COMMON PESTICIDES You Use That Can Lead To CANCER & LIVER DISEASE | Stephanie Seneff

Glyphosate makes many, many other chemicals much more toxic than they would otherwise be because it disrupts the liver's ability to detoxify them. You can't avoid it, unfortunately, and we're all getting sick as a consequence of it. If the soil isn't healthy, then the.

Plant isn't healthy, then the food isn't healthy, and it just cascades downward. Let's get right into it. Glyphosate is this active ingredient in Roundup. It's the most commonly used weed killer in the world. There's about 300 million pounds of this herbicide sprayed on farms and food every year.

Is that just in the United States or that globally?

I think it's probably more globally.

And yeah, 9 billion globally, I think. 9 billion, 9 billion. 9 kilograms, kilograms. Sorry, you always have to watch the units. 9 billion.

9 billion.

That's an incredible amount. I don't even know what 9 billion kilograms looks like, but it's mind boggling. Mind boggling. It's on 70% of all crops and it's been around for a while, but not that long, right? In the '70s, it started being used and was actually used to sort of clean Pipes, I was supposed to clean all leaded pipes and stuff and all the gunk out of water pipes. But it turned out as it came out on the other end, it started killing all the weeds. And they're like, oh, there's a weed killer. So talk about the history of glyphosate, why farmers use so much of it, and why it's so toxic and bad for us.

Yes, well, it was, you're right. 1961, it was patented as a pipe cleaner, and it wasn't Monsanto, but Monsanto figured out it could kill weeds, and they patented it in 1969 for that specific role. And then '74 was when it rolled out. in America, we started being able to buy it. And they didn't use that much up until the late 1990s, which was when they figured out how to engineer crops to resist it. That was a huge breakthrough in agriculture. And that caused a huge increase in the use of biotech, exponential growth over time in those next decades. Since then, really, it's just been growing phenomenally because it's been successful in just spray the weed killer all over the crop. The crop doesn't die, the weeds die. It's very convenient for agriculture and it's made our food cheap. United States uses 20% of the world supply and we're, we're only 4% of the world population. So you can see that we get a lot more exposure than people elsewhere in the world. We have the most per person of any country in the world. That's terrifying.

I, I, yeah, I've, I've actually checked my urine glyphosate levels and, I'm like, you know, I pretty much focus on eating organic food. I don't try to eat any GMO foods. I mean, I, I, I, I'm not perfect because if I go out to a restaurant, I don't know what I'm getting. And I was shocked that I was.

In the 50th percentile for glyphosate in my body. It's really disturbing, isn't it? I had a similar experience. I was shocked that I had any at all, and I tested, I was positive. And I eat organic. I eat certified organic for many years. So it's just, you know, it's out there. You can't avoid it, unfortunately. And we're all getting sick as a consequence of it. I think it's the major driver behind the rise in the huge list of diseases in this country, you know, diabetes, obesity, autism, Alzheimer's, various cancers. It's quite shocking. These things are all rising dramatically in.

Prevalence over time, exactly in step with the rise in glyphosate.

That usage on core crops.

Yeah, it's interesting. Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, she talked a lot about the birth defects and also the sort of developmental effects of these chemicals, which got people to really think about them. But the glyphosate is a little different. It doesn't seem to cause the developmental effects, but it causes all these other issues like cancer and destroys our microbiome. So can you talk about what it actually does to the human body, but also the soil? Because I think it's very similar in its adverse effects around harming the microbiome of the soil and harming our microbiome, which turns out to be a very important part of our biology and may.

Link all those diseases you mentioned. That is so true. And that's what I've realized is that, and of course others have too, because the number of papers on the microbiome is going up very rapidly in the last 10, 20 years. People are finding how important those microbes are because they're not working correctly. People are getting so many diseases that trace back to mitochondrial to the microbiome disruption. And glyphosate, unfortunately, preferentially kills the beneficial bacteria. That's crucial. It kills off Lactobacillus and Bifidobacteria, which are really important in the baby to really get started with drinking milk. Lactobacillus is very important because it has a lot of enzymes that specialize in breaking down casein in milk, the milk protein. And so when those enzymes are missing, the baby can't digest milk. And that has lots and lots of consequences. We get things like casein intolerance, gluten intolerance. I think it's due to this lactobacillus being disturbed by glyphosate and disrupting their ability to help us digest these foods that we're eating. And then of course these pathogens take hold because the beneficial bacteria are weak and depleted. And then the pathogens induce a leaky gut, inflammatory gut, the immune cells come in and things go south from there. So people just have a lot of problems with their gut. I have a whole chapter on the gut in my book and that was a really hard chapter to write. I had to read a lot of to kind of coalesce into a story. But I finally got what I was happy with as a story for all the different things that GliF is A does, much more than what I've just said now, of course, related in part to the inability to break down proteins. And that becomes very serious because it can end up with autoimmune disease when those proteins that you eat are not broken down in your gut. Then that induces a leaky gut. And then that also allows those proteins to get out into the general circulation, which then causes antibodies to those proteins. and then through a process called molecular mimicry, they become autoantibodies and attack your tissues. So you get autoimmune disease.

Yeah, what you just unpacked there was so important. I just want to underscore it because when you are exposed to glyphosate, it seems to directly impact the microbiome by killing off your inner garden in ways that prevent it from actually protecting you in the way it's supposed to from disease. And the glyphosate seems to be responsible for to increasing this widespread phenomena of leaky gut, which means that the barrier in the gut is broken somehow, and the proteins and the toxins from the bacteria and also food proteins leak, literally leak into your bloodstream, interact with your immune system, and create a systemic response of inflammation. And all the diseases that you mentioned, cancer, liver disease, autism, heart disease, diabetes, I mean, these are all inflammatory diseases. So, take us down that road a little bit more. in depth about how glyphosate, despite it being claimed as safe by the food companies for humans, animals and the environment, why it's not safe and how specifically the evidence is mounting around how it's connected to these various diseases. And we see that even in courts, and while this may not be played out in regulatory changes, it's being played out in the courts where 14,000 lawsuits have been filed against glyphosate and there's been billions in settlements against.

The Monsanto.

Bear now, which actually owns Monsanto. So can you talk more about the science of how much do we know, how well is this proven, is this just hearsay, or is there good data linking glyphosate with these problems? Yes.

Well, when you start with the gut microbes, and of course glyphosate is a metal chelator, that was the first way that it was patented. And when it binds to minerals, it makes them unavailable to the gut microbes. That's part of the impact of how it disrupts them. It hits on a particular enzyme called EPSB synthase in the shikimate pathway. And that's a very, very important biological pathway in plants. And it's also very common in the microbes in our gut. Something like a study showed 54% of the gut microbes would be affected by this specific problem of the shikimate pathway getting disrupted. That pathway produces the aromatic amino acids. And those are three of the coding amino acids that go into the proteins. We depend upon getting them from our food or from our microbe production of them because our cells don't have that shikimate pathway, they can't make those proteins. They can become deficient and those amino acids are really critical. The aromatics, this tryptophan, tyrosine, and phenylalanine, they're super critical for our health. For example, tryptophan is a precursor to serotonin and melatonin. Those are neurotransmitters that are extremely important for proper brain function. Melatonin sleep disorder is going up dramatically in step with a rise in glyphosate because probably in part because of disruption of melatonin supply. And serotonin is the mood hormone, you know, it's related to depression, violent behavior, it's deficiency. And they come out of that shikimate pathway. Also thyroid hormone, it comes out of the shikimate pathway as well, a different amino acid, tyrosine rather than tryptophan. And so thyroid hormone is going to be disrupted. Many studies have shown that glyphosate disrupts thyroid homeostasis. So the hormones are getting disrupted, the amino acids are being depleted. Also, those enzymes go to B vitamins, niacin and riboflavin. Niacin and riboflavin are precursors to molecules called NAD and FAD, which are very, very important for metabolism. And their deficiency is going to disrupt the mitochondria. And I think mitochondria- and you can't make energy. Right, you can't make energy. Mitochondrial dysfunction is central to so many diseases. And I think it's also central to glyphosate's effects. on the body. If I had to say one thing, I would say mitochondrial dysfunction as a key feature of what glyphosate does. And many papers have shown that it causes oxidative stress, it causes depletion of glutathione, it causes glutathione to be oxidized, which is important because glutathione is a.

Really important antioxidant only if it's reduced. Wow. So that's just a lot you unpacked there. Let me see if I got this right. If you're exposed to glyphosate, it harmfully affects the bacteria in your gut that produce really important amino acids that regulate your gene expression. And the pathway it disrupts is a shikimate pathway, and that leads to abnormal gene expression and not being able to actually do the things your body's supposed to do.

