Does ‘Gluten Allergy’ Really Have Anything to Do with Gluten?
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All of a sudden, my supermarket has a whole shelf of gluten-free products. Seems like everything now comes in a gluten-free version. But it wasn’t that long ago that most people had never heard of gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley, and rye, except that it was a necessary part of good, chewy, wholesome bread. What happened? Why so much gluten intolerance all of a sudden?
Well, why so much autism all of a sudden? So much diabetes? So much obesity? Could the allergic reaction to bread be attributed to something other than gluten? I mean, human beings have been eating wheat since the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago, and were probably gathering einkorn, modern wheat’s predecessor, for many years before that. All of a sudden everyone’s got a wheat allergy?
An intriguing blog called The Healthy Home Economist made a recent post that is astonishing, and it concerns wheat allergy. In the post, the author, who calls herself Sarah, with no last name, claims that just before harvest, most of the wheat used in our foods is sprayed with Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide and that what people are actually experiencing is a response to this toxic chemical.
“According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as of 2012, 99 percent of durum wheat, 97 percent of spring wheat, and 61 percent of winter wheat has been doused with Roundup as part of the harvesting process,” Sarah claimed, though a link to these USDA statistics was not provided. But a chart from a USDA database indicates that these wheats do receive applications of Roundup, even though there is no Roundup-resistant wheat that is approved for mainstream use in the United States.
I checked the Monsanto website regarding the application of Roundup to crops just before harvest (which means the herbicide residues are not only in every cell of the crop’s tissues, but also on the surface as a residue). Monsanto recommends spraying three or four days before harvest. You can check it yourself at http://roundup.ca/_uploads/documents/MON-Preharvest%20Staging%20Guide.pdf. At the site, farmers are encouraged to apply Roundup to many crops just before harvest, not just wheat but also barley, oats, canola, flax, peas, lentils, and dry beans.
One of the reasons to spray these food crops, Monsanto says, is to kill weeds that may have grown with the crop or will grow post-harvest. “Preharvest is the best time for controlling Canada thistle, quackgrass, perennial sowthistle, dandelion, toadflax, and milkweed. A preharvest weed control application is an excellent management strategy to not only control perennial weeds, but to facilitate harvest management and get a head start on next year’s crop,” Monsanto says.
And another reason to spray is to promote uniformity of ripening of the seeds to be used for human or animal food. And finally, when the wheat or other stalks die, they dry quickly and are easier on the farmers’ equipment, such as combines.
The Manitoba Pulse Growers’ literature warns farmers in that Canadian province to be aware that some countries require crops to contain “less chemical residue” than others. It states that, in the U.S., there are no marketing issues with excess Roundup residue on plants. The maximum residue level allowed is set, and provided farmers follow the directions on their Roundup labels, they don’t need to worry. Selling to Japan is a bit more difficult if farmers use pre-harvest Roundup treatments, because the maximum residue level of Roundup that Japan will tolerate on beans is “set at a rigidly low level.”
Preharvest spraying of this toxic chemical might help explain the results from a study released earlier this year that found higher than expected levels of glyphosate in breast milk samples. Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Roundup. Despite the herbicide being found in breast milk, urine, streams and waterways, and even rain, Monsanto maintains that the use of Roundup on feed crops and food crops alike is safe for animals and people under “present and expected conditions of use.”
Also, a new report by ConsumerReports.org points out that a gluten-free claim doesn’t mean the product is necessarily more nutritious, it may actually be less so; that consumers may increase their exposure to arsenic by going gluten-free, and a gluten-free diet might cause weight gain—not weight loss. And, most gluten-free foods cost more than their regular counterparts.
Still, a new survey of more than 1,000 Americans conducted by the Consumer Reports National Research Center found that about a third of people buy gluten-free products or try to avoid gluten. Among the top benefits they cited were better digestion and gastrointestinal function, healthy weight loss, increased energy, lower cholesterol, and a stronger immune system.
“While people may feel better on a gluten-free diet, there is little evidence to support that their improved health is related to the elimination of gluten from their diet,” said Trisha Calvo, deputy content editor, health and food, at Consumer Reports. “Before you decide to ride the wave of this dietary trend, consider why it might not be a good idea.”
Unless someone has a gluten sensitivity or celiac disease – an autoimmune condition in which gluten causes potentially life-threatening intestinal damage – Consumer Reports says there is little reason to eliminate gluten, and doing so may actually be a disservice to one’s health. Less than seven percent of Americans have these conditions.
