Scribd

Introduction

We haven’t inherited this planet from our parents, we’ve borrowed it from our children. We have not borrowed our children’s future— we have stolen it and we’re still stealing it now, and it’s time we get together, whatever our religion, whatever our culture, get together and start changing the way—changing our attitude—so that we can leave a better world for our children, whom we love.

—J󰁡󰁮󰁥 G󰁯󰁯󰁤󰁡󰁬󰁬

G

lyphosate. Not exactly a word that rolls off the tongue. A word that was not even in my vocabulary for the first 64 years of my life. Then in September 2012, I was invited to give a talk about the dangers of statin drugs at a nutrition conference in Indianapolis. I noticed that a botanist whose agricultural research focused on the epidemiology and control of plant pathogens, Dr. Don Huber from Purdue University, was speaking on the topic of “glyphosate.” Even though I didn’t recognize the chemical’s name, I thought it might be useful for me to find out what it was.In the previous five years, I’d been on a dogged journey to identify environ-mental factors that might be causing the increase in autism among America’s children. Characterized by social deficits, repetitive behaviors, and impaired cognitive abilities, autism spectrum disorder can present as relatively mild, or it can be extreme, requiring full-time lifelong care. Like many scientists, I’d noticed that the rates of autism spectrum disorders had been rising dramatically over the past few decades, in ways that could not be accounted for by diagnostic criteria. Based on a survey conducted by the United States Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) in 2016, the prevalence of autism in the United States is about 1 in 40 children.󰀱 According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the prevalence of autism among 12-year-old children is about 1 in 54, and it is four times more common among boys than among girls.󰀲

2

Toxic Legacy

By the time I attended Dr. Huber’s presentation on glyphosate, I had already learned a great deal about the complicated medical conditions that often accompany autism, including a disrupted gut microbiome, inflamma-tory and leaky gut, nutrient malabsorption, food sensitivities, vitamin and mineral deficiencies, and impaired methylation and sulfation pathways. I had been assiduously studying the toxic effects of various metals and chemicals in the environment: mercury, fluoride, lead, aluminum, plastics, polychlorinated biphenyls, polysorbate 80, and other endocrine disruptors and carcinogens. I was also investigating the role of diet and the overuse of antibiotics. I was trying to find something in the environment that had become more pervasive in the past two decades, in step with the dramatic rise in autism rates, that might explain the diverse symptoms associated with the brain dysfunction we were seeing.What I learned from Dr. Huber is that glyphosate is the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup. While glyphosate isn’t a household name, every-one has heard of Roundup. Drive across the United States and you’ll see vast fields marked with crop labels that say “Roundup Ready.” Monsanto, the Missouri-based company that was Roundup’s original manufacturer, was acquired by the Germany-based company Bayer in 2018 as part of its crop science division. Monsanto has touted glyphosate as remarkably safe because its main mechanism of toxicity affects a metabolic pathway in plant cells that human cells don’t possess. This is what—presumably—makes glyphosate so effective in killing plants, while—in theory, at least—leaving humans and other animals unscathed.But as Dr. Huber pointed out to a rapt audience that day,

human cells

might not possess the shikimate pathway but almost all of

our gut microbes

do. They use the shikimate pathway, a central biological pathway in their metabolism, to synthesize tryptophan, tyrosine, and phenylalanine, three of the twenty coding amino acids that make up the proteins of our body. Precisely because human cells do not possess the shikimate pathway, we rely on our gut micro- biota, along with diet, to provide these essential amino acids for us.Perhaps even more significantly, gut microbes play an essential role in

many

aspects of human health. When glyphosate harms these microbes, they not only lose their ability to make these essential amino acids for the host, but they also become impaired in their ability to help us in all the

Introduction

3

other ways they normally support our health. Beneficial microbes are more sensitive to glyphosate, and this causes pathogens to thrive. We know, for example, that gut dysbiosis is associated with depression and other mental disorders.󰀳 Alterations in the distribution of microbes can cause immune dysregulation and autoimmune disease.󰀴 Parkinson’s disease is strongly linked to a proinflammatory gut microbiome.󰀵 As has become clear from the remarkable research conducted on the human microbiome in the past decade or so, happy gut bacteria are essential to our health, including in ways that researchers have yet to fully understand. It’s worth remembering that Roundup hit the market—and was declared safe—before much of this groundbreaking research on the human microbiome was ever conducted.Dr. Huber also explained that glyphosate is a chelator, a small molecule that binds tightly to metal ions. In plant physiology, glyphosate’s chelation disrupts a plant’s uptake of essential minerals from the soil, including zinc, copper, manganese, magnesium, cobalt, and iron. Studies have shown that plants exposed to glyphosate take up much smaller amounts of these critical minerals into their tissues.󰀶 When we eat foods derived from these nutrient- deficient plants, we become nutrient deficient, as well.Glyphosate also interferes with the symbiotic relationship between plant roots and soil bacteria. Surrounding the roots of a plant is a soil zone called the rhizosphere that is teeming with bacteria, fungi, and other organisms. As I will explain later in more detail, glyphosate kills the organisms living in the rhizosphere, which then interferes with a plant’s nitrogen uptake, as well as the uptake of many different minerals.󰀷 This interference further translates into mineral deficiencies in our foods. Glyphosate also causes exposed plants to be more vulnerable to fungal diseases.󰀸 And fungal diseases can lead to contamination of our foods with mycotoxins produced by pathogenic fungi.I came away from Dr. Huber’s lecture convinced that I needed to learn a lot more about glyphosate.

—

I am a senior research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the most innovative research universities in the world. I have earned four degrees from MIT: a bachelor of science in biophysics, and a master’s, an engineer’s, and a PhD degree in electrical engineering and computer