Episode 43: Dr. Stephanie Seneff, PhD On How Glyphosate Is Impacting Gut and Immune Health

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SPEAKERS: Dr. Andrew Wong, Dr. Stephanie Seneff, PhD

“The government tells you glyphosate is safe it’s not true you really need to watch out for it, you need to watch out for it in your, in your local environment in the air in the water, and especially in the food to minimize your glyphosate exposure by being very careful about what you eat”- Dr. Stephanie Senef, PhD

If you could name one word for why you should eat organic foods what would that be? I think that word is glyphosate. Glyphosate is one of the most widely used herbicides in the United States sprayed in agricultural urban and suburban areas. It is a ubiquitous chemical that is becoming increasingly concerning to human health and overall planetary health and increasingly hard to avoid. Today’s guest Dr. Stephanie Seneff is joining us today for an important conversation about what glyphosate is and why it has widespread impacts on human and overall environmental health and I believe today’s conversation is one of the most important podcasts that we have taped. Dr. Seneff is senior research scientist at the MIT computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory for over three decades. Her research interests have always been at the intersection of biology and computation. In recent years Dr. Seneff has focused her research interests back towards Biology concentrating mainly on the relationship between nutrition and health. Since 2011 she has published over 30 papers together with colleagues and various peer-reviewed and medical and health-related journals on topics such as modern-day diseases including Alzheimer’s, Autism, and Cardiovascular diseases.

I am Dr. Andrew Wong. Co-founder of Capital Integrative Health. This is a podcast dedicated to transforming the consciousness around what it means to be healthy and understanding the root causes of disease and wellness. Don’t miss this important conversation about glyphosate and the impacts on your digestion, microbiome, brain health and mood immune system, and much more.

Dr. Wong

Great! Well, thank you so much Dr. Seneff for being here today to talk about glyphosate.

Dr. Seneff

I’m delighted to be here thank you.

Dr. Wong

So first of all let’s discuss for the listeners some of the basics. What is glyphosate and how does it work and why is it so important?

Dr. Seneff

Yeah. Glyphosate is the active ingredient in the pervasive herbicide roundup which a lot of people know about they know roundup they don’t necessarily know glyphosate and it’s very familiar to people because you can go get it at the garden shop and can zap your dandelions or kill the weeds in your walkway. It’s considered to be extremely safe and the government doesn’t regulate it at all so people can just go buy it. They don’t have to have any kind of you know permission and it’s used very very extensively in agriculture for the foods and so it ends up as a contaminant in many many food products. Government thinks it’s safe, they don’t measure how much is in the food they don’t care so it’s very, we’ve been told from way back that it’s a very safe chemical so that’s really getting in the way of people appreciating the dangers of it.

Dr. Wong

I think you’ve had on the right tack, right away which is that essentially if we find something that’s very you know we can go to a hardware store and get roundup we can go to you know Lowe’s or Home Depot right? I mean so it must be safe right?

Dr. Seneff

Right. Exactly yeah. It’s very very casual about how you use it and I think a lot of people who are using it in their yard are not aware they need to be careful.

Dr. Wong

Right, right. And then you know we know that you know it’s being used as a herbicide but essentially I think what you say in your book too is that there’s a lot of pervasive and multi-systemic you know from a functional approach sort of effects on both human health but also it sounds like the health of all creatures.

Dr. Seneff

Right. The ecosystem has really been messed up by glyphosate in my opinion.

Dr. Wong

So let’s kind of take a deeper dive now into how glyphosates affects the human body, especially with the shikimate pathway. I think that’s a good, good place.

Dr. Seneff

That is a good place to start, yes. And that is the pathway that it disrupts in the plants. All plants have a shikimate biological pathway and there’s a particular enzyme in the pathway called epsp synthase and they have figured out that enzyme really gets messed up by glyphosate it gets severely suppressed and that causes huge problems for the plant because it depends upon the pathway to produce the aromatic amino acids those are three of the coding amino acids of the famous DNA code that assemble into proteins and they’re also precursors to a lot of other really important biological molecules in the plant but also in the human. So what happens with us is that our gut microbes have that pathway they have that enzyme and they’re affected by glyphosate when it’s in our food or in our water or in, even in our air, and the microbes that are harmed by it so they become sick but they also that pathway, in particular, is disrupted and so there are many things that the microbes do for the host that depend on that pathway and so we become deficient in a lot of really critical nutrients and biologically active molecules and in particular, for example, those aromatic amino acids are precursors to the neurotransmitters, dopamine, serotonin melatonin, and also they come, they are converted into melanin in the skin tanning agent and also thyroid hormone and several B vitamins. So there’s a whole bunch of really important biologically active molecules that are going to be suppressed, will be less available because of the effect of glyphosate on the plants as well as on the microbes in our gut.

Dr. Wong

So glyphosate is really affecting both the microbiome and in our bodies as well as human cells and in addition to the microbiome is that right?

Dr. Seneff

Well, because the human cells depend upon the microbiome to produce these

Dr. Wong

Oh, indirect.

Dr. Seneff

Aromatic amino acids then, they become, everything that comes from them becomes deficient.

Dr. Wong

Right, right. Because I think the argument is that you know, I think, like you said in your book, glyphosate is safe is quote-unquote safe to humans because human cells don’t use that shikimate pathway but because human cells depend on the microbiome and the bacteria that do you use a shikimate pathway that’s where we get, we get some harm from that.