A quarter of the people CR surveyed thought gluten-free foods have more vitamins and minerals than other foods. But CR’s review of 81 products free of gluten across 12 categories revealed they’re a mixed bag in terms of nutrition. Many gluten-free foods aren’t enriched or fortified with nutrients such as folic acid and iron as many products that contain wheat flours are.
And according to CR’s survey, more than a third of Americans think that going gluten-free will help them slim down, but there’s very little evidence that doing so is a good weight-loss strategy; in fact, the opposite is often true. Ditching gluten often means adding sugar, fat, and sodium, which are often used to pump up the flavor in these foods; these foods also might have more calories and consuming them could cause some people to gain weight.
If going gluten free means cutting down on the toxic load of glyphosate you’re getting, then it is a good thing. But you don’t have to give up eating healthy whole grain breads. Just choose organic.
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THE TROUBLE WITH GLYPHOSATE
Shall we take a closer look at Roundup and glyphosate to see if it really is safe, especially if sprayed on crops just before harvest?
Glyphosate kills by inhibiting an enzyme (CYP 450) involved in the synthesis of amino acids. It’s absorbed through foliage and transported by the plant to growing points. Unable to make the amino acids necessary for life, the plant dies. Because of this mode of action, it is only effective on actively growing plants. It is not effective as a pre-emergence herbicide; that is, before the crop seeds sprout and start to grow.
Glyphosate may be the culprit behind many of the so-called “diseases of civilization” that have plagued humanity since the chemical was introduced into agriculture in the last third of the 20th Century, diseases that are escalating at alarming rates today. These diseases and conditions include birth defects, autism, gastrointestinal disorders, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression, infertility, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and more.
That’s the conclusion of two scientists who looked over 286 studies of the biological effects of glyphosate and published their findings in the peer-reviewed journal Entropy in mid-April, 2013. These findings are a bombshell that, if confirmed by further scientific studies, could—and should–lead to a total worldwide ban on glyphosate. Women of child-bearing age, who plan to become pregnant, who are pregnant, or are rearing young children should pay close attention to the following information.
In their search of the literature, environmental scientist Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Seneff, Senior Research Scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, found a great deal of evidence that glyphosate suppresses and inhibits a human enzyme called cytochrome P450, known in scientific shorthand as CYP. Inhibiting enzymes is exactly how glyphosate works as an herbicide, because enzymes are catalysts for all sorts of functions in plants, and when they are suppressed, the plants die for lack of the ability to function properly. Something of the same effect may be at work in humans who ingest glyphosate from their food.
“Glyphosate’s inhibition of CYP enzymes is an overlooked component of its toxicity to mammals,” they write. “CYP enzymes play crucial roles in biology, one of which is to detoxify any foreign substances not normally found in living creatures, such as pesticides, industrial chemicals, pollutants, and drugs. Thus, glyphosate enhances the damaging effects of other food-borne chemical residues and environmental toxins. The negative impact on the body is insidious, and manifests slowly over time as inflammation damages cellular systems within the body.”
The authors show how glyphosate harms three crucial bodily functions. First, it interferes with CYP enzymes. Second, it disrupts our intestinal flora’s ability to construct important amino acids that build and repair the body’s cellular tissues.
Third, it impairs the movement of sulfate compounds in the blood. These compounds are especially important in the growth of infants, young children, and the developing fetus in pregnant women due to their role in forming and assigning jobs to hormones that direct normal fetal growth. Hormones are the body’s messaging system, telling tissues like stem cells how to grow and what to grow into. Endocrine disruptors like glyphosate impair the body’s hormonal messages. It’s as if your cell phone connections were garbled and mostly incoherent.
Glyphosate’s enzyme inhibition acts synergistically with the other two damaging effects—that is, it produces a more serious health effect than the sum of the individual effects.
In conclusion, the study’s authors write: “Given the known toxic effects of glyphosate reviewed here and the plausibility that they are negatively impacting health worldwide, it is imperative for more independent research to take place to validate the ideas presented here, and to take immediate action, if they are verified, to drastically curtail the use of glyphosate in agriculture. Glyphosate is likely to be pervasive in our food supply, and contrary to being essentially non-toxic, it may in fact be the most biologically disruptive chemical in our environment.”
What the authors have done in this study of the scientific literature on glyphosate is to connect the dots, with each dot being one of the 286 studies.
Author Anthony Samsel is an environmental scientist with a long list of achievements in pollution control. He’s a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists, and an organic farmer to boot. “Now that I’m retired, it’s time to help those who are victimized by industrial polluters,” he says. Now his work focuses on charitable community investigations of industrial polluters of air and water by hazardous chemical materials; agricultural pollution by pesticides, biocides, and genetically engineered materials, and their effects on public health and the environment.