And.

It also seems to deplete glutathione, which you mentioned, which is a critical molecule for regulating inflammation, detoxifying antioxidant. It's really the center of our biology. and if it disrupts that, we're kind of screwed.

Right, glutathione is so important. And we're seeing so many people talking about, you know, taking glutathione as a supplement, taking anacetyl cysteine to as a precursor to glutathione. Methionine is the core essential sulfur-containing amino acid, and it is a precursor to cysteine, which goes to glutathione. Methionine synthesis is disrupted by any Coli, by glyphosate. There was a study that showed that. So it prevents the microbes and also prevents the plants from producing methionine from inorganic sulfur. So this gives you again a deficiency in the sulfur containing amino acids. So we have a deficiency both in the aromatics and in the sulfur containing amino acids. And they're so important for so many things. It's just uncountable practically the ways that that would impact particularly your metabolism, of course also protein synthesis and of course all the hormones that are affected. And the B vitamins, all of those things are going to be affected by these disruptions by glyphosate.

And, I mean, you're an MIT scientist. This is not some crazy fringe idea. You're an evidence-based scientist. It's looking at hard at the data and coming to these conclusions. Well, first before we get into why the government hasn't figured this out yet, let's talk about other diseases and how good the evidence is. How good is the evidence around cancer, for example? or diabetes or autism or any of these autoimmune issues that you're talking about.

Yeah, cancer is actually the hardest one to explain. And maybe the weakest one, in fact, I would say cancer, of course, evolves out of mitochondrial dysfunction, so eventually it causes it. Studies have shown that it enhances other chemicals effects that would lead to cancer. In other words, it's a secondary effect. There are studies that have shown that. And there are also studies that have shown that it causes cancer cells, breast cancer cells in reach or true proliferate at when it's exposed, when they're exposed to extremely tiny levels and parts per billion, per trillion, parts per trillion levels of glyphosate induced proliferation in cancer cells. I think it does cause several different cancers, but it's a much more difficult thing to explain than some of the other diseases. Liver disease is quite easy to explain. If you accept my theory, which we maybe should get into at this point, because that's crucial. My theory for its extremely unusual mechanism of toxicity.

So, and just to back up for people, a liver is your detoxifying organ. And, and you hinted at how glyphosate interrupts sulfur metabolism, which is a critical part of our biology. And in functional medicine, you know, there's, there's a real focus on our sulfur biology because it's critical for detoxifying all the environmental compounds are exposed to, for metabolizing our own internal toxins and, and people who have low glutathione, which is the sulfur based compound are sicker. I remember reading one study that if you looked at people who are hospitalized versus not hospitalized, if you have this general lower levels of glutathione based on a gene that is important in regulating it, 50% of the time you're going to be more likely to end up in the hospital. So it's kind of a marker for overall health and well-being. And I personally have a lot of experience with glutathione because I had mercury poisoning and it gets very depleted. And I had to learn how to restore my sulfur metabolism and also something called methylation, which is the B vitamins, because they're very interlocked. And when you think of your biochemistry, for those listening, it's like this big network of biochemical reactions, but right at the center of it is these two core systems that run all the time, literally every second, millions and millions of times a second, billions of times probably called methylation and sulfation. And these pathways, I've written a lot about them in books and articles, but this is the key to health. It's the key to gene expression, to immune function, to detoxification. to cognitive function. I mean, it just goes on and on and on. So when this is screwed up, it's not just like some, you know, sort of minor pathway that gets disrupted in human biology. It's a major pathway. So with that background, can you explain how glyphosate disrupts sulfur metabolism a little more clearly and explain, you know, what really the role of the sulfurs in maintaining health and why we should be terrified about glyphosate and sulfate?

Right, I mean, I think glyphosate disrupts sulfate synthesis, sulfate activation, sulfate transport, and sulfate delivery. It disrupts every step of the way for sulfate. And as you mentioned, mercury actually gets sulfated to detox it. If you can't sulfate the mercury, you're in trouble. I think that we have a systemic deficiency in sulfate in the glycocalyx, which is this lining of all the cells, like in the blood vessels. There's all this sulfate that populates the sugar molecules, complex sugar molecules in the lining of the blood vessels. Those need to to be heavily sulfated to have the blood circulation work correctly. Also for the cells to be able to receive signals and to bring in different things they're going to take in to digest. It's just really central. Having enough sulfate around the exterior of the cell, it also gives the red blood cells negative charge, which is important for the zeta potential in the blood. There's all these things that are connected to sulfate. I talk a lot about sulfate in my book. It's actually been central to my understanding of where biology has gone wrong. I felt sulfate was in trouble with autism. and with heart disease many years ago, long before I knew about glyphosate. So the sulfate and the glyphosate really came together very nicely for me, for me to recognize how glyphosate is causing autism and probably heart disease through sulfate issues. And as you mentioned, the sulfation, sulfation is very important for detoxing many of these fat soluble chemicals that they go to the liver, takes them, it's the liver's job to detox them and it takes them up, it adds sulfate, oxidizes them, it adds sulfate, the enzymes that the Sipe enzymes that take, that do that first step of detox are also suppressed by glyphosate. That's been shown in multiple studies. It suppresses the enzymes in the liver that modify these fat-soluble molecules to make them, to detox them and to make them water-soluble so they can be removed through the urine.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So, so what you're saying basically is when toxins come in the liver, they have to be detoxified by the liver. And there are enzymes that do that. that are like the helpers. What you're saying is that glyphosate screws up those enzymes so those chemicals can't get processed down the assembly line of detoxification.

Yes, and of course then those chemicals become much more toxic. So glyphosate makes many, many other chemicals much more toxic than they would otherwise be because it disrupts the liver's ability to detoxify them. And of course, glutathione is part of that problem because a lot of things get glutathioneated to get removed as well. There's methylation, glutathione, sulfation, these are all steps that are taken in the liver. to change these molecules into something that's less toxic. That process gets broken down by glyphosate. It's really quite remarkable, all the things that it can do to disrupt your health. The whole sulfate story has, in part, it's because these chikomate pathway, because the chikomate pathway produces those aromatics. For example, serotonin gets produced in large amounts in the gut, actually, and also melatonin. They both are produced in large amounts in the gut. they are sulfated before they're shipped out, and then they arrive in the brain in a sulfated form. So I think the serotonin is actually transporting sulfate to the brain. This is something I talk a lot about. There's all these molecules that get sulfated in transit, not just the toxic chemicals, vitamin D, cholesterol, various sex hormones, they're all sulfated when they're shipped out. And then all these aromatics that come out of the shikimate pathway. those molecules become deficient, which means that the sulfate transporters become deficient, which means that the brain doesn't get enough sulfate. And autism is very strongly linked to heparin sulfate deficiency in the brain ventricles. That's really been a core feature of autism that's been shown in both mice and humans. And I think it's just because there's not enough sulfate being delivered to the brain. And the body does something very interesting to get around that, which is quite fascinating and also quite disturbing, which is that it produces hydrogen sulfate gas in the liver, in the The autistic children produce hydrogen sulfide gas, which then floats up to the brain and then gets oxidized in the brain to make sulfate. So it's a way to transport sulfate, a very sneaky way to transport sulfate by turning it into a gas, turning the sulfur molecule into a gas, hydrogen sulfide.

It also makes the kids poops really smelly and stinky.

Yes, and it also gives them brain fog because hibernation is all involved with hydrogen sulfide gas. And it's basically people go into hibernation because they've got hydrogen sulfide floating in their brain. brain is. And then, of course, you have to have oxidizing agents to oxidize it to sulfate, which gives you the inflammations, the inflammatory process in the brain that's characteristic of autism, this kind of, you know, chronic low grade encephalopathy. That's a feature of autism is because.

The autistic brain is constantly trying to make sulfate from hydrogen sulfide gas. Okay. Wow. This is just so much information. I, I'm just loving this. I think just unpack a little bit for people, you know, when you eat foods with glyphosate, which is 75% of all or 70% of all crops and, and, I often it's used on GMO foods like soy, but even non GMO foods is used on like wheat. It, it, it, it is a whole host of different ways in the body that it screws things up, right? So what you're saying, it screws up this pathway that makes the neurotransmitters that help regulate gene expression important for cognitive function. It disrupts glutathione, which is critical for detoxification. It's regulates immunity and oxidative stress. It also affects protein synthesis and immune function and can create a leaky gut, destroy the microbiome. So you've got all these mechanisms, not just one, but many mechanisms by which glyphosate destroys human health.

