The Dangers of Glyphosate

From Gut-Brain Secrets.

Glyphosate is the ultimate fast-acting poison for plants

Glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup) is a freakishly effective chelator that does most of its damage by tying up beneficial minerals that organisms need to drive their enzyme reactions, and thus their biology. This devastates biologic function so extensively, for so many life forms, that it’s hard to believe it could be doing so much harm without the public being aware of its toxicity. Like other herbicides that chelate, glyphosate kills weeds through three mechanisms of action:

1. Chelates minerals. It chelates the minerals that plants depend on
   to run enzyme processes by which they grow, feed and protect    themselves from pathogens, toxins and stress.
2. Kills probiotic microorganisms. It preferentially kills beneficial microorganisms that feed and protect plants.
3. Stimulates pathogens. It stimulates pathogen activity.

Mineral chelator. As a potent chelator, glyphosate ties up an extremely broad spectrum of minerals so they’re not bio-available to the plant, including manganese, potassium, zinc, iron, calcium, magnesium and copper. It also disrupts the balance of nitrogen, boron and sulfur in plants. In doing so, glyphosate blocks the bioavailability of many positively-charged minerals. Like taking the key out of a car, minerals are then unavailable as activators for 291 enzymes that need a trace mineral to function properly.

As a result, glyphosate downregulates over 250 enzyme functions that life forms rely on for their biochemical processes. It upregulates about 30. And glyphosate produces these effects at incredibly small doses. These breakdowns interfere with biologic functions too numerous to mention, which then shut down the plant’s resistance to all kinds of threats, including soil-borne pathogens, insects, toxins, malnutrition, and environmental stresses like drought.

Basically, glyphosate kills non-genetically engineered plants primarily by giving them a bad case of “plant AIDS” (immuno-deficiency). Pathogenic fungi then quickly overwhelm the plant and eat it alive. Unfortunately for consumers, genetic engineering does nothing to alter the chelating ability of glyphosate or the mineral absorption of crops. It merely helps GMO crops resist the pathogens that would ordinarily do it in. The net result is, the plant still ends up nutrient-deficient.

Broad-spectrum antibiotic. Glyphosate is an extremely broad-spectrum antibiotic that kills beneficial organisms in soil – including probiotic bacteria, mycorrhizal fungi and earthworms. These critters convert minerals into a bioavailable form, transport them to the plant, multiply the plant’s absorption capacity, and limit pathogen populations, thereby protecting the plant from their attacks.

Stimulates pathogens. When the good guys in soil are wiped out by glyphosate, soil-borne pathogens have a feeding frenzy. Pathogens have alternative metabolic and immune pathways that allow them to survive glyphosate exposure better. So it’s not glyphosate itself that kills the plant. Rather, glyphosate weakens the plant’s defenses in several ways, while at the same time amplifying the attack from the plant’s enemies.

This is why glyphosate can’t kill plants in sterile “soil,” or when a fungicide is applied to protect it: fungi is the real killer. In other words, glyphosate ties a plant’s defenses behind its back so that pathogenic fungi and environmental stresses can beat up on it until it succumbs – taking as little as 2–8 hours.

As a result of this systemic spraying and weakening of crops by glyphosate, more than forty plant diseases are expanding in both geography and lethality, just within the last 5–10 years. At the same time, true weeds are becoming hardier – basically creating superweeds – because repeated glyphosate application selects for weeds that both survive glyphosate, and resist pathogens, better.

Plants suffer nutrient deficiencies, which they pass on to consumers

Glyphosate greatly reduces a plant’s ability to take up nutrients, transport them around, and store them within their structure. Applications as low as ½ ounce per acre reduce uptake of iron by 50%, and manganese by 80%. At this tiny dosage, glyphosate inhibits internal movement of minerals by some 80–90%. According to one report, after one application of glyphosate, alfalfa lost 46% of its potassium, 26% magnesium, 52% sulfur, 49% iron, and 31% manganese. From the same report, soy beans lost 40% of their nitrogen content, 26% calcium, 30% magnesium, 27% copper, 48% manganese, and 30% zinc.

