HomeAbout JeffContact

Monsanto Hid Evidence of Roundup and Cancer

Organic Lifestyle Comments Off on Monsanto Hid Evidence of Roundup and Cancer

Monsanto has been squirming since the World Health Organization (WHO) classified glyphosate, the active ingredient in their hallmark herbicide Roundup, as a probable human carcinogen. The WHO is designed to do just that, and yet Monsanto and its friends in high places unleashed a barrage of the usual criticisms claiming that WHO was out of step with science.

But a new study in the glyphosate series by Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Seneff shows that it is Monsanto who is out of step, and how its own studies demonstrated unqualified links to cancer for over 30 years.

Entitled “Glyphosate, pathways to modern diseases IV: cancer and related pathologies,” the authors utilize the data from Monsanto’s own studies that had been sealed by the EPA. Samsel’s freedom of information requests pried them out of the EPA’s files, and demonstrate that glyphosate fed to rats produced tumors and cancers throughout the organ and glands in the animals.

Question: Why did the EPA, charged with protecting the environment and our health, seal these documents in the first place?

The rates of many types of cancers, including thyroid, liver, bladder, pancreatic, kidney, and myeloid leukemia have increased in the US population in parallel with our increased exposure to glyphosate in the food supply. Its use since the mid-1990s has skyrocketed three different ways.

1. The introduction of genetically modified (GMO) Roundup Ready corn, soy, and canola to the US food supply meant that Americans began eating large amounts of the herbicide that had not previously been applied directly to conventional crops.

2. The surge in glyphosate use on those GMO crops caused weeds to battle back against the herbicide and evolve into “superweeds,” which then required the use of even more Roundup to manage.

3. Farmers began using glyphosate as a drying and ripening agent just before harvesting wheat, sugarcane, peas, beans, lentils, and many other crops.

Citing nearly 250 studies, Samsel and Seneff tease out the biochemistry that shows just how glyphosate can explain these cancers. The chemical, it turns out, makes all-important trace minerals like manganese unavailable—thereby cutting off key metabolic pathways that rely on them to function. Glyphosate also is an antibiotic, killing off beneficial gut bacteria like lactobacillus and bifidobacterium; these and other bacterial casualties of glyphosate are needed by the body to produce other key components for a multitude of reactions. And glyphosate also damages the mitochondria (the energy factories found in cells) and throws off the delicate balance of the hormonal systems.

As the authors connect the dots between glyphosate and numerous types of cancers, they also demonstrate how the same disruptions are likely contributing to a whole host of other diseases, including autism, diabetes, kidney disease, and fatty liver disease.

Most of these and others are highlighted in the previous three papers in this series by Samsel and Seneff. A videotaped interview of Dr. Seneff shows the links between glyphosate to more than a dozen diseases. A second interview discussing the second paper in the series focuses on gluten sensitivity and kidney failure as outcomes of glyphosate exposure.

In the current cancer paper, the authors reveal at least two methods that Monsanto uses to explain away the serious health issues found in its laboratory animals. The first is ignoring the low dose effects. It is well known that a certain class of chemicals called endocrine disruptors have a curious counter-intuitive property, where their greatest damage to the hormonal system comes at tiny doses. In fact, as the amount of these chemicals increases, the hormonal effects decrease.

In Monsanto’s studies, it was often the low dose of glyphosate that had the biggest impact on the gland, organ, or prevalence of tumors. Armed with the false concept that “the dose makes the poison,” Monsanto researchers flatly ignored findings where a lower dose had a larger effect than a higher dose. While some may rush to defend Monsanto, claiming that the low dose endocrine effects were not understood in the 1970s and 80s, when many of these findings were reported, there is no defending the company at this point. They had the data in their files since then, and the low dose endocrine disruption effect has been widely understood for at least the past 14 years. Understood, that is, by the scientific community other than those who work for the companies that produce endocrine disrupting chemicals. And oddly, it is also not understood by the government regulators who don’t require those same companies to even test for this effect. Hence the EPA in the US and EFSA in Europe waive chemicals like glyphosate onto the market without evaluating whether they’re messing up many key hormones that we rely on for staying healthy.

Once Monsanto saw the low dose effects of their chemicals on lab animals, they conveniently stopped testing the low dosage in subsequent animal trials.

Perhaps even more egregious is Monsanto’s use of “historical controls,” an unscientific method used to pretend that we can ignore even serious evidence of harm. According to real science, you design an experiment to compare an experimental group with a control group under the same conditions. In a rat study, for example, you raise the rats on the same food, same water, same environmental conditions, and even selecting the same type of rat for both groups. That way, you can isolate the variable you want to test. In Monsanto’s case, they varied only the amount of glyphosate in the diet. The controls got zero, and various experimental groups got one of several dosage levels.

