And as soon as we put this communication network back in, we saw something extraordinary happening, which was cells knew how to lace themselves back together. So we could destroy a gut membrane, small intestine, or colon immediately. Within six minutes of roundup, you've got massive leak going on. But if you gave it back a wireless communication network made by the microbiome, those cells would lace themselves right back up into a cohesive, coherent, highly protective barrier. Subsequently, we've shown this on the blood-brain barrier. We've shown that the relationship between the gut and the brain injury is very interlaced.

If you give Roundup and gluten, for example, to the brain barrier directly, it doesn't do much. But if you first give gluten and Roundup to the gut lining, then the blood barrier blows apart. And so it's so interesting to see how this cascade of putting this chemical Roundup into our food system set us up for this breakdown in these different barrier systems. And it's so beautiful that here is the chemical that we're destroying planet Earth's soils with, and yet she planted as an antidote to this chemical, these compounds within her soils 60 million years ago.

And that's how we extract these carbon molecules. We go to a fossil layer of soil in the Southwest United States, and we then bring that to our labs. We crush that into nanoparticles, and we go through a multistage process to liberate small carbon molecules and get hydrogen to bond to the oxygens again and get a redox effect and when that system of communication from fossil soils goes back in to a modern human experience it's unbelievable you know what can happen and again it's not because the compound's doing anything it's because the human cell is capable of that and when it's grounded in the intelligence

of soil when it's grounded in the intelligence of soil, when it's grounded in the intelligence of nature. And so that's been the journey towards this extraordinary realization that if we don't fix the agricultural industry, we're going to fail. So now our biotech company, with all of its supplements, are channeling all of our profits back into root cause solutions. And one of those being our nonprofit, which is an awareness and education effort to allow chemical farmers to realize that they're actually the most potent members of change for the transformation of human health. And this is poignant because

they are facing the highest levels of chronic disease in the world. The last 90 miles of the Mississippi River that collects some 80% of the roundup in our environment is cancer alleys. We see farmers with third time, fifth time cancers of different organ systems. Their children are affected by ADHD and autism and brain defects. And I've seen just the most horrific stories of tragic human health on these farms as we've been filming over the years in these environments. And so you can only imagine how devastating it is to, I give these talks out with PowerPoint presentations, literally in farm fields. And so it'll go dark while I'm showing a part.

And these farm families are just riveted, sitting around on bales of hay, listening to this story, realizing that their children's diseases that they're treating and their own cancer is coming from the very chemicals they have to handle every single day. Well, you just said so much, and I'm just literally blown away in awe because this is such an untold story that within the soil itself is the answer to the damage that we've done to the soil and ourself through the chemicals we've used in our agricultural system. So glyphosate, Roundup, like you said, it's 4 billion. I've heard 6 billion pounds. It's the most abundant agrochemical that's been used in the world. It is used on 70% of crops.

It's abundant in things that we wouldn't even think of. The top two sources of glyphosate in our diet are hummus, basically garbanzo beans, and lentils, which you think of, oh, that's a healthy, that's a plant-based diet. But unless they're grown organically, it's not just the GMO soybeans. And it has, you know, vast effects on the soil, which I want you to get into, including chelating all the minerals, so the plants get the minerals. It destroys the mycorrhizal fungi, which are this network of fungi in the soil that are necessary for the plants to extract the nutrients. It's just so complex. What you're saying is that when you looked at this ancient soil,

you were able to extract compounds that then you can use to fix the damage that's done to humans from the glyphosate, which is just mind-blowing when you think about it. It's mind-blowing. And I think when you're talking about leaky gut and the gut permeability and tight junctions, I think this is really the foundation of functional medicine, which is looking at the gut and how the gut has led to so many chronic illnesses. So when you look at the microbiome, it's linked to everything from depression to cancer to heart disease to diabetes to obesity to Alzheimer's to autism to ADD to, you know, you name it,

autoimmune diseases, allergic disorders, and a lot of it has to do with leaky gut. And it's not the only reason, but glyphosate clearly is a factor in driving this and has so many broad implications for how we treat ourselves. And what's so striking is that, and I've heard you talk about this, is that now there's this change that happened around glyphosate where Monsanto was bought by Bayer. And now they're trying to shut down glyphosate. They're paying billions of dollars in settlements and they're putting in this new chemical Liberty, something I think you talked about that I think is actually maybe worse.