Glyphosate destroys the medicinal properties of plants

Glyphosate eradicates the healing ability of plants by blocking an enzyme pathway used by bacteria, fungi, algae, some protozoa, and plants to make important compounds in food. Bacteria and plants use this “shikimate path-way,” as it’s called, to manufacture an extremely active family of chemical compounds called “alkaloids” that give plants medicinal qualities, in addition to making many enzymes, hormones, signaling molecules, and other proteins. By blocking production of 4–6 of the 26 most important amino acids used in making proteins, glyphosate robs plants of their innate ability to make medicinal compounds that pharmaceutical companies observe in plants and try to replicate in their drugs, including

• antiparasitic (e.g., quinine)
• antiasthma (e.g., ephedrine)
• anticancer (e.g., homoharringtonine)
• vasodilatory (e.g., vincamine)
• antiarrhythmic (e.g., quinidine)
• analgesic (e.g., morphine)
• antidiabetic activities (e.g., piperine)
• antibacterial (e.g., chelerythrine)
• moodstabilizing/neurotransmitter balancing (e.g., galantamine)
• antimalarial (e.g., quinine).

This epic instance of tunnel vision (or cold-blooded profiteering) contributes mightily to glyphosate’s role in modern disease. By spraying 4.4 billion pounds of glyphosate into the environment every year, we’ve wiped out the medicinal qualities that plants used to give us, before drugs high-jacked our healthcare system.

11 factors make glyphosate the perfect slow-killing poison for mammals

1. Absorption. Herbicides like Roundup add other (unlisted) ingredients besides glyphosate to make it penetrate the skin of plants.
2. Multiplied toxicity. “Adjuvants,” as those other mystery ingredients are called, make Roundup 1,000 times more toxic.
3. Concentrates in plants. 80% of glyphosate accumulates in the growth points (roots, shoots, legumes, seeds) that animals and humans eat.
4. Excretes into soil. 15–20% of absorbed glyphosate is exuded through a plant’s roots, into the soil.
5. Perpetual use. Growers used to rotate herbicides along with crops – depending on how long the herbicide took to degrade. But you can’t do that with glyphosate. It’s the only option. So farmers are stuck hammering glyphosate into plants and soil as it loses its effectiveness… and accumulates.
6. Persistent. Glyphosate is neutralized very slowly in soil, and degrades completely at an even slower pace.
7. Reactivation. After it’s neutralized, glyphosate is reactivated by conventional phosphate fertilizer.
8. Bio accumulates. Glyphosate accumulates in humans and animals when they eat anything with glyphosate in it.
9. Non-linear dose response. Glyphosate toxicity declines the less of it you ingest. Then, at a certain point, it begins to climb again. This makes it disruptive to our hormonal system in miniscule doses.
10. Water soluble. Glyphosate dissolves in water and goes everywhere in the body that water does. Most toxins, in contrast, are fat soluble.
11. Dissolves tight junctions. Glyphosate dissolves the tight junctions keeping the barriers of the body intact (gut, brain, kidneys and blood vessels). This causes leaky membranes all over the body, which leads to gut, brain, inflammatory, and immune system problems.

Glyphosate is 4,000 times more lethal to good bacteria than bad

Glyphosate is well-documented to kill microorganisms as easily in livestock such as cattle, horses, pigs, sheep and poultry as it does in soil – and at doses as low as 0.1 parts-per-million. Consequently, it was patented as one of the broadest, most potent antibiotics ever in 2010 – albeit slower-acting than conventional antibiotics. The list of microbes that glyphosate is known to kill from the patent is voluminous. So there’s no reason to think it doesn’t do the same to our good bacteria.

However, unlike conventional antibiotics, glyphosate is far stronger at killing good bacteria than it is pathogens. In fact, it takes 4,000 times the dose to kill pathogens as it does beneficial bacteria because pathogens have alternative metabolic pathways to survive the exposure. This preference for killing probiotic bacteria contributes chronically to corruption of the microbiome, neurotransmitter imbalances, and neurological disorders.

In livestock, glyphosate is killing the beneficial bacteria that normally keep the botulism bug (Clostridium botulinum) under control in cows’ stomachs. That’s why botulism deaths are spreading like the plague in herds across America.

As a result, glyphosate is corrupting our microbiomes over time. Glyphosate weakens and kills small populations of beneficial bacteria every time we ingest food, water, air, or any substance containing any glyphosate. Of course, the bacteria grow back between exposures. But this cycle continues day in, day out, for years, resulting in a gradual loss of good bacteria, and a takeover of pathogens that sabotage your health from within. That’s why glyphosate is so devastating to our microbiome, neurotransmitter and hormone balance, and mental stability. It’s also one of the leading causes of disease that we’re now brewing in, yet fail to recognize and escape.

Image used under Creative Commons 4.0 license. Author: BallenaBlanca.

