Danger Will Robinson Danger

I write today to once again save your life or at least try to. You can’t see or feel or taste the Coronavirus which will directly affect a few people tremendously and most of us not at all. However, there is something else you are constantly exposed to that you can’t see, feel, or taste that is ruinous to your health, and that is glyphosate.

What I’m talking about is the active ingredient in Roundup which started as a pipe cleaner and then graduated to herbicide but if I understand it correctly is also patented as an antibiotic. None of these things can be good for the bugs in your gut. Not only is glyphosate toxic to the bugs in your gut but it’s also toxic to the lining of your gut itself. This drug blows holes in the gut lining and therefore creates inflammation. Inflammation equals immune system overactivation equals chronic illness.

Most of us have less than 2 square meters of the skin surface but the lining of our guts, if stretched out, would equal the surface area of two tennis courts. The lining of our gut is very thin, one or two cells only, and chemicals like glyphosate directly attack the tight junctions which maintain gut integrity. If that weren’t enough this drug, separate from what it does to the microbiome and to the gut lining itself, is also directly toxic to the mitochondria in almost every cell of your body. Glyphosate also affects your health on a cellular basis since it, in part, resembles the amino acid glycine and gets incorporated into proteins, cell membranes, etc. Glycoside has been implicated in Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Glyphosate has been found, according to the European Working Groups website and many others, to be in breakfast cereals, pasta, flour-based products, oat-based products, and even in most of the red wines that have been tested. Every American has almost certainly measurable levels of glyphosate in our bodies. A study published in Ecow- watch in 2016 showed that 93% of Americans tested had glyphosate in their urine. If it’s measured in the urine that means you’ve ingested it and it’s gone through your body to reach your kidneys so it’s affected both the bugs in your gut and your own cells.

Let me put it to you a little more bluntly; this is food poisoning. You are being poisoned slowly but surely. Of course, the Bayer Corporation is going to say these are microscopic levels and are considered safe by the government but it’s having its adverse effects on microscopic bacteria, so it’s all relative. The more processed food you eat the more glycoside you’re being exposed to. Remember, I’m talking about the stuff you’re already eating like pizza and Cheerios all of which is almost certainly contaminated with this chemical which is sprayed on crops all around the globe to the tune of 6 billion pounds a year. Roundup is commonly used in conjunction with genetically modified food stock to maximize food production. You maximize food production by poisoning all the other plants/weeds. More recently and very widespread is also aggressively used to ripen the crop for harvest.

Map out, as I have, a picture of the United States of America with cancer rates per state. Now superimpose a map showing the greatest amount of glycoside contamination and you will see when you superimpose these two maps that they line up in a scary fashion. This does not prove cause amity obviously but I don’t think you could ignore this obvious data.

Okay, so we can agree that the biome in your stomach is important. You’re nothing more than a fellow traveler to them. Of the DNA and RNA we could recover from your body, human DNA is only 4% of that so there’s a lot of genetic material inside you that can affect your health. What happens to the bugs in your gut is important. You want a tropical rainforest, not a desert. You want all kinds of creatures great and small living in perfect harmony, not intestinal armageddon. The International Agency for Research on cancer part of the World Health Organization announced on March 20, 2015, that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic to humans”.

The most recent issue of Consumer Reports also addressed the question of pesticides and concluded that many fruits and vegetables have dangerous amounts of pesticides.

They did not specifically address glyphosate because that is found more in the grains, the wheat, the oats, etc.

So, if this dangerous chemical whose long-term effects have only begun to be appreciated is found in almost everything we’re eating, what’s the course of action? How do you preserve your health against this singular act of food poisoning? You have to buy local. You have to know the people who are growing your food and you have to ask them directly what they’re spraying on it. You can’t wash these chemicals off. They are not inactivated by pressure cooking. You have to minimize the processed foods and you’ve got to read the labels. Change your diet as your life depends on it because in point of fact it does. Until next month, get well and stay well.

Dr. Barry