Right.

Yeah, and you could say, how can one chemical cause so many diseases? I showed all those charts. Nancy Swanson was the first one who started doing those charts. I don't know if you saw those of rise into various diseases strongly, absolutely, practically perfectly correlated with the rise in glyphosate usage on corn crops over time. It was just stunning. And p-values are 0.0000, I mean several zeros before the first significant digit of the correlations between these two trends in disease versus the rise in glyphosate usage. And, you know, people would say, well, they would say correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation. Then they would say, how could one chemical cause so many diseases? And I was wondering that myself, but now I understand how. And it is this metal, it disrupts the whole minerals are completely messed up. The iron, manganese, zinc, they become both toxic and deficient at the same time because of its ability to bind to and hold on to them, prevent the natural system from transporting them properly. And then it's the sugar mate pathway getting wrecked, and that's all these aromatic amino acids and all the derivatives that are so important for our health are getting reduced. And then it's actually the Sipe enzymes in the liver. These are all, have all been shown, you know, in multiple studies that it's doing this, the Sipe enzymes in the liver getting suppressed, which is cytochrome P450 enzymes, which is stage one detoxification depressed. And then this inability to, for the gut microbes to convert inorganic sulfur into organic sulfur, which is going to give you methionine. And methionine, of course, is the methylation pathways, it's the sulfation pathways. Those are all going to be disturbed because of deficiency in methionine.

And instead, the sulfur gets reduced to hydrogen sulfide gas, which then causes all these other problems. So it just jams up your biochemistry.

It's bottom line.

It's just like throwing a sand in an engine, basically. Right, right, yes. Amazing.

And there's a few other things I.

Want to sort of touch on, which is glycine. Glycine is a- Yes, you need to touch on that. and it does affect our protein synthesis and tell us how our body has swapped out glyphosate for glycine and what that does.

Yes, and that's a central topic of my book. That's almost the point of my book is to try to convince the audience that that's true because I've been saying this. Anthony Samsel was the first one who suggested to me that might be happening, that it's substituting for glycine during protein synthesis. And at first I was skeptical because it has an extra piece attached to its nitrogen atom. It is a complete glycine molecule, and it does disrupt glycine in various ways, that's known. But it also potentially could be substituting for glycine during protein synthesis. And there's no reason to stop it, it turns out, because proline is a coding amino acid that also has an attachment to its nitrogen, and it's still able to find, there's another linkage that the nitrogen can hook up with the other, because the amino acids have to hook up in a chain, and the nitrogen is involved in the hook. They're like paper dolls holding hands, and the nitrogen needs to hold hands. It has something in the way, another molecule in the way, but if there's enough room around, it can fit. So it turns out there's specific circumstances under which it will substitute. And this gets a little complicated in terms of the science, but it's quite, quite interesting because the enzyme in the shikimate pathway that gets disrupted by glyphosate has a glycine residue at the site where it binds the phosphate piece of phosphoenolpyruvate. So that enzyme binds that molecule, at a place where glycine is highly conserved. And if you take that glycine out and replace it with alanine, which is just an extra methyl, a very small change, glyphosate can't affect it at all. All of a sudden, it's completely immune to glyphosate. Once you remove that glycine, and they've shown that it is at that place where that glycine is that it disrupts the protein. They've shown that that's the spot, and they know that they can either remove that glycine or they can crowd it. They can put in other amino acids close that'll crowd the glycine and then the glyphosate won't fit anymore. So the argument they say is that glyphosate is replacing the substrate PEP. What I say is that it's replacing the glycine. So we have a very different view of how that enzyme is getting disrupted. If you say it's displacing the glycine, and if you say it can displace the glycine and other enzymes that have the same property, and there are many, many enzymes with very important functions that have glycine at a place that's highly conserved, that binds phosphate, even that binds PEP, the same substrate. And I suspect it's affecting many of those enzymes. It's that particular group of enzymes that are getting extremely disturbed by glyphosate and that have enormous roles in metabolism. And that's how you're going to get.

Mitochondrial dysfunction, all kinds of things. So it screws up your immune system, it screws up your mitochondrial energy, it.

Screws up your gut, creates oxidative stress, it screws up your detox system. What doesn't it do? You know, that's the big question. Cancer is an interesting one. And there are cancers that are going up dramatically. pancreatic cancer, thyroid cancer, liver cancer, and kidney cancer. It definitely affects a lot of the endocrine system, basically the glands. That's what I want.

Yeah, huge. So there's 9 million kilograms of this stuff sprayed around the world, 300 million pounds or kilograms in the United States. It's a lot. We're exposed to this in significant quantities, right? And so what is the out that is going to cause harm? Oh, I know. That's the real question, right?

I think needs zero. I think we need to ban it worldwide and we need to work hard on figuring out how to get it out of the soil and out of the air and out of the water. We have a huge problem right now. We've got all kinds of glyphosate gathering up because it takes it a long time to, well, it can get broken down quickly under optimal conditions. And of course Monsanto says that that's what's always there. Two weeks later, it's gone. That's what they say. It is definitely not true experimentally in many different kinds of soils. It'll last for years. There was a study that showed that after two years, 60% of it was still there. So it stays in the ocean. If it gets deep and there's no sunlight, sunlight helps to break it down. There are certain microbes that can metabolize it, but most microbes can't. So it has to be specialized microbes. I think we need to do research to actually figure out which microbes can we safely put in the soil to help break it down, because actually many of the pathogens can break it down, like the fungus. We have all kinds of of problems with fungus infections in both animals and plants, and fungus can break it down. So I think that's a reason why it's thriving.

Incredible. So the amount we need is not very much, right? If you were going to look at the data, is there any data on how much glyphosate is in people? And if you look at the population, have they studied like, what is the body burden of glyphosate? And is it in amounts that are really relevant? relevant or not?

Yeah, that's a big question. Of course, it's a question of what you think is relevant. And one thing, it has been found in people. It's been found in large amounts in, and in fact, it's been found correlated with disease. There was a study that showed people who had liver, fatty liver disease, which is an epidemic, and the people that had fatty liver disease, they were tested for glyphosate in the urine, and they had statistically more than the ones who didn't have the disease. And among the ones who had it, the ones who had worse disease had statistically significantly more than the ones who had less worse disease.

Wow.

That's is fatty liver.

And there was a study- It's 90 million, by the way, 90 million people.

In America are affected by that. Yeah, it's huge. And I think life says they really dead on. And a study on rats exposed them to levels of glyphosate that were below regulatory limits and caused fatty liver disease in those rats at those levels. The other thing that's coming out lately, which is really shocking, is extremely low levels of glyphosate causing endocrine effects that are long lasting. There are these amazing experiments coming out recently where people expose pregnant rats to glyphosate at levels that are so low the rat doesn't look like it has any problems. The rat is perfectly fine. The babies are born, everything's good. The pups grow up. They have their own offspring. They grow up and you see all kinds of problems. So in other words, it's showing up.

In the second and third generation. So in the grandchildren of the rats that got exposed, there's the epigenetic changes that are passed through the lineage to another generations. So you're not only dealing with what you're exposed to, you're dealing with what.

Your grandmother was exposed to.

Yes.

And of course, we're now getting second, third generation showing up because it's been since 1975.

Yeah. It's pretty terrifying.

It really is. I mean, I feel we have to ban this chemical worldwide right now. I mean, if we have any hope for the future, I feel like we really need to wake up and realize this is the thing that's causing all the problems that we're seeing. And it shocks me that we see all this obesity. Like, this country is just so many problems with obesity. and we just think, oh, we're just watching too much TV and eating too much popcorn. I mean, that's just like really ridiculous to think that could be the reason why we have such a tremendous inability to keep the weight off.

Yeah.

Well, there's a whole science field called the study of obesogens. And obesogens are environmental chemicals that cause obesity. I've written a lot about this over the years, even, you know, 15, 16 years ago, I wrote about it because I used to see it in my patients. And when you start to improve their detoxification and get rid of these chemicals from their body, they actually do better. Their metabolism improves, their weight loss comes off. But what you're really saying is that most of us have levels of glyphosate in our bodies, including you and I, that do impair human health. And I'm sure people listening are wondering, what the heck can I do about it? Other than, you know, like if Dr. Hyman and Stephanie, who's an MIT professor who's made her life's work to study this, have high levels, what the heck am I going to do?

I know.