He says that the information about glyphosate’s disastrous effects on human health have not been reported to the public before. “As far as I know, I have never seen CYP 450 enzymes referred to in a non-technical magazine,” he says.
“I started reading Organic Gardening magazine as a child in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I have owned and operated several commercial farm operations in New England. I now grow five acres of organic produce in New Hampshire, most of which is donated to the needy in this area.”
Author Stephanie Seneff told me that “I became interested in glyphosate through my research on autism. I have been alarmed by the recent increases in the incidence of autism in the U.S., and I am determined to figure out what environmental toxins may be at play. I have now become convinced that glyphosate plays a major role, although it is not the entire story.” The incidence of autism in America has risen by 30 percent just in the past two years.
“We did not do any new research other than predict the likely consequences of glyphosate, given the evidence available in the papers we reviewed. I don’t think anybody else has put together the story that’s in this paper, regarding how glyphosate can be linked up to syndromes like obesity, depression, and autism directly through its known actions on biological systems. So I would say that our findings and conclusions are new, rather than just a summary.”
Are there any other indications that glyphosate may be causing harm?
Three rivers come together and run through the Yakima Valley of Washington State. The Valley is home to a large portion of Washington’s fruit growing industry, and so in the 1960s, noxious weed control boards were established to keep weed competition with the fruit industry’s crops in check.
Barbara H. Peterson, writing in her informative blog, Farm Wars, details what happened next:
“Three Washington counties – Yakima, Benton, and Franklin – experienced an unusually high number of birth defects (800 percent higher than the national average) at around the same time as glyphosate was being used extensively for several years to eradicate noxious weeds on land and in the water. That birth defect is called anencephaly, or failure of the neural tubes that form the brain to develop. It’s almost always fatal. Could there be a connection?
“It appears that Yakima, Benton, and Franklin counties just happen to have three things in common – the Yakima River, a noxious weed eradication program using copious amounts of glyphosate for years on both land and in the river, and an increase in anencephaly, which glyphosate just happens to be suspected of causing.
“Considering the government’s propensity to ignore any connection between Monsanto’s glyphosate and health effects, and the fact that the EPA just raised allowable glyphosate levels, I think we can safely assume that the correlation between increased usage and these brain damaged babies will not be adequately investigated.”
Worldwide, annual use of glyphosate is projected to reach 1.35 million metric tons by 2016, according to Global Industry Analysts, Inc.
Now let’s look at some studies about glyphosate’s toxicity.
The headline in the Journal of Environmental and Analytical Toxicology reads: “Teratogenic Effects of Glyphosate-Based Herbicides: Divergence of Regulatory Decisions from Scientific Evidence.” Put in simpler terms, the headline means that the people responsible for making the safety rules for glyphosate are ignoring the evidence of its harm in animal development. This article cites a number of scientific studies showing that the chemical causes birth defects by interfering with retinoic acid, a signaling molecule derived in the body from vitamin A that guides embryonic development in all animals with backbones, from fish to humans. Despite many studies showing reproductive problems and birth defects in animals like frogs and rats, officials in the German Federal Office for Consumer Protection and Food Safety and European Union food safety officials minimized the potential for harm by relying primarily on studies paid for by Monsanto, Dow, and Syngenta that downplayed the problems.
The conclusion of the article’s eight scientists states, in part, “A substantial body of evidence demonstrates that glyphosate and Roundup cause teratogenic (a teratogen is an agent affecting an embryo or fetus) effects and other toxic effects on reproduction, as well as genotoxic effects (a genotoxin causes mutations by damaging an organism’s DNA)…Attempts by industry and government regulatory bodies to dismiss this research are unconvincing and work against the principle that it is the responsibility of industry to prove that its products are safe and not the responsibility of the public to prove that they are unsafe.”
Researchers in a French study exposed live human liver cells to glyphosate at lower levels than found in agriculture and reported that all the cells’ normal functions were disrupted within 24 hours. DNA damage was found at just five parts per million of the herbicide. The researchers concluded, “A real cell impact of glyphosate-based herbicides residues in food, feed or in the environment has thus to be considered, and their classifications as carcinogens/mutagens/reprotoxics discussed.” The title of their paper in Toxicology for August 21, 2009, is not weasel-worded: “Glyphosate-based herbicides are toxic and endocrine disruptors in human cell lines.”
A September, 2013, study published in Food and Chemical Toxicology, is titled, “Glyphosate Induces Human Breast Cancer Cells Growth Via Estrogen Receptors.” In other words, when scientists added glyphosate to a petri dish with living human breast cancer cells, the cells started reproducing like crazy, an action that is the definition of cancer.