Dr. Seneff

Right and not only do they not, microbes are not only not able to make those products but microbes also get sick because that pathway is affecting their health and so we get a complete imbalance in the gut microbiome with a loss of critical you know beneficial bacteria. Lactobacillus and Bifidobacteria in particular are hit hard by glyphosate.

Dr. Wong

You’re saying glyphosate preferentially affects the beneficial microbes?

Dr. Seneff

Those are fibers yes. Well, those two, in particular, I hope those two classes the lactobacillus and the bifidobacteria are really important, especially in the infant gut. The infant gut should be dominated by lactobacillus but that gets, it gets so hurt by the glyphosate that other microbes get a chance to proliferate and become more dominant, and often those are pathogens like clostridium, desulfovibrio.

Dr. Wong

So even maybe, even someone that was vaginally born and is breastfeeding and stuff but then they’re eating a lot of foods either through you know breast milk or some conventional solids that are contaminated with glyphosate that might actually disrupt that shikimate pathway and thus the gut microbiome.

Dr. Seneff

That’s right.

Dr. Wong

Yeah. That’s, that’s incredible. We had Joe Pizzorno on recently, he had talked about glyphosate kind of touching on it a little bit because he was talking about toxins in general and he was saying that glyphosates there’s some other parts other like petrochemicals in the ground up so it’s like not just glyphosate but other things as well, is that right?

Dr. Seneff

That is absolutely correct and in fact, this is something that I’m well aware of as researchers have shown Monsanto when they did their studies to see if glyphosate was safe, they always used pure glyphosate in the studies but when they created the formulations they added things to it in particular petrochemicals, surfactants you know adjuvants things that would make the both, make the glyphosate more toxic and that were toxic in and of themselves and professor Seralini in France has done a lot of work on that to show that those adjuvants those things that are added to the formulation should have been studied as well and they should have been studied along with glyphosate used together. In fact, even when they evaluated the GMO crops that were designed to be resistant to glyphosate I was really shocked to find this out when they did safety studies on the GMO of these crops that have a GMO bacterial gene inserted into them to make them resistant to glyphosate they did not expose those crops to glyphosate in the evaluation of their safety which is really shocking so they evaluated the safety of the GMO in the context of a situation where the product was not used which is completely foolish because they know that if you’ve got that GMO you’re going to use glyphosate.

Dr. Wong

So it sounds like the food chain is rife with these GMOs that have glyphosate and these unnamed petrochemicals without really safety, real safety studies it sounds like.

Dr. Seneff

Absolutely, yeah. And it’s, it’s just. Also, there’s other issues that this, Seralini also pointed this out that, or showed it in his own studies they had declared that you only had to look for three months when you’re evaluating toxicity of a chemical with mouse studies you only have to look for three months if you don’t see anything after three months you’re good to go and he repeated the study that Monsanto had done exactly the same study only he kept going after three months and by three months he wasn’t seeing any real evidence of harm. Troubles started appearing after four months and by the time the experiment was done over the entire lifetime of the rats they had the males had kidney damage and liver damage the females had massive mammary tumors and both genders had issues with reproductive issues and they had early death, they died prematurely. All of those things showed up but it took a long time this is with a low dose of glyphosate and end of roundup they did both.

Dr. Wong

It’s kind of like pharmaceutical safety studies with you know eight weeks, “yep everything’s fine” you know, right?

Dr. Seneff

Exactly. We don’t want to look too long because we don’t want to find what we might find.

Dr. Wong

Yeah. I mean, obviously, some pharmaceuticals are beneficial just like you know there’s probably roles for different things but looking at something long-term. We know that you know in an organism that’s exposed to glyphosate it’s not gonna a lot of you know humans are not gonna live usually for only three months right? It’s going to be much more than that so we have to look at the long-term effects as well. Let’s go into human health a bit I know that’s one of your specialties one of your and a research specialist published a lot of papers on this connection between environmental toxicity, human disease. So what are the main connections that you can kind of link between glyphosate, glyphosate exposure, glyphosate levels, and chronic disease?

Dr. Seneff

Yeah. That’s a huge one and of course, you see it in analysis of trends, disease trends that’s what’s really really striking and Nancy Swanson was the one Dr. Nancy Swanson who first kind of started this idea of looking at the databases that the government provides readily available online. Health databases there’s both a hospital discharge data and of course there’s death statistics what do people die of and you can look at it over time and draw a plot and when you do that and then you compare it to the rise in glyphosate usage on core crops you find that there are many many diseases and conditions that are going up in our population exactly in step with the rise in glyphosate usage on core crops and we have a number of different slides you know both in papers and slides where we show incredible correlations. Autism of course comes to mind immediately because there’s a perfect match between the autism and first grade and the accumulated use of glyphosate over four years before that time so from the age of two to the age of six in the child’s life the levels of glyphosate in the environment and then plotted against autism at first the two groups coincide they have a perfect match.

Dr. Wong

I’m curious if there’s any individual data on looking at urinary levels of glyphosate and disease.