It seems really hopeless. I was so depressed when I found that I was really shocked actually that I was contaminated. It wasn't high. by, but it was there. It was measurable. And it's just really depressing that you can't avoid it, which I think is the case if you live in America. I mean, there are places in the world where you probably can, but it's very difficult to find a place here that without it. It's in the rain. It's in the rain, it's in the.

Water, it's in the atmosphere, it's in their food.

There was a study in Brazil found it in the atmosphere, found it in the nanoparticles in the air in, you know, in Brazil.

Is the majority though from our food that we get it? I think so, but I'm not sure.

I mean, that's always been my big question. I think people who live next to fields where it's being sprayed are in serious trouble and they're going to get things like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease because they're breathing, breathing glyphosate. But I think most of us are getting it through our food and possibly through our water. I mean, there's a question of a water supply and it could also be from the air. And I'm concerned about that with respect to biofuels because I'm really quite wondering if biofuels are introducing glyphosate into the air in cities where they're being burned because they're coming from, like, for example, ethanol, bioethanol is coming from GMO roundup ready corn or sugarcane sprayed with glyphosate right before the harvest. So it could be in the atmosphere. I mean, it is in the atmosphere and it could be from the air that you're getting exposure into the lungs.

And that's another word that I have. So is there a way for us, is there anything we can do, eat, take supplements, anything that can help us reduce our glyphosate levels, take a sauna, wheat grass enema, What are we gonna do?

Yeah, I mean, I'm a big fan of sunlight and of course vitamin D is so important, but I believe sunlight also helps you to make sulfate in the skin. I talk about that in my book, quite fascinating science. And so sunlight exposure, I think, is extremely useful for improving your immune function. And your immune function is really central to your health. People, many people in America, have a weak innate immune system and that's causing a lot of their diseases. Their diseases are they're actually there to help boost the immune function. They serve the immune cells to help improve their health. I believe, you know, all these diseases like arthritis and things, gut dysbiosis and et cetera.

So we'd be taking, for example, sulfur producing compounds that help boost glutathione like lipoic acid and N-acetyl cysteine. Yes, right. We'd be taking the methionine B vitamins.

To help with that sulfur and- Right, make sure you have a good I like to just eat really, really healthy foods, you know, certified organic, whole foods, lots of green vegetables, lots of fruits.

Is that enough though? I mean, is that enough? Because I don't think you've been doing that already. So, I'm thinking, okay, from my functional.

Medicine perspective, how can I fix these problems? Glycine is another one, you know, taking glycine. That's one that I've talked to functional medicine specialists who like glycine as a supplement. Yeah, I love it. Yeah, because that's going to help to.

Counteract the glycogen substitution for the glycine, which is so important to try to so you can take amino acids of glycine, you can take sulfur boosting compounds like NAC, lipoic acid, selenium, milk thistle.

Epsom salt baths.

Epsom salt baths, vitamin D. These are all things people can do and plus just cut out your exposures as much.

As possible from your diet. And then probiotics, yeah. Cut out exposure is crucial. Try everything you can to cut out exposure. And then probiotics, especially, it's curious that there was a study on cows that found that sauerkraut juice was beneficial for cows that were, I can't imagine these cows saucrout, but they were sick and they had glyphosate in their urine and they gave them several things. But saucrout juice was one of the things they gave them. And I don't know how they thought to do that, but I found that quite interesting because I was wondering whether, and it hasn't been proven, whether the microbes in the saucrout juice were able to metabolize the glyphosate. I feel like if you could get microbes growing in your gut that can metabolize glyphosate, you would be a lot better off. And so, there are species of acetobacter that can metabolize glyphosate. So one could hope they might be in apple cider vinegar, you know, you mentioned foods, it's a possibility. It hasn't been proven, but it's something.

That I find appealing. So we sort of need a multi-pungent approach, right? Yes. Okay, so let's sort of switch gears a little bit for a minute. So we talk about the human health impacts, but let's talk about the environmental impacts. Why is glyphosate such a threat to our environment, the wildlife and biodiversity and.

The microbiome of the soil? And why is that important? Right, I mean that just goes so far, doesn't it? I mean, because the soil, if the soil isn't healthy, then the plant isn't healthy, then the food isn't healthy, and it just cascades downward. There's so many animals that are in trouble right now. There's such a mess with the insects, you know, the bees, the bee colony collapse syndrome, the butterflies are disappearing. I believe many of those problems that glyphosate is a major player in many of those problems. People have always looked elsewhere and certainly there are other chemicals that are affecting them. You know, the insecticides are an obvious one for the bees, but lately it's becoming clear that glyphosate is a player in the bee colony collapse syndrome. and it's quite clear with a monarch butterfly because glyphosate is used to kill its major source of food as a weed. The milkweed is a weed that grows in the corn crops and they use glyphosate to kill it. The butterfly depends on the milkweed as its diet. The milkweed is poisoned with glyphosate, so so is the butterfly. Monarchs are disappearing. Insects are way down. And of course the amphibians, they're very sensitive to glyphosate because they they have, they breathe, they take in water through their skin and, and they think their skin is very porous. So they get, they get the glyphosate probably goes right in through their skin.

So it affects wildlife, it affects pollinators, it affects reptiles, biodiversity. I mean, we need pollinators for, for fertilizing agriculture. Um, so a lot of ways in which it screws things up. To me, one of the most important ways is soil. And we've talked a lot about soil, the importance of the health of the soil, the organic matter in the soil determines the quality of the food we eat, our quality of our health. It's also necessary for the sequestration of carbon in the soil. Right. We're holding water for reducing the effect of chemicals. So glyphosate seems to have a really horrible effect on soil and the soil microbiome as well as our own microbiome. So can you talk about that and why that's important?

I can, yes. In fact, in fact, it does. disrupts the ability for the plants to take up the nitrogen fixing bacteria get disrupted so the nitrogen is not easily taken up by the plants. And this means you have to use more nitrate fertilizers and that they stick around and then when there's a rainstorm, they wash out into the waterways. And this, and actually we have a huge problem with the overgrowth of cyanobacteria because of the nutrients that are being supplied. They sort of block the sun and then you get into, and they use up the oxygen. So you have this hypoxic environment in the waterways that ends up reducing nitrous oxide from that nitric oxide. From that nitrate fertilizer produces nitrous oxide, which is 100 times worse than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. So that's getting released. So it's messing up climate change as well. In fact, glyphosate just suppresses an enzyme, which is the most common enzyme in the world. It's called Rubisco. It's a nice name. R-U-B-I-S-C-O. Rubisco is an enzyme that's present in many plants and is essential for converting carbon dioxide into organic matter. So it's preventing the plants from capturing the carbon dioxide in the air and putting it into the soil. And that's, of course, a crucial way to avoid carbon release, carbon, you know, global warming from these greenhouse gases. I think I suspect that glyphosate is playing a major role in the crisis we're seeing with carbon dioxide. I don't know if you heard, but the carbon dioxide levels on the top of this mountain in Hawaii have the highest levels ever measured happened this April, this month, despite the fact that we've shut way down on the, you know, because of the lockdowns, we have a lot more, a lot less burning of fossil fuels in our vehicles. And despite that, the levels keep going up. I think that I think glyphosate is a major player in climate change. And I'm frustrated that nobody seems to.

Be looking at that.

Because of its effect on the soil health, you mean? Yeah. Capturing carbon from carbon dioxide in the air, capturing it, turning it into organic matter, putting it into the soil. This is a process that goes on in all the plants all over the planet.

And when glyphosate is there, it suppresses their ability to to do that.

Yeah.

I mean, a lot, a lot of people listening to this podcast have heard me talk about regenerative agriculture and the importance of soil health, and we've got a lot of soil experts on the podcast. And, and, and, you know, we've talked about the reasons for degraded soil health, tillage and lack of COVID crops and lack of animal integration and lots of other things, but, and even nitrous nitrogen fertilizers. But glyphosate seems to be one of the worst actors in terms of damaging the microbiome of the soil, which is into linking to our health and our microbiome, but also is critical, as you said, without the organic matter in the soil, which is really the microbes and the carbon from the plants. We can't want to extract nutrients from the plants. Well, we can't hold carbon in the soil, we can't hold water in the soil, and we need all these agrochemicals. So in a sense, glyphosate is the Kingpin that can help unlock this.

And it also causes the soil to erode much more easily. Yeah. So we lose the because it doesn't have enough organic matter to hold it in place and hold water.