So, you know, how do we then begin to shift the agricultural system to one that actually gets rid of these chemicals, that actually helps to restore soil, that helps to solve some of these problems at the root, and actually deals with human health problems by fixing the soil. Yeah, beautiful. Yeah, I think, you know, to begin with the mind-blowing part, you know, the reason we're going to 60 million year old soil for our source is because, again, the more biodiversity you have in the bacteria and fungi in a soil system, the more diverse

you have of these carbon molecules. And the importance of that is that in different pHs and different osmolalities and different changing environments throughout your own gut or throughout organ systems as they change, there's different carbon molecules that are going to be more available, more bioavailable, more biofunctional at those different environments. And so the more biodiversity you can get in that communication network, the more effective you're going to be at lacing all of this together. And the striking thing is just how little soil is left on the planet. We are now calculating that 97% of the world's soils are severely depleted. And it's just jaw-dropping how much damage we've done in such a short period of time with chemical agriculture as we scale that globally.

And so it's really a 50-year story of chemicals, but interestingly, it was over plowing that destroyed the soil infrastructure before the chemicals hit. Yeah, right. Tilling. The tilling is really damaging to the, you mentioned mycorrhizae, which are totally bizarre structure, but the mycelium is the root system of the fungal world. And then in this bizarre quantum relationship with root fibroids, they inspire this totally new structure called the mycorrhizae to appear. And nobody understands what mycorrhizae is.

Nobody knows how mycorrhizae knows how to be mycorrhizae because it can't, it doesn't exist as an entity. If you have lots of mycelium around, it doesn't exist. If you have lots of plants around with root fibroids, you have to have the combination of the fungal world with a complex multicellular plant world before you can get mycorrhizae to form. And so it's some bizarre like exudate or hyperintelligence between these species systems that will or corn is we're talking about a biophotonic phenomenon where you have solar radiation coming in with all of its energy potential hitting the surface of the earth and its plant life or microbial life within the soils. And then there's an intelligent process in which that biophotonic energy is transmuted to ATP or in the plant. It's different little things like chlorophyll and all of the phosphorescent plasmids

that create energy within the plant, biomutating, biotransmuting the biophotonic energy of the sun into soil energy. And the soil energy is picked up by this interesting mix of microbiome between bacteria and fungi that's then passed into this electrophotonic transfer mechanism of the mycorrhizae that will then go into the root system of the plant and take that back and plant it will then go into an animal consumer human or otherwise and so that's this beautiful complex system and then you take roundup and it functions as an antimicrobial at every level. And so it's been patented as an antibiotic, it's been patented as an antifungal, antiparasite. And so it starts to

come into this chemical, you know, this beautiful array of biophotonic transformation through all of these species interaction and starts breaking the cycles. And so what we've achieved through a very short period of time is a soil that's devoid of the nutrient and energy density, the little biophotonic energy that it would get from the sun because it's lost its workforce. And that workforce can no longer translate that information into something like a plant. And so we grow through petroleum inputs, green plants,

that are devoid not only of nutrients. Nitrogen fertilizer. Yeah, nitrogen is MPKk so it's nitrogen phosphorus and potassium and so the mpk fertilizer is used to create green plants that grow fast and have high yield but they're lacking that intelligence of that whole system that we just described and so not only are our soils depleted they've lost the mechanisms by passing energy on through from sun to plant to human. And so this is why I believe we look like we do as a society right now where recent Medicaid screenings are showing 52% of our children with a chronic disorder or disease by the time they're 16.

That's compared to 1.2% in the 1960s right before we debuted these chemicals. Wait, wait, wait. You just said one in two kids have a chronic disease? Chronic disorder or disease. So some of them we don't call diseases, but we call it asthma or eczema or immune sensitivity to their food or the air they breathe or whatnot. That's staggering. 52% of our children by this time. Staggering.

One in two kids. Yeah. And at first when you say that statistic, you're like, that can't be right. Until you walk into an elementary school and take a look around the room, and you can immediately see kids not only with eczema, you can see kids with full-blown psoriasis in elementary school now. And so the amount of gut disruption that you need to develop an autoimmune condition near psoriasis is devastating.

And then you see this explosion of leukemias, lymphomas, and weird sarcomas in children that used to appear in 80-year-olds are showing up in children under the age of two now. And so we're showing this just decimation of biologic youth or regenerative capacity within human biology in this most recent generation. The scary thing is right now we're looking at generation number two of roundup babies.