Dr. Seneff

There is, there are. There are actually and I can think of at least a couple one is pregnant women looking at glyphosate levels in the urine in pregnancy and then looking at the girl babies that were born this is a recent paper and there’s a metric you can use on the formation of genitals where it’s the distance but anything’s called the, you know, it’s the anal genital distance is what it’s called is a symmetric on the on the form and if it’s long that’s an indicator of excess testosterone exposure in utero and they showed a statistically significant correlation between the level of glyphosate in the urine of the mom while she was pregnant and this metric and this and when you have this metric a girl baby who has this problem they are much more susceptible I think it’s like 14 times as susceptible to polycystic ovary syndrome which is a very common form it’s a very common condition in women that causes infertility. Those people often have irregular periods or no periods at all have very lot of difficulty getting pregnant and also that condition PCOS is associated with increased risk to autism and increased risk to producing children with autism. So all of that connects together. Autism is also I think connected to too much testosterone in utero in the male. So it’s expressed differently in the two genders and that’s probably why the males have a much higher likelihood of autism than the females because it is this disruption of the production of estrogen in the brain which makes a big difference a bigger difference for the female for the male then for the female in utero so the males don’t have nearly enough estrogen in the brain that disrupts their brain development and that’s because it’s a very clear reason I always look for the underlying you know biological reason and glyphosate has been shown to suppress an enzyme called aromatase which converts testosterone to estrogen. So that’s all very clean story and there’s another study that showed urinary levels of glyphosate correlated with liver disease this was fatty liver disease and the ones who had the disease versus didn’t have a disease or a statistically significant difference in the levels of glyphosate in the urine and among those who had the disease the ones who had more severe disease had more glyphosate than the ones who had a more benign case. So that was again clear evidence that glyphosate was linked to this fatty liver disease.

Dr. Wong

So just a little brief public service announcement for those of you who just listened to the glyphosate being a possible aromatase inhibitor all the bodybuilders out there don’t take glyphosate just testosterone, that’d be the worst thing right?

Dr. Seneff

Right, I know.

Dr. Wong

EDC. Endocrine Disrupting Chemical. I think a big topic you know, we, you know talk about a lot in functional medicine, functional nutrition, etc. Just root cause medicine overall is a leaky gut, right?

Dr. Seneff

Yes, absolutely.

Dr. Wong

We talk about permeability, are we absorbing nutrients and things like that, does glyphosate cause leaky gut as well?

Dr. Seneff

Yes it does and absolutely and in fact there are studies peer-reviewed studies that have shown that Zach Bush is a

Dr. Wong

Zach Bush.

Dr. Seneff

Yes right. He’s an author on these multiple studies where they showed experimentally I think in rats that the glyphosate disrupted the gut barrier now it increased the expression of an enzyme called Zonulin, and Zonulin causes this response that involves a leaky gut barrier.

Dr. Wong

So I want to get back to Zach Bush once we get into possible therapeutics for this but it sounds like there could be something there. What about other conditions? I think we think about certainly brain issues, brain fog, cognitive decline, depression, anxiety. Any links there between glyphosate and those?

Dr. Seneff

Absolutely. I think it’s quite clear and there’s again studies coming out even in mice and rats they’ve shown they’ve shown that glyphosate exposure causes depression-like symptoms you know in the mice and again not very high doses, low doses of glyphosate can cause depression and that could be connected to serotonin. I think because serotonin is one of the hormones as a neurotransmitter that is comes out of that shikimate pathway. So you have suppressed levels of serotonin in the brain. Serotonin is called the feel-good hormone so it’s causing depression I think in part probably through that melatonin is another one that is comes out of the shikimate pathway produced in the pineal gland and in the evening and it’s very critical for sleep you know people a lot of people taking melatonin to help them sleep we have a huge problem with sleep disorder and that’s one of the conditions that we showed is going up exactly in step for the rising glyphosate usage on core crops and I think that’s part of the reason for that is the melatonin deficiency due to glyphosate suppressing the shikimate pathway in the microbes and in the foods in the past.

Dr. Wong

Such a big issue because you know even with people eating organic and we’ll even test people’s urinary levels of glyphosate on a functional lab test and they still have some of them are even high or they’re definitely detectable, right? We know that there’s no safe level is that correct?

Dr. Seneff

No, I don’t think there’s any safe level. In fact, there’s some evidence that lower doses are more toxic than higher doses and that’s because of this whole effective endocrine disruptor it’s become well known that toxic chemicals that act as endocrine disruptors are more toxic at low doses because it’s at those low doses that they can pretend to be some kind of an endocrine signal and you get these incorrect endocrine responses and so the hormones get all messed up and I think and glyphosate is very clearly an endocrine disruptor it’s become very clear actually in recent studies.

Dr. Wong

And if the level is too high or if the level’s too high that would provide some negative feedback to the system too.

Dr. Seneff

Yeah. I don’t know. I think it, I think it has to do with the fact that at the low levels it imitates the appropriate concentration to be effective as binding to the receptors and doing its thing whereas if there’s too much and maybe doesn’t, that doesn’t work correctly anymore I think it’s at the levels that are appropriate for an endocrine thing

Dr. Wong

It fits into the parking space on the receptor

Dr. Seneff

Yeah! Exactly it becomes a signal. It’s quite interesting, it’s quite surprising. You wouldn’t think of that offhand, you wouldn’t believe it but it turns out to be true for plastics have that property too.

Dr. Wong

Got it. Well, let’s get into the rabbit hole. I think maybe some of the listeners want to talk about immune system health and COVID-19 you know we’re taping this in 2022 so we’re selling you know your third year now the pandemic, but what are your thoughts there?

Dr. Seneff

Oh man, I really think so. I think glyphosate is a major player in COVID-19 and you see the countries that are having trouble controlling COVID-19 in many cases our countries that make high use of glyphosate and in particular countries that are advanced in the area of biofuels I really think biofuels are playing a role and I’m quite fascinated by that possibility more research needs to be done and most people kind of dismiss it as in being impossible but there’s growing evidence in my opinion that what I’m thinking is happening is that there’s glyphosate in the air in cities where they are promoting biofuels and they’re getting those biofuels from crops that are heavily exposed to glyphosate.