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Now, Monsanto, which is now gone and is a new company that has been bought by Bayer, which is the same company makes your aspirin, by the way. It's a big agrochemical company. They seem to have bought this when it was undergoing a lot of review and lawsuits and took on a huge risk. And yet they seem to be okay with it. And they also have been looking like maybe they might shut down glyphosate, but they've come up with another compound called Liberty. Link, which is another herbicide that they want to replace glyphosate with and is starting to be used all over America and globally. What's your take on that? Because it's like, you know, it's a new thing. Maybe it's better, maybe it's worse, but I don't trust it.

Is that one, glufosinate? I'm not sure the chemical name for it.

You can look it up, but it's- I was thinking it is, but I.

Need to do a quick Google search to see. But glufosinate is also an amino acid analog, by the way. It's an amino acid analog of glutamate. And I suspect it's going to have a similar property of substituting for glutamate during protein synthesis, just as glyphosate is substituting for glycine. It's possible that it's going to do that.

All these chemicals are bad. Yes, it's glyphosate.

It's glyphosate. It's glyphosate. It's an amino acid analog of glutamate. Of course, glutamate is a major player in autism because there's excess glutamate in the brain. It causes neuroexcitotoxicity. the phosphates bad news. I mean, none of these herbicides are good. It's a new better one, but it's not good.

So, so what do we do? We have to change our agriculture to a more regenerative system that doesn't need all that crap. And when you look at the farmers like Gay Brown, Alan Williams and a lot of the regenerative farmers, they're actually phasing out all these compounds. They're phasing out these Roundup Ready seeds and they're phasing out the use of agrochemicals and they're seeing better yields, increased soil carbon, lower water use and water retention. The soil is better, improving the nutritional density. the products, they're making more money, and they're actually drawing down sequestering carbon as part of the cycle of regenerating soil. So, I mean, why is the government not doing this?

And.

Other countries have really taken a stand on this. And what countries have banned it and what do we need to do to get it banned here?

Right.

So Bermuda has banned it since, I think, at least 2015. Bermuda has just not used it. I think they care about their coral and trying to protect it. Sri Lanka and El Salvador banned it some time ago, off and on. They kind of banned it and unbanned it because of kidney failure among the agricultural workers that were being exposed to glyphosate. And Mexico is such a darling. I'm so happy to hear that Mexico just declared maybe last year they're going to phase glyphosate out by 2024. And they're also going to phase out the GMO corn as well. So Europe has been trying to ban it, and that's kind of a sad story because I think Austria banned it, and then basically, or they passed a law to ban it. And then I think higher ups at the European Union basically said, you can't do that, or you did it wrong or something. So, the European Union is trying to gain wrestle control over all those countries so that individual countries can't make individual decisions, which I think is really sad.

So Mexico, the environmental working group, I mean, sorry, the EPA has basically sort of taken a backseat on this and has said it's safe and it's not an issue. And there were emails that were discovered under the Freedom of Information Act in a lawsuit that found that the Trump administration was emailing Bayer saying, don't worry, we got your back on glyphosate.

I heard that.

I know. You know, like, whoa. So maybe your book will help us to call this out in a way that people can understand and that will catalyze lawmakers and policymakers. And I I personally am going to help you with my efforts in Washington to help educate lawmakers about the dangers of life of state and begin to hopefully turn the tide on this. And it really comes down to one, supporting a different form of agriculture like regenerative agriculture, but also to really help with driving the regulations that have to stop the use of it in this country. But 9 billion pounds is a hell a lot. Kilograms actually, that's more than 9 billion pounds. So basically, here we go. We've gotten bird's eye view, just really touched on it in the most superficial way really. Everybody should get this book, Toxic Legacy, which is the subtitle is How the Weed Killer Glyphosate is Destroying Our Health and the Environment. It's out, get it wherever you get your books, Amazon. It's such an important book for our time. And I think hopefully it'll be a catalyst of one, help people change their own behavior and change policy. And as, as sort of the take homes for people listening is that one, it disrupts so many of the body's key systems, mitochondria and energy, your immune system, your microbiome, your hormones, your oxidative stress, your detoxification pathways. But the good news is we know a lot through our understanding of biology and functional medicine, how to help the body detoxify. So while you may not be able to get rid of it completely, you can reduce your exposures by eating regenerative organic. You can make sure you are up regulating your pathways that need to be up regulated, such as the glutathione pathway with lipoic acid, selenium, milk thistle, and acetyl cysteine, even glutathione sublingually, as well as the B vitamins. We know you also need things like Epsom salt baths, vitamin D, and lots of other things to help. So I'm sure all that's in your I'm super excited to get this out in the hands of everybody. And I'm so thankful you've done the hard work and the science behind this and taking this on because you could be a target for something, you know, because of what you're saying. So thank you so much, Stephanie, and, and I love having you on the podcast. Any last thoughts or words you'd like to share about your work or what people can learn more?

It's hard to say, but I just really want to have hope for the future. And I'm so excited about the regenerative agriculture. I think we need to be positive. we need to understand that it's not hopeless. And if we do manage to get the product banned and not adding more, and then we learn how to remove what's there, and then we learn how to fix the soil and grow healthy food and then be healthy and reduce our health care costs, I mean, there's nothing not to like about that. We just need to get lots of people on board, need to get the government on board to recognize that toxic chemicals have no place in our food supply.

One of the things I've recognized recently is it's pretty well known that our factory farming of animals and the way we grow the corn and soy that actually is used to feed these animals, by the way, 70% of our agricultural lands are used to grow food for animal consumption, that we will then eat the animals. And 70% of the world's water is also used for animals to grow food and to also feed the animals that leads to water shortages. But what most people don't realize is that the factory farming as we do it now has enormous impact on climate change and can have increasing greenhouse gases and methane and so forth. The soil depletion that results from the way we grow the food. But it turns out that in order to actually reverse climate change, and this is work done by Paul Hawken and a team of scientists, he wrote about in his book so-called drawdown using regenerative agriculture. In other words, grazing animals, you literally can restore soil. And soil is a huge sink for carbon, and it sucks out the carbon from the environment and prevents it from heating the climate and affecting the oceans. In fact, some say that we could, by doing this at scale, could reverse climate change completely and take it back to pre-industrial levels. And people don't understand that the soil is so important. We used to have 60 60 million buffalo in America.

80.

I thought it was 80 million cows, 60 million buffalo, somewhere around there. But it's a lot of them and they weren't causing climate change. They were actually restoring soils by treading on it, digging up with their hooves, peeing and pooping on it, and building soil. That's why we have tens of feet of topsoil in the Midwest. Now, the way we grow animals is not doing that and it's actually the opposite.

So, from a climate change perspective, it might be better to eat meat to reverse climate change.

If you eat the right meat.

And if you look at the science on climate, you know, on cows causing global warming, I think, you know, that is, it's, I wouldn't say that it's unsettled science at this point, you know, in my reading of it. But, you know, I think the other really, the argument that people make and has been made since Frances Moore Lappe wrote her book, Diet for a Small Planet in the, in 1970s, early 1970s, is that how can we afford to produce a pound of meat versus a pound of plants if the meat consumes so many of the Earth's resources, right? That doesn't seem right. And there are people starving around the world and we, we should eat plants instead because they don't consume it so much water and inputs. But what we're finding is that a high carbohydrate diet, a high grain diet for humans, is what is very likely to fuel obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. So you're looking at a pound of plants all of a sudden. You have to add $300 billion a year in diabetes, this other obesity, that doesn't look so cheap anymore.

Right?

Right. What's the cost? Not all calories are the same. So a pound and a pound is just not equivalent. You have to really look at what the externalities of health are.

Yeah, right. We don't include all the true cost of food into the price of the thing we buy at the grocery store. And there are a lot of other studies that are showing this. The 42 country study looked at not just seven countries, but food consumption patterns in 42 countries, and found that those who consumed those cereal grains and potatoes had a higher risk of heart disease, and those who had the most animal protein and fat had the lowest, which I thought was fascinating. You're talking about the PURE study. Yeah, no, the PURE study is another study. 435,000 people, I think 10 years, 19 countries, five continents, showed a very similar thing. And so some of the data is just sort of looking at this quite differently. And what's fascinating is that there's a lot of lands that we can't use in agriculture. They're grasslands. 40% of the planet is grasslands. And that's the kind of land that we can use in a regenerative way with grazing animals that can actually increase production and actually decrease climate change.

Right.

Well, I know they're doing this incredible experiment in Brazil where they took arid land that had absolutely nothing nothing growing on it. And they were, they put, they planted trees and grass, and they put cows on it to, to roam, and the whole Forest came back.

That's right.

Yeah. Because, you know, they need, they need what, you know, the nitrogen from the, the feces is what, you know, fixes the soil, and they need them walking around on the land. And, I mean, I think that, I.