A French study found that very low doses of glyphosate reduced testosterone levels in male rats by 35 percent and caused cell death at higher levels. A study published in the journal Archives of Toxicology showed Roundup is toxic to human DNA even when diluted to concentrations 450-fold lower than used in agricultural applications. Industry regulators and long-term studies look at glyphosate in isolation, instead of looking at Roundup’s full formulation, which includes secret added ingredients. These “confidential” and unlabeled ingredients, when measured as a whole, affect all living cells, including human cells.
A study in Environmental Health Perspectives for June, 2005, tested glyphosate alone and as an ingredient in Roundup, which contains other chemicals beside glyphosate, on living placental cells—you know, those cells whose job it is to interface with the mother’s bloodstream to secure nutrients for the developing baby. Here’s the upshot, translated from the scientific jargon: “Here we show that glyphosate is toxic to human placental cells within 18 hours with concentrations lower than those found with agricultural use, and this effect increases with concentration and time or in the presence of the other ingredients in Roundup. Surprisingly, Roundup is always more toxic than its active ingredient (glyphosate). We tested the effects of glyphosate and Roundup at lower nontoxic concentrations on aromatase, the enzyme responsible for estrogen synthesis. We conclude that endocrine and toxic effects of Roundup, not just glyphosate, can be observed in mammals. We suggest that Roundup enhances glyphosate bioavailability and/or bioaccumulation.” In other words, the other ingredients in Roundup make it more toxic than glyphosate alone.
The other way that newborn babies can get glyphosate from their moms is through breast milk. A group called Moms Across America did research on glyphosate in American mothers’ breast milk at several locations across the country and found that indeed, it was in the milk at levels around 700 parts per billion. This is 700 times higher than allowed in Europe’s drinking water. And while 700 ppb is a lot, it is still less than the maximum allowable by the Environmental Protection Agency. And since the research was preliminary and not a rigorous scientific study, we need to make sure we don’t overstate the case here. And yet 700 ppb is frightening, because glyphosate at almost any level causes concern.
Moms Across America released the breast milk report to EPA in April, 2014. More recently, the group gave EPA a three-inch-thick binder full of studies showing harm to humans and other mammals, Here are just a handful of the many studies EPA was given:
Glyphosate was recently connected to increases of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Peer reviewed studies show rats fed diets as low as 2 ppm of glyphosate were 70 percent to 80 percent more likely to develop tumors than rats not fed the chemical. Infertility, affecting both the sperm and the egg, was documented in animals subjected to glyphosate residue levels as low as .05 ppm. Birth defects in frog and chicken embryos resulted after being subjected to glyphosate residues of just 2.03 ppm.
The chemical is a chelator, making certain nutrients unavailable in foods.
Glyphosate has an antibiotic effect that kills gut bacteria at one-tenth parts per million. One of the levels found in breast milk was one-third greater than that. “Therefore we can surmise that many of our babies’ gut bacteria are being destroyed, weakening their immune systems,” the organization writes. And remember that study by Samsel and Seneff mentioned earlier? The study’s full title is, “Glyphosate’s Suppression of Cytochrome P450 Enzymes and Amino Acid Biosynthesis by the Gut Microbiome: Pathways to Modern Diseases.” Some of the studies cited in this review connect glyphosate with autism. That’s a connection, not a cause-and-effect conclusion, but it should throw up a big warning flag for the EPA.
EPA, however, has said only that it will include Mothers Across America’s breast milk information in its review, which will take until sometime in 2015. During this wait time, MAA points out, the U.S. will continue to be Number One in the industrialized world for infant death on the baby’s first day. “Fifty percent more babies die in the U.S. on day one than all of the other industrialized nations combined,” MAA says.
About a million metric tons (about 2 billion, 205 million pounds) of Roundup are used on farms, gardens, and lawns worldwide every year in the most recent calculations. And so it’s found everywhere—in the air, water, and soil; in the plants grown in that soil, in the animals who eat those plants, and in the people who eat those plants and animals.
Glyphosate was detected in more than 75 percent of air and rain samples in the Mississippi delta region in a 2007 study.
The EPA in July, 2013, announced a final ruling to increase, yet again, the allowed residue of glyphosate in food and animal feed. Under the ruling, the allowed glyphosate level in animal feed has risen to 100 parts per million and 40 ppm in oilseed crops.
The EPA ruling defies sound science and undermines public health, yet the EPA claims glyphosate is only “minimally toxic” to humans, and 40 ppm is nothing to worry about.
But if Roundup is so toxic, why is everyone using so much of it? And why all around the world?
