ONE SUBSTANCE might be at the root of a huge number of human and animal health problems

Put another way, are GBHs causing you GBH?

Are glyphosate-based herbicides causing you grievous bodily harm?

Glyphosate is a herbicide which is widely used in arable farming across the world. It kills weeds, or plants that farmers don’t want in their crops. In the UK, its use has increased 1000% since 1990 (https://www.pan-uk.org/glyphosate-rise-in-the-uk/).

It was originally patented to strip metals from pipes, because it’s a metal chelator. It “holds on” to metals. It was only later that it was accidentally found to be a herbicide. It has been marketed as such since 1974 as Roundup by Monsanto (a company which was later bought by Bayer).

Its use has gone up astronomically in the US since GMO (genetically modified) crops were invented that are resistant to glyphosate, in the mid-90s (so you spray the crops, they are resistant to the glyphosate, but it kills the weeds around crops). But now the weeds are becoming resistant to glyphosate, so we spray on more glyphosate, and whoops, a 1000% increase in use happens.

In one of its most harmful uses, it is used as a final spray to desiccate the

crop before harvest (so it dries quicker). But this final spraying means huge residues are left on the food crop. There’s a Brexit angle here – the EU stopped this final desiccation spraying of glyphosate in 2023, and is making moves to ban glyphosate entirely. Unfortunately not so at the moment in the UK, since Brexit. Boo.

But it’s also used hugely on crops used for animal feed, namely soy and corn. The animals eat the glyphosate-sprayed crops, it gets into their proteins, we eat the protein, we get more glyphosate.

So why is this stuff so bad? Oh man, it’s so difficult to sum up, this stuff does so much. Here are a handful of those reasons:

It’s a bacterial disruptor

It disrupts the soil bacteria, so that over time, soil becomes less and less rich in good bacteria that are good for crops. But unfortunately is also disrupts the bacteria in our microbiome. It is known to kill off the “good guys” in our gut, including lactobacillus, bifidobacteria and also akkermansia. This last one has received a lot of interest recently – we know it to be a butyrate producer, a short-chain fatty acid that feeds other good microbes in our gut. Akkermansia is also known (when present in just the right amount) to be a gut barrier function protector. Glyphosate has been linked to increase levels of leaky gut. Once the gut becomes leaky, anything in our gut, or anything we eat, can get through into the bloodstream creating all sorts of downstream issues and conditions.

It's a chelator

In other words, it can “hang on to” minerals and pull them out of the body. It is known to chelate such minerals as manganese, magnesium, copper and zinc. These are essential minerals involved in gazillions of functions in the body. We can’t function without them. For example, between 300 and 600 enzymes in the body need magnesium to work.

It can change our proteins

This is a biggy. Because of its structure it can replace glycine in many proteins. Glycine is the smallest amino acid. The “gly” part of the name glyphosate means glycine. So glyphosate can substitute glycine in our proteins. And once it gets in, it stays in. It is essentially recycled and accumulates in the body as our proteins are recycled. What might this mean? 3 scenarios:

• Consider collagen, an abundant protein in body. A huge proportion of it is glycine (every third amino acid). Glyphosate been found by this mechanism to be implicated in Ehlers-Danlos, a condition that changes proteins in connective tissues in the body. Ehlers-Danlos is not just very bendy joints, it can disrupt connective tissue in the gut and elsewhere, causing huge digestive and other issues.

• Glyphosate also messes up the protein myosin, a fundamental protein in gut motor muscles. It has been found that glyphosate can via this mechanism slow down, or even completely paralyse the gut. This is probably the result of the substitution of the glyphosate in the myosin.

• Proteins are in our enzymes…glyphosate been shown to disrupt the phase 1 CYP450 enzymes in our livers, so we can’t detox so well. The implications of this are huge.

Because glyphosate can disrupt so much in our bodies, it has been implicated with conditions as varied as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, gut issues, fatty liver, cancer. In rats exposed long term to glyphosate it caused mammary tumours. It has been linked to infertility, autism, other neurodivergences. Coeliacs diagnosis has gone up massively…another hypothesis is that glyphosate is a big part of the problem, that it’s not just the gluten implicated here.

Things are starting to change. Agricultural and garden/outdoor workers have been successfully suing Monsanto since 2018 for demonstrating that their Non-Hodgins Lymphoma was essentially caused by glyphosate. A key first case was that of Dewayne Lee Johnson Vs. Monsanto, in 2018. Johnson was a groundskeeper at a school in California, the only chemical he used in his job was Roundup. He won the case.

(https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/aug/10/monsanto-trial-cancer-dewayne-johnson-ruling)

So, that’s all very depressing!! But …what can you do to protect yourself?

There is an argument that we can never be 100% glyphosate free - the stuff is sprayed, and has been found in rainwater. Even organic crops are not 100% glyphosate free…but they contain a lot less than their non-organic counterparts. So here’s what you do:

• Eat certified organic generally – it’s expensive, I know, but if you can

  afford it, I urge you strongly, buy it

• Eat certified organic cereal crops – wheat, oats, legumes like chickpeas and lentils, sugarcane, barley are some of the most heavily glyphosated crops

• Eat grass-fed meat – the glyphosate gets into the muscle proteins of the animals fed on soy and corn crops sprayed with glyphosate

• Eat lots of sulphur foods – because glyphosate disrupts sulphur pathways, but also sulphur foods  are essential for detox – so onions, garlic all the cruciferous vegetables like cabbages, broccoli, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, etc. Consider sprouting broccoli seeds

• Eat fermented foods, especially fermented sulphur foods like sauerkraut – because this helps the gut, it helps replace all those good bacteria that are killed off by the glyphosate

• Make sure your detox channels are upon – this is code for make sure you are peeing and pooing ok! Don’t get constipated, and drink lots of clean water.

You can also do urine tests to find out your own glyphosate exposure, and if you have lots of glyphosate in your urine, there is more you can do to help you get rid of the stuff.

What if I want to know more?

The person to look up is Stephanie Seneff PhD of the Massachusetts institute of Technology. She is 78 and is an absolute legend. She has written many research papers, and more recently a book on this subject. The book is “Toxic Legacy: How the Weedkiller Glyphosate is Destroying our Health and the Environment”. (Notice how I’ve not gone down the environmental harms pathway in this blog…that’s a whole other story). Dr Seneff can be found on lots of podcasts and interviews. Go look her up. Go Stephanie, you’re a star.

Also if you want to address this toxic substance in your own life, and find out ways to help you detox it over and above the strategies set out above, get in touch via a discovery call and let's talk.