Think that's tremendously promising. So let's talk a little bit down a different Road, because, you know, saturated fat is bad according to the experts, but vegetable oils are good according to the experts. And then we should be consuming a lot of these polyunsaturated, basically Omega-6 refined oils like soybean oil, which is 10% of our calories, corn oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil, canola oil. And they're all saying these are great.

We should consume more of them. What do you have to say to that? Well, okay. So going back to Ancel Keys, when they said avoid saturated fats, you were supposed to replace them with vegetable oils, right? That was the idea going back to the 1960s. Well, this is where the food industry does come in a little bit, just to start off this story. So, the vegetable oil industry was kind of born in the early 1900s, right? The first vegetable oil product was Crisco.

Oh, yeah.

Right? So, it used to be that those oils were used for the Industrial Revolution. They were used to lubricate machinery, and then they figured out how to harden them to make them, and they learned how to bleach them make them look white. And then they thought, and it was actually Procter and Gamble that figured out how to do that. They were going to make it into a soap. Soap is made from oil. Instead, they're like, that looks an awful lot like lard. Let's try to sell it as a food. So they started to sell it as a food. And- Trans fat. Yeah, so it turns out that they contained, it's what they, hardening vegetable oils is done through a process called hydrogenation, and that produces trans fats. but so these trans fatty hardened oils were started to be sold to Americans in 1911. So coincidentally heart disease starts to take off right around maybe like 10 years later. We start seeing increases in death from heart disease. So then Proctor and Gamble figures out how to just sell oil as oil. So one of the things to understand about these oils is they are processed.

Procter & Gamble produced like shampoo.

Yeah, well, they were a soap maker. So that's why they came up with this. But they were like, but Crisco was like a best-selling thing. They convinced, you know, in America, so all these immigrants, and they want to become American, right? And so Procter & Gamble had this brilliant advertising campaign basically saying, you know, give up lard. Those are the bygone days of your grandmother's like the spinning wheel of the olden days. And you have Crisco instead. And this is the newfangled thing made in shiny scientist kitchens.

So.

Proctor and Gamble figured out how to then make vegetable oils that were fluid in bottles. They kind of tinkered with the fatty acids to make them stable. And then, so here's where they started to influence nutrition science. In 1948, the American Heart Association, which is really just an association of cardiologists, right? Remember, heart disease is new. Tiny little association, they barely had an office. They were just like, they barely had any funds. Procter & Gamble comes in and says, We're gonna make you the designee of this radio show for a week. And it was this huge deal overnight. Literally, according to the official history of the American Heart Association, they said millions of dollars flowed into our of our coffers, we became overnight the powerhouse, opening offices all across the country that we are today. They're still the number one largest non-for-profit in the country. Amazing. All thanks to Procter & Gamble. And pretty soon thereafter, they started to recommend that you start eating vegetable oils to prevent a heart attack.

Which was the worst idea because it turns out that trans fats, everybody agrees in this, have killed hundreds of thousands, millions of people over the decades.

Trans fats and the hardened vegetable oils in Crisco are bad for health, clearly bad for health, but in the liquid form.

And now they're ruled as not safe to eat by the FDA after 50 years of pressure to change that.

Right.

And finally took a lawsuit from a 97-year-old scientist who first discovered this 50 years ago to get them to change.

Right, right. And that's also another story I tell in my book about how he tried to get it to change, another woman, a scientist who was trying to lobby for change and how they were vilified and how they were raked over the coals by all the scientists who disagreed with them and how people would literally, the vegetable industry literally had people assigned to stand up in conferences and yell at these people when they were giving their presentations. I mean, this is the state of nutrition science, which again, continues today.

Food hecklers.

So vegetable oils, so it turns out that when they're in the oil form, they're also dangerous. So they don't contain trans fats, right? But in the oil form, the oils are highly unstable. That means that they oxidize easily.

Correct.

They go rancid. Oxidation is, remember that's why we take antioxidants because oxidation causes inflammation in your body. Yes, that's actually true.

On the inside and the outside.

Because heart disease on the inside. Oxidized LDL is what's thought to provoke that unstable plaque that causes blockages.

Yeah, that's the problem.

Yeah, so this is what, and in those clinical, in that, on all those studies, remember we talked about the Minnesota Coronary Survey where they had people, some people on vegetable oil diets. In all of those studies again and again and again, the people on the vegetable oil diets died at much higher rates from cancer. This was considered a side effect of this heart-healthy diet, and they actually had a series of very high-level meetings at the NIH in the early 1980s to figure out what was going on with this side effect of cancer, and nobody could figure it out. And they basically just said, Look, we believe that vegetable oils will help people prevent heart disease, so we're going to ignore the cancer effect.

So how do we explain then these.

Top Harvard scientists who studied this data for decades saying that we should all be consuming more of these oils. You know, I have- what's the dirty backstory on that?

You know, I don't have the whole story. I have to assume that a lot of it is cognitive dissonance, right? We're in the third generation now of scientists who believe saturated fats are bad and must be replaced by polyunsaturated vegetable oils. And that is their- that is just their boiled in the wool belief that they cannot back out of, right? 100 papers written on that subject, you're not going to change your mind. It is also true that the Harvard scientists have a close relationship with Unilever, one of the biggest vegetable oil manufacturers in the world, if not the biggest.

They're a big food company.

Bunge, another big vegetable oil manufacturer. In fact, recently, Harvard published a paper in which three of the authors were employees of Unilever.

Wow.

What? And they have Unilever fellows who come and work with them. And one of the biggest promoters of vegetable oils is on the Scientific Advisory Board of Unilever. So I think that the veg... And what I found out from my research, because I actually started my book by writing about trans fat, I thought I was writing a book on trans fats when I started. I didn't realize I was get sort of dragged into this whole larger world. So I spent like a year doing nothing but talking to vegetable oil executives when I started. And I came to understand how much they have controlled nutrition science for like the last 50, 60 years. They were involved in every single one of those trials. They would give them their products for free. They were intimately involved in trials at NIH. I mean, they've just had they've really been brilliant. And executives from the vegetable spoil industry have almost always served as the top general counsel role at the Food and Drug Administration. So they just like, they're very, they've.

Been in the vegetable oil lobby.

Yeah, it's called the Institute for Shortening and Edible Oils.

Wow.

They still call it that? The Institute for Shortening.

Shortening.

You know what they call it shortening, right?

It shortens your life.

That's good. Shortens your life.

That stuff is not good. And what's fascinating is that we've increased our consumption of this. This is a new food. You know, I always worry about when we add new to nature foods. So we had olive oil, we had lard, we had tallow, we had other fats, but we didn't have vegetable oils. And these seed, they're not really vegetable, they're like seed and nut and bean oils.

Yeah.

These were sort of invented 120 plus years ago, and we now have increased our consumption of soybean coconut oil, for example, a thousand fold, and it's 10% of our calories, and it's in everything. It's stuff that you wouldn't imagine is in. So any processed food that you buy, it's made in a factory, probably has this oil in it or some variety of it. And I think, you know, when you look at the data, it is confusing. There's a lot of people who, who are looking at large observational processes that, that show that there's a risk for, you know, saturated fat and benefit for omega-3 or omega-6 oils. And there's other data that show this, some actually randomized trials that show the opposite. When you just have people eat only the vegetable oil, they do worse.

Right, and let's just remember that latter data from trials is the rigorous cause and effect data, right? So, yeah, I mean- so what do you recommend?

No vegetable oils?

Well, I was just gonna tell briefly about my visit to a vegetable oil factory to explain- I do. what a bungie factory what a brutal process it is to get oil out of a bean or a seed, right? They have to go through this process of extracting the oil. It's not even really oil when it comes out. It's this gray, rancid, disgusting fluid. It's chemically extracted with hexane and other nasty chemicals. Right. They have to use hexane as a solvent to extract it. And then they have, and then it's this bad smelling gray liquid. It has to be deodorized, winterized, deuterized, you know, bleached and all this. So it goes through like 17 steps in this giant industrial plant. And then it's Crisco. So, you know, compared to, and this is what we're told to eat instead of churning butter.

Right.

She's like, you just milk the cow and then you churn the butter. So I think that, you know, it's sort of, it's speaks to our, to me, like speaks to kind of the craziness about food that we live in, which is so, you know, so divorced from our history. Like, can you really believe that something that goes through this, you know, 17 step process in a, in a factory is what you should be eating to restore your health?

How many steps did it take from the field to your fork? You know, if there's more than one or two, it's probably not a good idea.