Dr. Wong

Okay, okay.

Dr. Seneff

And it’s quite interesting in fact, I really focused on new york city back when the pandemic first started. I got interested in this idea and as you may remember you know it was Wuhan and then it was Northern Italy and then it was New York City that was kind of where the pandemic started and New York City of course has international travel so there’s lots of stuff coming in that’s going to bring the virus into the city. I will certainly admit that and it’s crowded so there’s a lot of reasons why you might expect that it would catch on there but I think there may be a further factor having to do with glyphosate and biofuels and new york state and new york city have been leaders in the biofuel industry and in fact new york city was I think at the time the only city in the world as far as I could tell that required five percent biodiesel in home heating oil and home heating oil in New England really is, if you look at the country New England is the part of the country that has a lot of homes that are still heated by these, by this home heating oil and new york city I just looked this up and new york state has they’re very enthusiastic about this and now they’ve required it over the whole state five percent and they’re pushing that level up there. I think they’re thinking of like 25 by 2030, something like that they want to encourage more and more use of these bio home heating oil.

Dr. Wong

So just in general Dr. Seneff, would glyphosate be immunosuppressive, or kind of what does it do in general to the immune system?

Dr. Seneff

Yeah. It does a lot of things to the immune system and I have a whole chapter on the immune system. It’s quite interesting, I really did a lot of studying of the immune system when I was doing my research for my book and it, part of my of it, is theoretical. As far as what I see but certainly the mitochondria. The mitochondria are being attacked by glyphosate there’s no question about that. There’s several studies that have shown that glyphosate causes mitochondrial damage and the mitochondria are the workhorses of the cell that produce the energy they produce the ATP and so when the immune cells have sick mitochondria they can’t fight disease. That’s one thing, but I think another factor that’s extremely interesting to me and I wrote about it in the book is the possibility that glyphosate’s getting into proteins by mistake in place of glycine in place of the coding amino acid glycine that there’s a lot of evidence to support that both from Monsanto’s own studies on how glyphosate affects the shikimate pathway but also from many other different dimensions showing that and then if you and I actually predict developed what I call a glyphosate susceptibility motif that I predicted certain proteins that have this characteristic would have more to glyphosate than other proteins and then I could identify which proteins meet that pattern and then what would be the consequences of that and one thing that jumps out is collagen. Because collagen is a, it’s the most common protein in the body. 25 of our proteins are collagen molecules and it has this long long sequence of g x y g x y j x y where every third amino acid is a glycine. So it has tremendous opportunity for glyphosate to substitute for glycine and it depends upon those glycines to create this beautiful triple helix structure that it makes it work the way it’s supposed to work in terms of its flexibility its ability to absorb water tensile strength so all of the properties of collagen depend upon those that regular sequence of lysines so I think the collagen is getting messed up and collagen is a there’s something called a collagen-like stalk that’s in a lot of these and there are these proteins that are released by immune cells. This is innate immunity not adapted not antibodies these are proteins that can go out and trap viruses for example and allow the macrophages to clear them and those proteins have this collagen-like stock that if that gets messed up by glyphosate they won’t work properly. So I developed that idea and that’s theoretical and no one has shown for sure that, that’s happening. But I think it makes a lot of sense if I’m right about the glycine substitution it definitely would mess those up.

Dr. Wong

So just, just to remind the listener. So your book is called Toxic Legacy, we’ll make sure to say that on the end as well

Dr. Seneff

I have it here, I can show it.

Dr. Wong

Yes, yes. Thank you! I brought it in too it’s here. It’s a great book. I think number one, you know glycine it sounds like is needed for the collagen, also you know for vascular health and certainly for you know the sleeping up insomnia or sleep epidemic that you had mentioned glycines needed to help pair with GABA to maintain that REM sleep and you know.

Dr. Seneff

Right, right. That’s important, yeah.

Dr. Wong

A lot of people have that issue. So glycine is a big issue. We’ve been finding a lot of people with glycine deficiency or you know basically empiric use of glycine in sort of sleeping better and I wonder how much of that is glyphosate substitution actually.

Dr. Seneff

Yes. I do too. And I’ve heard many naturopaths report that they get good success with glycine substance make sure that you get organic glycine because

Dr. Wong

Organic, okay.

Dr. Seneff

Gonna have glyphosate in there.

Dr. Wong

Oh no. I guess, I assume that a lot of, well, we can’t assume anything right but you know some of the more professional grade products would be more organic but I guess we have to look at the sources right at the end.

Dr. Seneff

I know it gets really complicated quickly and I’ve been interested in actually the synthesis of anything that’s used as a pharmaceutical of any sort and how that’s made and you know and when things are made in the chemistry lab or if they’re made with growing cultures of microbes feeding them nutrients are those nutrients glyphosate contaminated is that going to affect that product. I think that’s a serious question that we have not addressed at all.

Dr. Wong

Yeah, yeah. So we can talk about I think that question is, it’s kind of a segue into, is it possible to avoid glyphosate you know how do we reduce our exposure to glyphosate?

Dr. Seneff

Right, that’s a tough one in the United States because it’s so pervasive here.

Dr. Wong

We move somewhere else.

Dr. Seneff

Yeah, move to Bhutan, that’s all they are.

Dr. Wong

Moved to Bhutan. Okay.

Dr. Seneff

Bhutan is interesting because they have they still have sort of natural organic farmers, small farmers, they’re not

Dr. Wong

Oh, nice!