According to the Samsel/Seneff paper, the animals that received the doses of glyphosate had a far greater number of lymph node and thyroid cancerous tumors than the controls. The results were clearly statistically significant.

In order to make the findings disappear, however, Monsanto deployed its research staff to comb through other animals studies, looking for cases where the control groups also had a high level of cancers (or whatever the disorder is in question). They simply claim that because some other group of rats in a lab with completely different conditions and diets showed an equivalent number of problems as the group of animals that were fed glyphosate, we can ignore the findings altogether.

Real scientists condemn this practice as completely inappropriate. Numerous studies have shown that controls are sometimes subject to contaminated diets or other environmental conditions that make their number of tumors, for example, far from normal. They say, why would one even do an experiment according to the scientific method, which requires careful attention to keeping the conditions the same for the experimental group and the controls, if you are just going to throw out the results by finding rats in other studies to compare results with.

In fact, a study by Robin Mesnage entitled “Laboratory Rodent Diets Contain Toxic Levels of Environmental Contaminants: Implications for Regulatory Tests” discovered that the normal diets of lab animals, both control and experimental, are contaminated with GMOs, glyphosate, heavy metals, and other toxins. This raises questions about all the animal studies being conducted, especially those testing GMOs and glyphosate.
It is unclear what contaminant may have been in the experiments used by Monsanto as “historical controls,” but as Samsel says, “…through the dishonest magic of comparing the findings to data from unrelated historical controls, they were explained away as a mystery and deemed not to be related to the administration of glyphosate.”

Unfortunately, while scientists worldwide condemn the use of historical controls, once again, the manufacturers of toxins and their regulators cling to this practice and rely on it for approving chemicals that would otherwise never be allowed on the market.
Here are several key points in the Samsel/Seneff paper on Glyphosate and Cancer:

DNA Damage

There is strong evidence to suggest that glyphosate operates through two key features known to be associated with carcinogens: 1) causing DNA damage, and 2) oxidative stress. Samsel and Seneff focused on examining evidence that glyphosate can cause DNA damage. A study of the DNA of children living near rice paddies in Malaysia found chromosomal breakage attributed to pesticide exposure. Glyphosate use in Sri Lanka was linked with widespread kidney failure among young agricultural workers in the rice paddies, which led to the 2015 ban on glyphosate in the country.

Cancers

•Monsanto’s studies showed that glyphosate readily reacts with nitrogen oxide compounds to form a toxic substance called nitrosoglyphosate, which can cause cancer in at least 40 different animal species, including higher primates.
•Samsel and Seneff hypothesize that a non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which is linked to excess fructose, stems from the disrupted gut metabolism and blocked shikimate pathway that is a metabolic route used by our gut bacteria, and the disruption is caused by glyphosate consumption. Fructose should be digested by the gut, but in a disrupted metabolism it is instead delivered to the liver and converted to fat. Inflammation and metabolic disorders are characteristic features of diabetes and obesity, which carry dramatically higher risks of cancer, especially for the liver and gastrointestinal tract.
•They further theorized that pancreatic cancer and insulin-deficient diabetes are linked with glyphosate’s ability to chelate manganese, and that chronic kidney disease is linked with glyphosate causing the production of excess hydrogen peroxide, which attacks key proteins.
•There is an 80 percent increase in melanoma associated with glyphosate use, which may be caused by glyphosate’s disruption of the shikimate pathway used by our gut microbes: impairment of the supply of key aromatic amino acids, tryptophan and tyrosine.
•Glyphosate stimulates the growth of human breast cancer cells, specifically the cells that are hormone-dependent, and is controlled by glyphosate’s ability to act as an estrogen agent.

***

NEW ORGANIC PLANT BREEDING EFFORT TO PRODUCE NOVEL VARIETIES

A new effort to provide California growers with seeds for tomato, bean, pepper and other crop varieties that are specially bred for organic farming has been launched at UC Davis.

The organic plant-breeding project was developed in direct response to California organic growers, who have reported that the scarcity of seeds for cultivars that meet the needs of organic farming can seriously impact a farm’s bottom line.

“Seeds bred to account for the difference between growing organically and conventionally could improve farm yields and marketing potential for produce, yet organic seeds available to farmers are rarely developed with these organic management considerations in mind,” said Charlie Brummer, director of the UC Davis Plant Breeding Center and coordinator of the new organic breeding project.

Studies show that plant varieties developed under organic conditions can out-perform those developed under conventional conditions, Brummer said.

The new breeding effort, funded at just under $1 million by the Organic Research and Extension Initiative of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, will develop new cultivars on certified organic land at the Student Farm, a program of the Agricultural Sustainability Institute at UC Davis. Breeding programs will be led by graduate students as part of their hands-on training to be plant breeders.

“When we started the Plant Breeding Center in 2014, we wanted to give our plant-breeding students experience with real cultivar development projects that would result in products that growers and seed producers would want,” Brummer said. “This project lets us put those pieces together in a very meaningful and exciting way.”