Yeah.

I always joke, I say it's easy to, to figure out what to eat. if man made it, leave it. If God made it, eat it, right?

That's good.

Yeah, or olive oil, man made it, but they step on the olives and smush them, and then you get the olive oil.

It's not. Well, you know, the story of olive oil is a little bit funny because actually it was originally used in ancient times. It was not eaten. It was used as like a, people put it on their bodies to make their muscles shine, and they used it to make their skin look good, but they didn't eat it. They didn't start eating olive oil. oil until the late 1800s. Interesting. So it wasn't actually an ancient food stuff. What humans... I remember being in Greece and everybody.

Was rubbing all over their bodies. I was like, wow, this is fascinating. Everybody smelled like a salad.

Did they really put it on their bodies?

Yeah.

Oh yeah.

I went to Mickey and Nost when I was 17 and there were these beaches and everybody was rubbing olive oil.

All over their bodies.

I'm like, okay. Yeah. The other thing you notice in the Mediterranean is of course Mediterranean diet high in meat, right? That's another thing that was kind of not been accurately transferred through history. So olive oil is relatively stable. So the huge worry about vegetable oils, to my mind, is that when they are heated, and even if they're left out in a bottle where it's exposed to light, they will degrade. They oxidize. They degrade. That means they break down into these oxidation products. When you put them under heat, like any chemical reaction, that speeds up and it creates literally hundreds of degraded oxidation products, some of which are known toxins. Look up the word aldehyde and see what that is. A known toxin that is created.

Deep fryers, they call it acrylamide, which is super toxic.

Acrylamide is another one. And they occur so without going into too much detail, but Even all the big fast food chains like Burger King and all those McDonald's switched over to trans-free oils, oils without trans fats, they went right back to using just regular old vegetable oils. I mean, much as we don't like trans fats, what they did is that they stabilized the oil. That process of hardening the oil made it stable. Now we have these totally unstable oils in these fryers. They create hundreds of degraded toxic products. Those products are now known there's experiments have been done to show that they enter into the food and that food enters into your body and that those products go past the blood-brain barrier. And if you eat a lot of those, you know, chicken McNuggets or french fries or whatever, they are going to build up in your body and cause toxic inflammation in your body.

I used to work when I was 17, I used to work in this mother's sandwich shop. And my job was to, you know, deliver the sandwiches in Volkswagen. But at night, at the end of the shift, I would have to go in the kitchen and clean the oil. So literally, it would run the oil through a filter so they could reuse it. And we used the same oil for a month. Heated, heated, reheated, reheated. It was terrible. And, you know, I think people don't realize that McDonald's and all those companies used to use beef tallow to fry in. And now they switched to Crisco, basically, trans fats. And now they've gone to vegetable oils.

Which in some ways may be just as bad.

If not worse.

So, it's definitely worth it. It's frightening. I think it's definitely worth it. And, you know, actually, ironically, it's probably like places like McDonald's and Burger King are probably safer than your mom and pop shop, right? Because they have all these regulations in the big stores about not reusing their oils too much. And then they know about this oxidation product. So, they've developed things like nitrogen blankets and silicon beads that they put in the oil to try to absorb all the toxic oxidation so their oils are probably better than your local Chinese stir-fry or whatever, where they're, I mean, that's probably where the real danger is.

Go for the McDonald's of our Chinese takeout, is that it?

Yeah, that's the take-home message here.

I don't know about that.

We're gonna work on that messaging.

Stay at home and cook. No, but I wanted to just tell you the amazing story that I discovered, which it how they found out that these trans-free oils were causing all these problems is that when they switched over to trans-free oils, all of a sudden they were having this polymer-like build-up on their walls and in their fryers that they couldn't scrape off. It's like paint, stickiness. And those toxic oxidation products were so unstable and volatile that they would take the used uniforms from the workers to the dry cleaner and on route, they would spontaneously combust in the back of the car because they were so- Go on fire here. Because those products are so unstable. They're so unstable. They're mutating and changing minute by minute. And then they would wash the uniforms, put them in the dryer, and the dryers would combust. So there's just like this, it's just unbelievable that we're eating this stuff.

Yeah, that's a good take-home message is to stay away from the refined oils and deep-fried stuff. Maybe a treat once in a while.

But Definitely not a staple. You can fry things in lard. That is stable. If you can find it.

Yeah, I mean, I know a big food company that switched over to beef.

Tallow for their fries and everything now.

Yeah, so, I always say you can eat French fries, but you have to make them yourself and you have to.

Make it home and you have to do it in lard or tallow. Right, right. And you know, or we should start a citizens movement to get tallow back.

Into McDonald's, you know, fryers. Because that's what actually tallow was what led to the development of America with Lewis and Clark expedition and the settlers, they all ate pemmican, which was basically bison tallow, which was 70% fat, about 20 something percent protein, about five percent carbs and horn berries. And that's what led to the settling of America.

That's amazing. And there's another quote in my book from Lewis and Clark that I remember reading where they were, as they were traveling across country, where they said that they had gone out to kill meat, but it in the spring and all the meat was too lean and therefore inedible. Which just tells you something about, like, we used to think a lot differently about fat than we do today.

All right, now, before we end, I want to dive into a topic that I know you're passionate about and that matters. So we've heard all this conflicting evidence about what to eat, about the recommendations from the government. And these recommendations, which are called our dietary guidelines, have really shaped a lot of our thinking about what's good and what's not good to eat.

And we followed it.

And we followed it in terms of public health recommendations, in terms of what doctors say, nutritionists say, what scientists say, and more importantly, what the government tells people to eat in the form of nutrition programs from our school lunches to our military programs and so much more. And, you know, I just want to give you some credit because people say, oh, what can one person do to change change the world. Margaret Mead said, Never doubt that a small group of people who are committed can change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has. And you understood the challenges with these guidelines that really were promoting ideas that were killing millions of people. And you said, I'm not going to stand for this. And you went to Congress and you shared this perspective and you said, We need to think about the guidelines in a different way. And you basically got Congress to commission a million dollars for the National Academy of Sciences and Medicine would review how we come up with these guidelines and whether there was integrity in them, whether they looked at all the science, whether there was corruption in them. And this report that was really initiated by you has come out and it says some pretty shocking things. So can you tell us about what's wrong with the dietary guidelines and how you set about to go fixing them and what's next? So, okay.

Well, so first of all, no one person can take credit for what Congress does. Congress does what Congress does, and I-.

You- came a little zets in there. Yeah.

And it was that report by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine was the first ever peer review of the dietary guidelines since they were launched in 1980. Amazing. 35 years of policy. And if you look at there, I mean, if you judge the guidelines by the outcome measures, dietary guidelines were meant to prevent disease.

We got pretty bad.

How is that progress gone? How is that working for you? Obesity going up, diabetes going up, heart disease still number one killer, cancer going up. So by any outcome measure, they have been a total failure, right? And the conventional explanation is that people don't follow the guidelines. And who even knows about the guidelines? I don't go to my.gov website to find out about a diet, and you don't.

But the thing is- But you know.

About the food pyramid. You know about the food pyramid, and the reality is that they are just downloaded into every doctor's office, every nurse, every dietitian, every nutritionist. When you go to their office, they are giving you the guidelines, right, with rare exception. And they determine school lunch programs, feeding what your elderly parent gets at their feeding, their nursing home, all of that. And hospital food. So I came to understand how powerful they are. They have such a powerful control over how Americans eat, probably the single the most important lever, and they clearly are not working. The argument that Americans don't follow them, I looked at that. I was like, well, maybe Americans don't follow them and it is our fault. But I went and looked at all the best available government data that I could find. Since 1970, I mean, in every food category you looked at, you can look at Americans follow the guidelines.

Low fat, less meat, less eggs, less high fat dairy.

Red meat's down by 28%, and we've increased our chicken by 120%, vegetable oils we've increased by almost 90%, animal fats down by 17%, I mean everything. There's not one area where we have deviated.

Eating more grains, right?

40% more grains, more fruits and vegetables, and the vegetables is not ketchup. It's like the greatest single increase in vegetables has been leafy greens. You mean iceberg lettuce? I don't know, kale, we're all eating kale, it's the age of kale. So, So that argument that it's just that Americans don't follow the guidelines is not supported by the data. And then people also say, well, Americans eat more calories, right? And that's true. We do eat 270 something more calories per day than we used to. But if you look at every single one of those calories is carbohydrates. So what we did, what the guidelines did is they put us on a high grain diet, right?

7 to 11 servings of bread, rice, serum pasta a day.

Every day.