Dr. Seneff

They’re not, they don’t have to be certified because basically, that’s the food they grow.

Dr. Wong

Okay.

Dr. Seneff

And they have extremely low rates of COVID-19 and almost zero.

Dr. Wong

Have they outlawed glyphosate? They just don’t use it?

Dr. Seneff

No, they just don’t happen to it sort of hasn’t reached them I think it’s for the most part.

Dr. Wong

Okay, okay.

Dr. Seneff

Yeah. They are becoming westernized and I worry.

Dr. Wong

It’s too high in the mountains, yeah.

Dr. Seneff

Yeah. So it’s kind of too remote they don’t realize how lucky they are but they have had you know no problem with COVID whatsoever and I think that’s part of the reason I think you look at the COVID crisis here and in Brazil and most of Europe, I mean all of those are places that are heavily reliant on glyphosate and as I said also glyphosate in biofuels and it was in Brazil that a study was done that showed that found glyphosate in the nanoparticles in the air both at the agricultural fields and in the nearby city, the city had almost as much as the air as the agricultural fields where glyphosate was being used.

Dr. Wong

So let’s say we’re listening to this podcast here Dr. Seneff then we’re not, we can’t move to Bhutan. Although, it’d be a great place to go it sounds like. Where are the kind of the, hot spots in terms of whether it’s foods or you know other sources of exposure obviously we don’t want to spray our spray pesticide or lawns and stuff like that?

Dr. Seneff

Right, right. Don’t use it on your lawns.

Dr. Wong

Don’t use them on your lawns.

Dr. Seneff

Absolutely your first step and you can have your water checked for glyphosate you tap water and make sure that it’s not in there and you can add filters if it is reverse

Dr. Wong

Do you recommend a certain type of filter?

Dr. Seneff

Reverse osmosis filtering apparently will take it out.

Dr. Wong

Got it, got it. It’s good and certainly, we can assume that restaurants probably are not using RL like when you go to a restaurant.

Dr. Seneff

Right. I don’t know yeah, they’re water. I have no clue right that’s a thing to worry about lots of things to worry about restaurants.

Dr. Wong

What about food? Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Seneff

So food certified organic is really your only choice and it won’t guarantee that you don’t have glyphosate in the food because it’s they can’t avoid it either if their nearby farm is spreading right.

Dr. Wong

There’s the spray the wind comes over and yeah.

Dr. Seneff

Yeah. So that it shows up and even for example the manure because they don’t have to have organic manure and the manure is going to have glyphosate in it.

Dr. Wong

Okay.

Dr. Seneff

So. It, you can’t avoid it like I said in this country but generally, the organics come up much much better and many of them test negative. So definitely certified organic that’s one thing we have adopted in my family. We don’t buy it if it’s not certified organic so that’s a really, it’s great that we have that label. It may not be perfect but it’s good to look for that and non-GMO is not good enough a lot of people think non-GMO that’s safe and I want to warn people that there are the GMO roundup-ready crops and they certainly want to avoid those because they can just be sprayed with glyphosate they don’t die they take it up it gets in the food but the, many of the non-GMO crops are actually testing for higher levels than the GMO crops and this includes oats and wheat, garbanzo beans, chickpeas, lentils.

Dr. Wong

A lot of legumes.

Dr. Seneff

Sunflower seeds yeah, and sugar cane. All of those are sprayed with glyphosate right before harvest as a desiccant. So they actually are trying to kill the crops so it’s not a GMO crop it’s not resistant to glyphosate you’re using glyphosate to sometimes, to get to synchronize the yields like for wheat it causes all the plants to go to seed and they harvest it shortly thereafter and the glyphosate goes into the seeds and you get really high levels the garbanzo beans and chickpeas have come up with the highest levels Canada did a whole bunch of testing and they found that really pretty much the highest levels in those in those legumes.

Dr. Wong

So besides the US, so what other countries are kind of allowing glyphosate? I know some places are not now, correct?

Dr. Seneff

Right. I think Bermuda. I think Bermuda has banned glyphosate since forever if I remember correctly.

Dr. Wong

Okay, so they’re the pioneer.

Dr. Seneff

Yeah, and there are a few other countries that have banded and then maybe kind of given them.

Dr. Wong

So from a public health perspective, what do we need to do as consumers of food and drinkers of water and you know what do governments need to do, government officials I mean I know this is a huge topic here we could probably have another podcast on this but what you know this is kind of we look at you know more root cause health this is really potentially one of the biggest sources of human disease and ecological imbalance that we can see out there now is glyphosate you know?

Dr. Seneff

I think, so I definitely think that’s the case and I want to say Mexico and Mexico has decided to ban glyphosate altogether.

Dr. Wong

Okay. Oh good!

Dr. Seneff

And I don’t know if it’s 2000. I can never learn whether it’s 2023 or 2024 but right around that time frame very soon coming up they’re not going to allow it at all on the crops which is really awesome.

Dr. Wong

That’s great.

Dr. Seneff

And I’m hoping that they might set an example for the United States which is not thinking any way, in any way, in that way they think life is it’s wonderful the United States they see that, they see no downside.

Dr. Wong

They, because they’re because there is evidence for harm obviously but is it more of a political thing or?

Dr. Seneff

Economic I think. It maybe because it’s so efficient to just poison the crop and I mean kill the weeds right and then put poison in the food, it’s a much easier way to grow food they have these mega farms they use a lot of chemicals of course it’s not just glyphosate they’ve got you know insecticides and fungicides and even you know non-natural chemical-based fertilizers and things like that so they really have gone all the way towards chemical-based agriculture which I think is a huge mistake and I think that the government kind of thinks we’re stuck there. I think, they think we can’t survive, we can’t supply the food we need if we don’t do it this way I think that’s what they believe and they believe it’s safe because Monsanto has assured them that it’s safe.