Glyphosate dissolves tight junctions, causing leaky barriers

Glyphosate makes cells of the gut lining produce more zonulin than they should (by up-regulating CXCR3 receptors, which enable gluten/gliadin to do their damage). Runaway zonulin production breaks down the tight junctions of the gut whose purpose is to open and close in a controlled manner to selectively let nutrients pass from the gut into the bloodstream. The gut then becomes porous and leaky – otherwise known as “leaky gut.” To make matters worse, zonulin leaks into the bloodstream and travels everywhere.

Zonulin: Protein that modulates permeability of tight junctions of cells lining the intestinal tract.

As zonulin circulates, it dissolves membranes throughout the body – just one cell thick – that are supposed to act as protective barriers against intrusion of toxic chemicals, heavy metals, pathogens, and undigested food. With leaks occurring through the blood-brain barrier, blood vessels and kidneys, your whole body becomes a sieve to harmful substances. This is what makes glyphosate public enemy #1 in the rise of food sensitivities, digestive disturbances, autoimmune conditions, malnutrition and neurological problems.

Glyphosate causes a hormonal “non-linear dose response”

Government health agencies create regulations based on the traditional assumption that toxicity declines as you ingest less of a toxin, until it becomes non-toxic (and thus “safe”). Biologists call this a “linear dose response.” In basic terms, it means the dose makes the poison.

Unfortunately, this is not an accurate description of how glyphosate affects the body in real life. Instead, glyphosate toxicity decreases with exposure level, until you get to a certain point. Then, counter-intuitively, it levels off, or goes back up. This means a larger dose can trigger a healing response such as apoptosis (cell-suicide) so that injury is repaired. Whereas as a smaller dose does not damage cells or the endocrine system enough to ever activate a healing response. Thus, cell damage persists. For this reason, reducing your intake could make your problems worse.

To name a few, an incredibly small dose of glyphosate can cause issues with sex hormones and fertility, insulin reception, metabolism and weight, as well as hormones that regulate brain function. In particular, glyphosate is known to disrupt estrogen function in women, dramatically increasing the incidence of breast cancer. And it collapses testosterone levels in men, severely decreasing sperm quantity and quality.

Glyphosate kills the bacteria that help make neurotransmitters

Essential to neurologic function, beneficial bacteria in the gut make aromatic amino acids we can’t make on our own – including tyrosine, tryptophan, phenylalanine, L-dopa and 5-HTP. These amino acids are the building blocks of the essential neurotransmitters dopamine, serotonin, epinephrine, and norepinephrine that run brain function. Therefore, glyphosate promotes mental health disorders through this pathway:

1. Glyphosate preferentially kills good bacteria that make aromatic amino acids.
2. Shortages of aromatic amino acids = less neurotransmitters for the brain.
3. When brain circuits don’t have the electro-chemical juice to fire properly, our neurology malfunctions, which we call ADD, anxiety, depression, autism, obsessive/compulsive behaviors, bipolar, learning disabilities, social delay, eating disorders, sleep problems, anger management issues and cognitive decline.

Glyphosate impairs detoxification in all living organisms

It does this by disturbing the cytochrome P450 enzyme pathway (CYP), which is a family of 20,000 enzymes (aka “metalloproteins”) that act as oxidants and catalysts – thus reducing detoxification in bacterium, plant and animal cells. Humans have about 57 of these CYP enzymes directly controlling our detoxification system’s ability to neutralize and remove toxins. They’re essential for normal physiological function. On the other hand, chronic, degenerative diseases occur when glyphosate blocks their ability to oxidize toxins and deport them. For instance, a dysfunctional CYP enzyme system constricts bile flow. Low bile flow chokes off a major pathway by which toxins leave the body.

Glyphosate moves through the environment with ease

Most toxins are fat-soluble (lipophilic), which means they tend to dissolve, travel and accumulate in fat much more easily than water. In living systems, toxins tend to collect in fatty tissues and bio-accumulate up the food chain. But, terrifying to people who understand the implications, glyphosate is the opposite. It’s one of the few toxins that’s water soluble (hydrophilic). It has an affinity for water instead of fat.

That means glyphosate travels easily through the air, water, soil, plants, animals, and our bloodstream. In other words, there’s nothing stopping glyphosate from moving through the environment and contaminating every nook and cranny of the planet and its inhabitants, because it has an all-access pass to go places inaccessible to most poisons.