In our rodent studies that we just reviewed for the EPA, the third generation is where the devastation really gets out of control. Yeah, I saw that. We've never seen that generation. It's after genetic effects. It's generation three. So if the grandmother gets exposed, the mother may or may not get sick, but the little grand rat gets sick and they get kidney disease and cancer

and all sorts of hormonal disruptions and endocrine things, which is kind of scary, and they've never been exposed. So it's these transgenerational effects that actually have consequences and things we can't even imagine on our children. And I think that these dots are not getting connected. Why do you think there's so much resistance to actually looking at the science around this? Because there seems to be ample science. I mean, the EPA has said it's safe.

Trump said to the makers of Roundup, don't worry, we got your back during these lawsuits. I mean, I think, you know, how do we kind of break through and get people to really understand the impact of glyphosate as one of the most noxious compounds that's ever been invented? And by the way, it came from the same people that brought you Agent Orange, dioxin, PCBs, and DDT. So they're in good company. Yeah, they've been masters at toxins. They know their industry well. So they're masters of their trade. You know, I think, you know, I've given up with the EPA, you know, with this last cycle, just in November, you know,

me and a team of nonprofit and scientists showed up and we just reviewed 96, you know, scientific studies done in universities and private labs around the world over the last few years showing that the extreme toxicity of Roundup. And at the end of that, the, the director of the EPA panel that we were, you know, presenting to stood up and said, everything that you've just presented is irrelevant to us. We're regulated, regulators, not scientists. You haven't filled out any forms to suggest how, how this is relevant to us. And, you know, and, and furthermore, you know,

we were really hammering on this generational toxicity as our toxicity as like the most scary piece of data out there. And she said, and by the way, there was a piece of legislation passed two and a half years ago that makes it illegal for the EPA to consider generational toxicity data. So your argument is irrelevant to us. And so that was the end of that, you know, that hour and a half of effort, you know, of science demonstration. So at that moment, I was like, okay, you change cannot come through these regulatory environments, it's never gonna, never gonna be fast enough. And there's too much special interest, you know, mounted against change in this industry that drives billions and billions and billions of dollars, it really pales in comparison. So, you know, Monsanto sold for $66 billion. And that was pennies on the dollar because they

had all this pent up court system taxation that Bayer bought with it. And so Bayer just settled for $6 billion, which was only 10% of the purchase price of Monsanto. And now they own 85%, 90% of the seed industry for 70% of the land around us and everything else. So it's just an insane amount of ownership that this German company now has over the else. So it's just an insane amount of ownership that this German company now has over the world. And they're the ones that of course, put out Liberty Link, as you mentioned. And so Liberty Link is another GMO that was approved by European Union and US and Canadian regulators just a year before they made the move to buy Monsanto. And so they got their own GMO approval.

And now you can see the smart business decision like, okay, we want to get this new thing on the market, but Monsanto has the whole corner on the market. The only thing we can do to really move Liberty Link in in a meaningful way is to buy Monsanto. And yeah, they've got a bad press. Everybody hates Monsanto now. And yeah, they've got all this 10,000 cases,

and now it's over 30,000 cases in the court system that are, you know, trying to sue them for their cancer that they've developed from Roundup. What we'll do is we can buy that up. We can then, you know, sell the hell out of Roundup for the next few years while the court system slog along. And then we could sweep in as the, as the white knight, perhaps, and savior and say, Oh, we're taking glyphosate off the market. You're a stupid American company. Hit all this data from you that they knew it

was causing cancer. And they're just evil people, but we're good people were pulled out of the market and we brought you Liberty link and liberally link. Unfortunately it's already growing throughout the whole Midwest United States. It's already, you know, very prevalent GMO crop and it's scarily it's sprayed with a chemical that it's genetically modified to handle, which instead of disrupting the glycine amino acid pathways that glyphosate does, it disrupts glufosinate and some of these other amino acids that are critical for human reproduction.

And so the mix of having this residual of roundup in our systems for another 50 years combined with this new toxin getting integrated, we can really start to map out the extinction of humankind over the next few decades. And then glad to say last for up to 20 years in the soil, right? Yeah. The very, the very between, you know, six hours if you live into Monsanto and then out to 50 years, depending on which science.

Yeah. I heard a scary fact that, that, you know, ch hours if you listen to Monsanto and then out to 50 years, depending on which science you're looking at. Yeah, I heard a scary fact that, you know, chelates minerals. So it literally binds to minerals and it sticks on them like glue. And so your whole wheat, which has more minerals because it's whole, has 40 times the glyphosate as white flour, which you think you're doing something good for yourself, but you're not. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. One of the best ways you can support this podcast is by leaving us a rating and review below. Until next time, thanks for tuning in. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introduce to you all the experts that I know

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