Dr. Wong

Do you think there will be currently now or in the future studies on regenerative agriculture and the economic feasibility of that?

Dr. Seneff

Absolutely and that’s where I’m very excited about the work that’s being done by many people across the country and across the world I think that there’s a growing interest in the whole concept of I mean one thing is how to revitalize the soil because glyphosate really messes up the soil every year you use it the soil suffers and you lose the minerals and the microbes in the soil get disrupted you know and there’s impaired ability to, for the plants to take up the minerals so the plants become deficient in minerals and lots of things go badly and the yield goes down because the soil is so sick and the organic matter in the soil disappears the earthworms are very seriously harmed by glyphosate and they’re really important in the soil they play an important role in many ways the earthworms and they’re getting clobbered by the glyphosate so we’re really once you take away the glyphosate then you’ve got to fix the soil before it’s going to produce the kind of yield that you would like to see and so really, and a lot of the solutions I think are similar to what people are saying with the gut you know probiotics minerals so adding things to the soil to make it healthier adding sulfur deficiency in the soil and in the plant is happening also because of glyphosate is disrupting the uptake of sulfur into the plants and Don Huber showed that in some experiments he did massive reduction in the amount of sulfur in plants exposed to glyphosate so that means sulfur-deficient food which then means sulfur-deficient humans and that gives you disease.

Dr. Wong

Very true especially with the knowing that glutathione is needed to detoxify a lot of these issues etc. Wow, there’s so many things that we could discuss. I would say, just from a perspective of something concrete to do besides like we can vote with our pocketbooks and wallets and you know shopping carts. In terms of buying USDA organic etc supporting regenerative agriculture, are there any other things that we can do from an advocacy perspective to promote this to our politicians?

Dr. Seneff

Right. I think it’s a good thing for people who have the stomach board to go after local politicians and there’s been quite a bit of success at the city level for example that getting glyphosate banned in public places in the city getting glyphosate banned in the schoolyards that’s happened here in Hawaii recently in the last couple of years and Dewayne Lee Johnson played a role in that. He was the guy who had that first case of Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma that he won with a jury trial he won a huge amount of money and he came to Hawaii and talked to the political people there and it was really about the fastest action we’ve ever seen where they just very quickly passed the law and said no glyphosate on any of the schoolyards in all of Hawaii which was really exciting for me to see because Hawaii has shown its favoritism towards the industry in the past and there’s a lot of you know people here who are fighting the chemicals but they they’re up against an industry that’s quite powerful so it was really impressive that they did that and I know individual cities in California I think there are several cities where they banned glyphosate in public places in playgrounds and schoolyards that sort of thing you can work locally to make that happen and I would encourage anybody to who has the energy to do that sort of thing to get on it and really try to make the work it from the bottom up starting with the cities and the counties and the states.

Dr. Wong

So the classic adage of uh, thinking globally and acting locally.

Dr. Seneff

Exactly, yes! That’s right yes.

Dr. Wong

Let’s go back to the connection between glyphosate and another chronic illness or group of chronic illnesses. Cancer, you mentioned Dewayne Johnson and the roundup and all that. What is the general thought of research now on glyphosate and risk of cancer or incidents of cancer I would say?

Dr. Seneff

Yeah. So the IARC decided that glyphosate was a probable carcinogen. This happened a few years back I think maybe 2016. And that was actually a really big motivator for people to think they could win a case claiming that glyphosate caused their cancer and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma really jumped out because it was quite there were many many people who had only used roundup, this was the case with Dewayne Lee Johnson. He actually worked in schoolyards, he was a grounds person for the schoolyards and glyphosate was the only chemical he used and he got this non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in his 40s a pretty severe case. So he had a really good case in the sense of it you couldn’t really find something else that could be blamed for it and then with the IARC saying that it’s a probable carcinogen California actually put it on their list as the probable carcinogen and that has made people aware. So now there’s like over a hundred thousand cases in the wings where people are claiming that glyphosate caused their non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma I think it is causal in a number of other cancers as well and you see correlations again when Nancy Swanson and I looked at data we found some cancers in particular really stood out thyroid cancer and pancreatic cancer and of course, there’s liver disease, liver cancer, kidney cancer all of those are correlated with the use of glyphosate. The rise in the glyphosate use and the rise in the prevalence of these diseases and exactly how it’s doing that is complicated it’s actually quite hard to figure that out there was a paper that showed that glyphosate increased the risk of cancer from other chemicals. So it was a prime, it primed the cell’s susceptibility to cancer from another exposure. So that’s a kind of synergistic toxicity effect that we see a lot with chemicals. Glyphosate is synergistically toxic with a lot of things and in particular, I should mention this because it’s been shown to suppress cytochrome p450 enzymes in the liver and those enzymes are critical for detoxifying many fat-soluble chemicals. So those become much more toxic and that includes the insecticides they become much more toxic as a consequence of the glyphosate disrupting the liver’s ability to detoxify them so that’s again synergistic toxicity.

Dr. Wong

That’s huge. The glyphosate, being a detoxification system disruptor.

Dr. Seneff

Exactly.

Dr. Wong

It actually disables or decreases the ability of the detox system itself the hepatic p450 enzyme etc to do their job that, that’s really huge and we know that of course that’s needed to do things like, prevent cancer, reduce inflammation.