And we did it. And just the way you can fatten cattle on grains, it turns out you can fatten humans pretty well on grains. So I did. I mean, I felt like in Washington, D.C., there's just so much defense of this policy and the status quo. And, you know, they're renewed every five years, and the expert committee that is supposed to review the science instead just kind of rubber stamps the status quo. Nobody wants to change.

Food industry. conflicts of interest.

Many of them have conflicts of interest. They're funded by a food industry, people in the food industry. Nobody wants to change, rock that boat. I mean, because to say that the guidelines are wrong is really a kind of heresy, right? So that's what I've done. I've committed an act of heresy. I wrote a paper that was on the COVID story of the British Medical Journal saying that guidelines are not based on good evidence. They've ignored all those clinical trials we talked they were never in there.

The best available evidence about fat, they completely ignored. They ignored.

So, those of us who studied the science, if you go and read the expert report, you're like, well, where's all the science I studied?

It's not there. Why do they say we have to.

Drink three glasses of milk a day? There's no evidence for that. There's no evidence for that. So there's also, and I look to see, like there's been this huge body of evidence that's grown up around the benefits of ramping back your carbohydrates a little bit and eating a little more fat. There's more than 70 clinical trials now. before when the 2015 Dietary Guideline Committee was reviewing the science. None of those were in there. So actually they reviewed them, but they decided to put it in the methodology section of the paper. And one of the committee members, I know this from emails that I got through Freedom of Information Act request.

One of the committee's spam emails, right?

They get to you. That's right.

Be careful what you write in your email.

So one of the committee members said, you know, I don't think we should be burying barring, that was the word he used, burying this data in the methodology section where it doesn't belong. And then it was like, well, that was the end of that email chain. Yeah. So, you know, I started this group, the Nutrition Coalition, and our goal, it's really, you know, we get no industry money. We don't want to be conflicted in any way. We just, our whole aim is just to say we want science in our guidelines and we want the best science and we want it not to be cherry we want the whole body of science. We want you to review those clinical trials that we paid for and put that in the evidence base. And we don't recommend any one diet. We're not an advocate for any one diet. I'm confident if the clinical trial research is actually reviewed, which is the best, most rigorous science, that we'll get good guidelines. And the reason it's important for everyone is that even if you fix your With your own diet, you've still got, unless you live in a very privileged sphere, you've still got your child in school lunch program, what food you get in a hospital, your parent at a nursing home, are military. Do you know what the rate of obesity is in the military? Obesity, not overweight, it's 14%. Unbelievable. And you cannot say those guys are not exercising, those men and women are not exercising enough.

No, right. You can't exercise your way out of a bad diet.

Who said that?

I did.

And actually, two-thirds are overweight or up to two-thirds overweight or obese. And they have due to illness and injury, and illness is something that happens is associated with being overweight, right? Yeah, of course. 10% of our armed forces at any one time are not deployable.

No, it's frightening. We are literally poisoning America. And I hate to say this, but I think it's true that our government recommendations and the original food pyramid, which was 6 to 11 servings of bread, rice, serum, pasta a day, and very little fat, really led to millions of deaths. Not intentionally, but I think the consequence of that advice has really led to this greatest health crisis globally that we've ever seen in humanity. And you're really a pioneer in fighting for this. And I think, you know, it's curious to see what's going to happen next with the guidelines. Do you think they're going to shift? Do you think there's going to be a shift in the recommendations?

Well, I'm somewhat hopeful in that I think that, you know, the USDA, which is the agency in charge of the guidelines, they, I believe that they are actually interested in real reform. They put it out as one of their legislative priorities to have reform of the dietary guidelines so that they are science-based, those are their words. And they've taken a number of steps as they started off doing this next set of guidelines that suggests that they really are going for transparency. Yeah, it was the first time they.

Ever invited comments, right?

Right. They had public comments on sort of the topics that they want to focus on for review. And among those topics, like hallelujah, included low carbohydrate diets and saturated fats. And, you know, so those are two big areas where if you could change the current guidelines, like if you just simply allowed lower carbohydrate diets as one possible dietary pattern, that would be huge. And if you could recognize that the caps on saturated fats are really not, it shouldn't be a strong recommendation, if at all a recommendation, if you could get rid of that, that would also be big. That would reflect good science.

It's true.

And there's more and more emerging research. One of our colleagues, Sarah Hallberg, just published a paper on diabetes. Now, this is a condition that in medical school I learned once you had it, you got it. There's no reversing type 2 diabetes. Type 1 for sure not, but that's at autoimmune disease. Type 2 is really a disease of carbohydrate intolerance. And in this study, which was remarkable, showed by using a very high fat diet with lots of saturated fat, you literally could reverse 60 of type 2 diabetes in a year. You can get a hundred percent of people off the main diabetes medication, which potentially is harmful and has been linked to heart attacks, and you can get people off insulin or dramatically lower insulin in 94 of the people. That is unprecedented. And the average weight loss was 12, which is unheard of in dietary studies are about 30 pounds. This is radical, and yet it's not mainstream. It's not something that doctors use or recommend, but there's an increasing awareness that different kinds of diets that actually restrict carbohydrates and increase fats may actually help with certain metabolic conditions. And we're seeing this across the board in terms of diabetes, obesity, even things like cancer, fatty liver disease, fatty liver disease, Alzheimer's, autism, epilepsy, brain tumors. I mean, it's pretty interesting. This data starting to come in at a rapid rate. And now I go on Amazon, look at the best-selling books, and a lot of them are ketogenic diets, which I find really fascinating.

Yeah. Well, and just to emphasize one of the numbers that you just said about that Sarah Hallberg study, that was at one year, 60% reversal. That means they no longer have a diagnosis of diabetes. If you look at that same number, if you go on the standard American Diabetes Association that number is 0.1. I'm sorry, give them credit, 0.1%. 0.1, all right, 0.1 compared to 60. But I mean, just speaking to the politics of this field, when I talk about my work or my book, yes, it's about science, but really the story here is really about politics, right? I mean, this is really so much more about politics than it is about science. 'Cause as we've seen, the science is ignored so much of the time, and that is politics. And the story of Sarah Halberg's diabetes study is the current day version of that, because can she get, I've been working with her to try to help her get an op-ed placed or get any press coverage. There was zero mainstream press coverage of that study, which should be, if you know, headline news. We can reverse 60% of our nation's diabetes in a year. Everybody ignored it. And she actually, she's gotten back like angry notes from editors saying, how can you say this?

Yeah, well, it's not something we actually believe is possible as doctors. So we have to think something's wrong with the study. That's the assumption. Yeah, I guess that's what we're saying. I mean, we were in our clinic in Cleveland Clinic last week and one of the patients who'd been on insulin for 20 years was off insulin in three weeks.

Wow.

It's unbelievable.

It is. But you think that doctors would at least be, and this is the surprising thing, that they're so close-minded. You would think there are some doctors who are open. I mean, in the Nutrition Coalition, we have hundreds of doctors among our members, are people who are now successfully helping people through, by ignoring the guidelines basically, right? But there are so many.

So many.

Yeah, including like most famous among them. But there are so many stories of people who go to their doctor and they find out about a lower carb diet. They go to their doctor, like, Hey, doctor, guess what? blood pressure is down, my weight's down, all my cholesterol looks better, oh, and then my skin problem went away, and the floater in my eye is gone, or whatever. And then the doctor's like, well, just.

Be careful of that dangerous diet you're on. Right, right. Don't confuse me with the facts. My mind's made up.

Yeah.

All right, final question. If you were queen for a day and you could change something in our food space, what would it be? And if you had one piece of.

Advice for people listening to change in their lives, what would it be? Wow. My family asks me that every morning, Nina, would you like to be queen for the day? I don't think so. You know, I have to just be boring and say I would change our dietary guidelines. They're so powerful. So I would change them to be evidence-based. That would be the single biggest lever on how Americans eat.

The truth is our guidelines influence global dietary guidelines.

That's awesome.

It's not just here.

It's the whole world.

And what would you suggest to someone listening to change in their life?

In their diet. Well, if you're still frying anything in vegetable oils or using vegetable oils, don't do that. Look up a good large supplier. And I think that, don't fear fat, right? The fat you eat in bacon is not going to be the fat in your hips.

The fat that goes by your lips won't end up on your hips. Is that it?

Yeah.

That's great.

You need 1000 milligrams or more calcium.

A day to meet new comets.

It's almost certainly flat out wrong. These balance studies were based on very short term studies, 21 days, where yes, if you dump in a lot more calcium, the body will absorb some of that calcium and put.