He noted that there are myriad genetic traits that apply specifically to organic agriculture. For example, because organic farmers tend to rely on nonchemical methods to control pests and supply nutrients, natural resistance to pests and adaptability to organic soil conditions are important traits for crops grown organically. And increasingly, organic growers also need crop varieties that meet specific market niches, to clearly differentiate their products.

UC Davis has a long history of plant-breeding projects, but few have focused on organic seed or vegetable production until now.

***

ORGANIC MANAGEMENT IMPROVES SOIL AS IT BOOSTS YIELDS

A new study published in the journal Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems has found that farms under organic soil management systems can produce yields equivalent to conventional management systems, and those organic methods that incorporate residues into the soil improve soil nutrients and reduce weeds.

Researchers found that under organic management, weed biomass was lower by 22 to 47 percent, total soil nitrogen was higher by 7 to 4 percent, and yields did not significantly differ between the two management types.

***

WHEN IT COMES TO FUNDING ORGANIC RESEARCH, USDA IS STINGY

A report published in the journal Environmental Science & Policy looked into the amount of funding that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has put towards supporting sustainable agroecological farming, including organic. Its authors found that only 15 percent of the major external research and education grants awarded by USDA incorporate any element of agroecological principles. However, most of the projects included agroecology as a minor aspect of the research. The paper concludes that there is “an urgent need for additional public funding for systems-based agroecology and sustainable agriculture research.”

***

MICE, VOLES, SHREWS, AND GOPHERS THRIVE ON ORGANIC FARMS

Mammals play an important role in agricultural systems, yet very few studies have examined the influence that organic and conventional farming systems have on small mammal richness and diversity.

Now, a study published in Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment has found that the abundance of small mammals that are habitat specialists is greater on organic farms than conventional farms. While many studies have demonstrated that organic farms host higher diversity of soil microorganisms, beneficial insect predators, pollinators and birds, this study suggests that organic farming systems may also have an important role to play in biodiversity conservation of mammals.

Is this a problem, if we’re talking about mice, voles, shrews, and gophers? Nope. These prey bring in the barn owls, foxes, and other predators that are necessary for a rich, diverse ecosystem—and biodiversity is the key to health.

***

MAN AND SUPERMAN

An international group of scientists meeting in Washington has called for what would, in effect, be a moratorium on making inheritable changes to the human genome, writes Nicholas Wade in The New York Times. Let me quote the article:

“The group said it would be “irresponsible to proceed” until the risks could be better assessed and until there was “broad societal consensus about the appropriateness” of any proposed change. The group also held open the possibility for such work to proceed in the future by saying that as knowledge advances, the issue of making permanent changes to the human genome “should be revisited on a regular basis.”

“The meeting was convened by the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, the Institute of Medicine, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Society of London. The academies have no regulatory power, but their moral authority on this issue seems very likely to be accepted by scientists in most or all countries. Similar restraints proposed in 1975 on an earlier form of gene manipulation by an international scientific meeting in California were observed by the world’s scientists.

“’The overriding question is when, if ever, we will want to use gene editing to change human inheritance,’ David Baltimore said in opening the conference this week. The participation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences is a notable achievement for the organizers of the meeting, led by Dr. Baltimore, former president of the California Institute of Technology, given that earlier in the year Chinese scientists seemed to be racing ahead independently toward clinical alterations to the human germline.

“The meeting was prompted by a new genetic technique, invented three years ago, that enables DNA to be edited with unprecedented ease and precision. The technique, known as Crispr-Cas9 and now widely accessible, would allow physicians to alter the human germline, which includes the eggs and the sperm, to cure genetic disease or even enhance desirable physical or mental traits.

“Unlike gene therapy, an accepted medical technique that alters the body’s ordinary tissues, editorial changes made to the human germline would be inherited by the patient’s children and thus contribute permanent changes to the human gene pool. These, if sufficiently extensive, might, in principle, alter the nature of the human species.”

So where do we organic folks come down on science’s new ability to easily change the human DNA at will? Here are some considerations:

The first time a human being is born to a set of parents who have undergone this genetic engineering (because that’s what it is), we will have two kinds of human populations: natural and GMO. The GMOs will most likely be “superior” in some way, either because a gene that causes horrible, painful, disease will have been removed or altered, or because the person has been given a gene for nicer eyebrows, or faster synapses, or some other improvement to the race. And this means that the superior GMOs will eventually, when they become strong enough, want to eliminate the naturals the way Cro-Magnon man eliminated the Neanderthals.

Another way of saying this is that from that birth onward, evolution will have been taken out of nature’s hands and placed in the hands of lab scientists.

One of the basic tenets of organics is that nature knows best. Or do you believe that human beings are smarter than nature itself?

###