Glyphosate’s toxicity can linger for decades

Despite Monsanto’s claims, glyphosate degrades with great difficulty in the environment. It can remain toxic for a generation or more. So even though its toxicity to plants, animals and people may be disabled temporarily by soil microbes or chelation – losing half its original toxicity over 1½–22 years – its bioactivity can be revived to do more damage. Like dormant zombies, glyphosate hides out underground, waiting to be raised from the dead. Conventional phosphate fertilizer brings inactivated glyphosate back to life, restoring its former toxicity – even years later – which is why you may see glyphosate toxicity returning years after a grower switches to bio-friendly farming.

So whether land has been producing or dormant, glyphosate toxicity sticks around for decades, and is harder to eradicate than zombies that won’t take no for an answer. In fact, Monsanto was found guilty of deceptive advertising in two lawsuits over false claims that Roundup is biodegradeable, which is simply not predictable. In summary, evidence clearly shows that glyphosate accumulates in the environment for years. You can disable most of its virulence temporarily through years of exposure to environment forces. But conventional fertilizer wakes it up. So, under most real-world conditions, glyphosate remains highly toxic for a very long time, wherever it is. It needs to be banned completely.

Commercial farming releases megatons of carbon into the ecosystem

Globalists want us to think that fossil fuel use causes climate change. They say the greenhouse effect is the result of CO₂ from cars and industry accumulating in the atmosphere. While the burning of petroleum (which does not come from dead dinosaurs or plants) is certainly not doing the planet any favors, it does trick people into looking at one thing the globalists want us to blame and abandon: using petroleum for energy to another that few know anything about: commercial agriculture’s side effects.

The latter would probably be the bigger influence of the two, if the planet were warming, if burning petroleum products was causing it, and if atmospheric carbon caused a greenhouse effect. However, they aren’t. These are half-truths used to deceive and manipulate the masses. First off, plants thrive when they get more CO₂ because it’s their oxygen. Second, secret programs have been controlling the weather for decades because weather is the most powerful weapon of them all.

Consequently, most weather catastrophes – including floods, droughts, hurricanes, tsunamis, and sub-zero temperatures in Texas – are man-made to serve some purpose. These people even came right out and said it in the 1969s: they wanted to use environmental destruction (aka “weather warfare”) as a fear and control tactic. Why would anyone believe the global elite are too kind and compassionate to do what they set out to do? That’s willful ignorance, if you ask me. But I digress.

Commercial farming – particularly glyphosate – is adept at killing microorganisms that keep carbon in the soil, where it belongs. Killing soil microbes releases millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year, because each acre of biologically-active land contains ten to twenty tons of carbon-rich biomass.

Industry is only required to test glyphosate itself for toxicity, not Roundup’s full formula

As toxic as glyphosate may sound, it’s not good at penetrating a plant’s skin when sprayed on plants by itself. For this reason, herbicides require helper chemicals that act as antagonists, or “adjuvants,” that break down the skin of the plant, get inside cells, circulate throughout, and cause lethal reactions. These surfactant/adjuvants massively increase glyphosate’s toxicity. In the case of Roundup’s newest formulation (of three or four), the full formula is 1,000 times more toxic than glyphosate alone.

However, because Monsanto doesn’t declare the other toxins to be active ingredients, they’re not required to list them on the label, or test them for toxicity – either individually, in combination, or as a complete formulation. Monsanto alleges by omission that the other ingredients are inert, thereby escaping regulation and liability (nice trick, if you can pull it off).

That’s how Monsanto has sidestepped testing Roundup’s complete formula for years, even though the full formula is what actually gets sprayed onto crops, and what we end up ingesting. To this day, industry-sponsored research studies only glyphosate, while independent, honest research makes a point to study real products, the way they’re used in practice.

Glyphosate is killing us all… slowly, but surely

When you deprive a living organism of minerals, you ravage its biochemistry (through enzyme inhibition), metabolism, detoxification, hormone function, immunity, fertility, and pretty much everything it takes to sustain a living organism. Examples: Poor enzyme function prevents you from breaking down food and metabolizing it properly, which makes you store that food as weight gain, instead of burning it efficiently. Decreased serotonin production damages the switch that tells the body to stop eating, further contributing to weight gain.

People have rightfully been worrying about 29 million pounds of conventional antibiotics such as streptomycin, tetracycline and penicillin being used in animal feed to prevent disease and fatten up livestock. But who even knows that we’ve been spraying 4.4 billion pounds of antibiotic each year on crops, roadways, driveways, gardens and waterways in the form of glyphosate? And its use is doubling every six years. This is why glyphosate deserves much of the blame for causing inflammatory and degenerative diseases spreading like wildfire since about 2000. In fact…