Roundup has been around since the 1970s, but it really became a super problem when the science of genetic engineering was perfected in the mid-1990s. Monsanto’s scientists—and its marketing executives—reasoned that if they could find a gene for glyphosate resistance and put it into major crop seeds, then farmers could pour on enough Roundup to kill weeds without harming the major crops. This would open up vast new markets for the herbicide.
As early as 1982, the scientists were looking for ways to make crops resistant to the herbicide, but first, they had to find the genetic key to that resistance. Remember that Monsanto had been making Roundup since the early 1970s, and waste water involved in the processing was stored in its waste ponds. Now, when you assault an organism—especially a microorganism—with a death-dealing chemical, you kill off most of a population, except for a few mutants who can resist the assault. These reproduce and soon you have a colony of resistant bacteria, or weeds, or insects, or what-have-you. It was then that Monsanto discovered the gene for glyphosate resistance in its waste water ponds, where they had inadvertently created the conditions nature needed to develop the gene in bacteria through mutation and natural selection. At the same time, genetic engineering—the swapping of genes among different orders of plants and animals—was a developing science, and by 1996, GMO soybeans were dubbed Roundup Ready and offered for sale on the market. Today soy, corn, canola, alfalfa, cotton, sorghum, potatoes, and wheat (under development) are Roundup Ready.
What this means to pregnant women and parents of young, developing children and those kids entering puberty is that those crops are not only GMOs (genetically modified organisms)—you know, the GMOs that Monsanto, Dow, DuPont, Syngenta, and other biotech firms don’t want you to know about on food labels—but they have also been grown with systemic Roundup. Remember, this chemical mixture is systemic. It’s in every cell of the plant. You can’t wash it off. It survives cooking, freezing, and canning. It goes into you and your offspring.
Monsanto says that by using Roundup Ready crops, farmers can reduce the use of this herbicide. But that’s nonsense. Farmers lavish Roundup on their crops and fields, as we’ve seen. Roundup use has quadrupled since the GMO crops were introduced.
Remember also that nature responds to death-dealing chemical assaults by creating mutations to counter the assaults. And so the use of Roundup on these GMO crops has resulted in races of superweeds that Roundup now can’t kill. In Monsanto’s version of the arms race, it suggested that Roundup be paired with Dow’s 2,4-D—another very toxic herbicide and one of the components of Agent Orange, the defoliant used to kill forests in Vietnam so our planes could see where to bomb.
The USDA was asked to approve the use of this double-whammy, supertoxic herbicide, and in the fall of 2014, did so. Will it kill the superweeds? Experience tells us that it will kill some of them—but not all. A few resistant weeds will survive, breed, and produce the next generation of super superweeds. And so on ad infinitum, with Monsanto, Dow and the rest laughing all the way to the bank, leaving farmers, the environment, and all of us out here in a world poisoned by glyphosate, holding the bag. And trying to learn how to protect our children.
Be aware that glyphosate-containing GMO corn and soy are almost ubiquitous in conventional processed foods like breakfast cereals, soft drinks, cookies, pastries, and so on. Read labels. If it contains corn and soy, it almost assuredly contains glyphosate.
So, given all this information, let me ask you two questions:
Do you think it’s wise to trust Monsanto when it says that Roundup is safe?
Do you need any more incentive to eat organic?
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MAUI VOTES AGAINST GMOS, IS PROMPTLY SUED BY MONSANTO
Despite outspending citizens 87 to 1, the biotechnology industry, led by Monsanto, was defeated in Maui when that Hawaiian island’s citizens passed a GMO moratorium calling for a complete suspension of the cultivation of genetically engineered crops until studies conclusively prove they are safe.
Monsanto has announced it will file a lawsuit to challenge the moratorium. It is already suing the state of Vermont after that state passed a law requiring GMO foods to be labeled.
Ballot initiatives to label GMOs narrowly failed to pass in Oregon and failed miserably in Colorado on November 4 after the biotech industry and junk food makers spent many tens of millions of dollars to tell people—falsely—that labeling GMOs would raise their food prices, that anyone who is anti-GMO is anti-science, and that all of it, Roundup included, is perfectly safe.
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I FOUND THIS GOOD IDEA ON FACEBOOK
From Klyda White: Instead of an oil sands pipeline, build a water pipeline from the Midwest and northern states to California. Same number of jobs created. Limit some of the flooding in these Midwest states. Help rebuild California’s water tables and irrigate all the fresh vegetables the country needs. And if it springs a leak, it would just be FRESH WATER spilling into rivers, lakes and the aquifer. Seems like win-win-win to me.
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