Dr. Seneff

Right.

Dr. Wong

Improve the immune system you know all the things we just talked about even with COVID-19. Let’s talk about some concrete things that our listeners can kind of glean from how to support our bodies and you know their bodies are you know our bodies their loved ones when it comes to contact with glyphosate. What are some of the lifestyle tips you know nutritional tips any supplements out there anything like that herbs out there that would?

Dr. Seneff

Right I think herbs and spices are actually really really beneficial. Those are, they’re really good for antioxidant effects and glyphosate has been shown to cause oxidation damage like it causes release of these reactive oxygen species in the mitochondria that’s been shown in multiple studies and it’s also shown that it can cause mitochondrial damage, DNA damage in the mitochondria.

Dr. Wong

Okay.

Dr. Seneff

And yeah, which is a direct pass towards cancer also.

Dr. Wong

So cellular and mitochondrial damage?

Dr. Seneff

Yeah. Right. It might, they disrupt the mitochondria they actually suppress critical enzymes in the mitochondria that’s one thing I talked about in my book succinate dehydrogenase is a really big one super important enzyme in the mitochondria involved in both the citric acid cycle and in oxidative phosphorylation which is what makes the ATP, that’s the only enzyme that’s involved with both of them and it has been shown to be suppressed by glyphosate and so that’s really crucial it just disturbs the whole mitochondrial pathways that go on there causing of course a loss of ATP but also causing mitochondria to release reactive oxygen species and it also causes glutathione to be mentioned glutathione really, really important antioxidant and they’ve shown in studies that it causes it to be oxidized so it’s not in the reduced form which is the form that makes it beneficial it gets stuck in the oxidized form probably because it disrupts the enzyme that brings it back to the reduced form and it’s also deficient so it causes a loss of glutathione it actually causes an upregulation of an enzyme called GGT gamma glutamine transpeptidase which breaks down glutathione into its individual component amino acids and of course glutathione contains glycine, it’s glycine and cysteine and glutamate and glycine is the is the amino acid that glyphosate is, glyphosate is a glycine molecule with extra material on its nitrogen atom. So I’m suspecting that glyphosate may actually be getting into glutathione by mistake in place of glycine that would totally mess up glutathione’s ability to do its job and might explain why it’s upregulating enzymes that break it down.

Dr. Wong

That’s huge, well.

Dr. Seneff

And then cysteine is a sulfur-containing amino acid and glyphosate disrupts the whole sulfur system in a big way and so people take an Acetylcysteine which I think is probably a good idea as a supplement to help with the glutathione you can also take liposomal glutathione but N-acetyl cysteine is a, is an important and glycine both of those will help with the supply of the raw materials to make the glutathione.

Dr. Wong

It sounds like we may potentially need all three of those after you speak about this Stephanie, and what do you think about Zach Bush’s or would you know the ION biome product is that something you know there’s a thought of that would help with glyphosate?

Dr. Seneff

There is and I and I’m pretty enthusiastic about it I’ve taken it myself and I think it’s a good product it’s you know it’s got a set of ingredients that makes sense in terms of what you might need to fight back against glyphosate and apparently it looks like the sort of fulvic acid, humic acid. This is organic matter from the soil those things are able to they’re known to be able to trap various chemicals not just they have a general you know a diverse mechanism that allows them to trap toxins and clear them even they have the possibility of trapping enzymes that are very versatile in terms of being able to break down chemicals of a variety of sorts and so it’s possible that the, this is theoretical, that the fulvic acid and humic acid have trapped enzymes to metabolize to break down the glyphosate which would be really great if it’s true that’s still theoretical.

Dr. Wong

Okay.

Dr. Seneff

Yeah and so then they have these spores of these microbes as well which can help to refurbish the gut microbiome and minerals. I think there’s minerals in there as well so that’s a kind of a good combination I think.

Dr. Wong

Nice so thank you so much for this enlightening conversation about glyphosate definitely everyone, check out Dr. Seneff’s book Toxic Legacy. Dr. Seneff, we have one question about just in general thoughts about a final thing you wish everyone would know about glyphosate. I think any like take-home message you know listeners.

Dr. Seneff

Yeah, wow, I mean. I think they just need to be aware that it’s alive and the government tells you glyphosate is safe it’s not true. You really need to watch out for it you need to watch out for it in your, in your local environment, in the air, in the water and especially in the food to minimize your glyphosate exposure by being very careful about what you eat.

Dr. Wong

And if people can’t afford organic, are we talking about like clean 15 dirty dozen trying to find?

Dr. Seneff

Yeah but that’s actually Clean 15 I don’t think is based on the glyphosate from what I’ve seen. I’ve seen that the corn has been listed as one of the clean 15 if my memory serves me right okay which makes no sense because corn is a GMO roundup-ready food so I think they’re ignoring glyphosate in deciding that’s probably mostly based on insecticides rather than herbicides.

Dr. Wong

Okay.

Dr. Seneff

Because they think glyphosate is safe so they’re not.

Dr. Wong

So, so people on a budget let’s say like you know maybe they’re wondering can I afford this organic everything, what’s the solution if you?

Dr. Seneff

Grow your own food in your backyard.

Dr. Wong

Grow your own food yeah and get some soil.

Dr. Seneff

It’s tough. I realize it’s tough and of course, food prices are going through the roof and I expect organic is probably going up even faster than non-organic. There’s an increasing demand for organic and can see it flying off the shelves. I often go to the grocery store and they’ll have the vegetables that are organic and there’s practically nothing left and then the other ones over there that are not organic there’s still plentiful so you really could see that.

Dr. Wong

Now in Hawaii, even in Hawaii, are there some victory gardens or you know something where people can grow their own food? If they don’t have their own plot of land they can go to a public place and

Dr. Seneff

There is that kind of system here, yeah, and of course you can also go directly to your farmer like we have our favorite farmer and we pick up our we make our order online. This is really great I think this direct farm-to-table type of concept I really would encourage the farming system to think in terms of small family farms a web page presence and then they just people order online and then they just come and pick it up you know I think that’s a great system and of course cooperatives as well but I think it’s just really super to kind of get rid of the middleman and that will save the price too lower the price that will benefits both the farmer and the consumer.

Dr. Wong

Lower the price, right improve health, bring the food production back to the local areas right, good for the environment.

Dr. Seneff

Yes local area I think that’s really important and that would be one one way to help if you do live near farmers to really get to know those farmers and to buy directly from them if that’s possible is great and of course, even if they don’t some of the farmers are so small they can’t afford the whole process of the certified organic label but they don’t use chemicals and they can tell you that. So if you have a trusted farmer you don’t necessarily have to buy certified organic I think I like to encourage those small farmers so I feel bad that they don’t necessarily have that label only because they can’t afford the process not because they’re not practicing organically that’s really a shame. The government should fix that, the government should allow a small farmer to get the certified organic label for free you know.

Dr. Wong

That’s a good, that’s a great point.

Dr. Seneff

Without charge yeah, so that would be helpful. I think the government should be encouraging every which way they can should be encouraging people to think in terms of buying a pot of land and becoming a small farmer growing organic food. I think we really have to be pushing that idea out to the young people to get them engaged in farming again because we’ve just really lost touch with the land people.

Dr. Wong

To get back to the land, the soil, it sounds like we need to do our own research but also become farmers ourselves yeah.

Dr. Seneff

Right. I’m almost thinking that it’s almost the only safe way and of course with food security is an issue now too with all these food shortages if you have your own farm you don’t have to worry as much about food security.

Dr. Wong

Right. Well, thank you so much Dr. Seneff again for being on. We have some fun closing questions to ask.

Dr. Seneff

Okay.

Dr. Wong

If that’s okay. So, they’re pretty straightforward but, A. Do you have a morning routine? If so, would you mind sharing that with us?

Dr. Seneff

Oh sure.

Dr. Wong

We know morning routines are good for health.

Dr. Seneff

And I have a kind of a fun one. I get up and usually, I’ve got dishes from last night so I do the dishes while I’m making my coffee, come down make the coffee pretty early I’m an early bird and get my cup of coffee and then I go up back to bed and I get my sudoku puzzle it’s killer sudoku which I love and I work my puzzle drink my coffee I sort of really relax and enjoy the first part of my day and then my husband and I take a long walk together all different places we always go to some very pretty place and take a walk maybe 45-minute walk and then if I’m lucky I come back and take a dip in the pool so that’s kind of a really nice spot.

Dr. Wong

That’s amazing. Hawaii is a best place for that.

Dr. Seneff

Then I settle into working hard. So after that i’m working hard but I do allow myself that luxury of a lovely morning routine and I don’t eat breakfast besides coffee so I start my meal with lunch.

Dr. Wong

What do you do every day to cultivate joy? I mean it sounds like there’s a lot of things you do but that’s another question that we typically ask.

Dr. Seneff

Cultivate joy, yeah! I mean I certainly, that morning routine is pretty happy.

Dr. Wong

It’s pretty happy, yeah.

Dr. Seneff

And of course, my husband and I are really close so we’re very fortunate that we have each other, especially in COVID because you really, you get lonely, so you’re very supportive of each other, and yeah.

Dr. Wong

Thank you Dr. Seneff, again her book is Toxic Legacy, it’s available online and I’m sure in like bookstores and everything. How can listeners learn more about you and contact you?

Dr. Seneff

Yeah. I have a webpage stephaniecenter.net so you can check that out and it has my links to where you can buy my book, Amazon of course, but many other booksellers also sell it.

Dr. Wong

Are you on like Instagram or those kinds of sites as well?

Dr. Seneff

I’m on, I’m actually on a Twitter.

Dr. Wong

Twitter, okay.

Dr. Seneff

I got thrown off of Facebook but I’m on Twitter and also on a couple of other social networks called MeWe and GETTR, G-E-T-T-R but I no longer am on Facebook.

Dr. Wong

Okay so you got Twitter and your book and other sites you mentioned. Well, thank you so much this is very valuable information. I think this is going to take us down hopefully a path where we all become farmers and you know all become

Dr. Seneff

I know. I really tell young people you should be a farmer and it can be a very interesting job with respect to trying to figure out how to grow food safely and cheaply and you know really paying attention to how to make farming work which is a research problem so it becomes quite an interesting job I think in terms of scientific research especially like how to remove the soil that’s broken by all the years of toxic chemical exposures how to fix it that’s a research problem and we desperately need the answer to that problem.

Dr. Wong

It sounds like renewing the earth is going to also renew our own health yeah.

Dr. Seneff

Right. Exactly! And it’s probably going to help climate change as well so there’s nothing not to like about that can you feel good about yourself if you’re working in that space.

Dr. Wong

Thank you, thank you Stephanie again for being on and enjoy the walks out and the quite there.

Dr. Seneff

I will. Thank you.

Dr. Wong

All right, i’ll see you later.

Dr. Seneff

Bye-bye.

Dr. Wong

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