Nothing to do with glyphosphate or ‘roundup’.
Everything to do with something assumed to be safe based on short term or in vitro studies later being found in fact to be very detrimental using longer term multigenerational studies.
Let’s do a search for ‘glyphosphate’ and ‘microbiome toxicity’.
The bugs in your gut run the whole show. A petri dish with this or that cell line isn’t the whole story wrt exposures via diet. There are literally thousands of microbes in your gut. We’ve cataloged very few of them. And what we’ve found is revolutionary. As it turns out, we need them for our own genetic expression and health.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23010679
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22968153
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22688187
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22162969
(I can give you hundreds if not thousands of similar research articles. all published within the past 5 years. it’s a brand new field) (and I don’t use google for scientific research, I prefer pubmed)
What, precisely, do these compounds do to the bugs in our guts? Where are the long term, multigenerational studies of these genetically modified ingredients?
Haven’t seen any.
So, my question isn’t whether WE have a metabolic pathway problem with glyphosphate. My question is whether or not any of the microbes we depend on in our gut have a problem with glyphosphate.
And that hasn’t even been asked. Much less answered.
Excellent post! I’m a probiotics queen myself since I think gut bugs are the key to good health.
It does make me wonder what these Frankenfoods do to intestinal flora. One has to ask why all the strange & sudden allergies to common foods over the last 10 to 15 years. My guess is with Monsanto’s power & money, these questions will never be explored because someone somewhere already knows the answers, and they ain’t good.
"Bugs" are critical to a lot more "shows" than that.
A petri dish with this or that cell line isn’t the whole story wrt exposures via diet. There are literally thousands of microbes in your gut. We’ve cataloged very few of them. And what we’ve found is revolutionary. As it turns out, we need them for our own genetic expression and health.
Really, I don't need your "instruction" on this topic. You quite apparently don't know what I do much less what I advocate.
I was writing on this topic of the ecological damage portended by RoundUp ready products fifteen years ago. I was writing about relationships among sheath bacteria, ruminants, and weather five years ago. That study is why my daughter is studying host-specific soil microbe/plant root relationships at Stanford now. She'll be working in a lab dedicated to that study all summer. I've been reading the papers she finds interesting all year. You don't need to tell me about intestinal microflora.
I am not an advocate of RoundUp ready. I don't know where you got the idea that I was. Here's the point: Antibiotics aren't good for you, yet sometimes they can save your life. The same is true of soils, weeds, and herbicides. Weeds can disrupt the entire microbial chain that produces soil. It is true that herbicides can damage soil microbial communities. Which is worse? Nobody knows. We know even less about soil microbes than we do about what is in the animal gut. I have put 25 years of arduous labor restoring native plant habitat. NOBODY has done it as effectively as I have. I have university researchers and professionals visiting my place from hundreds of miles away.
RoundUp was critical to my success. This year, I used less than a quart of it on 14 acres. I don't like using it, but sometimes it is necessary. What I can tell you is that a landscape once overrun with weeds and possessing buy 60 species of plants is now 99.9% native with 371 species of plants, many of which require specific soil microbes to breed. Hence, those bacteria must be there.
What I don't like is Monsanto leveraging protection the public offered them wrecking a very useful tool any more than I appreciate condescending fear mongering from people who clearly have no interest in dealing with relative risk, pretending that there is such a thing as a 'no risk' option. Got it?
The amount of tilling farmers were doing to soils before the invention of RoundUp Ready products was VERY damaging to soil microflora, soil structure, and soil retention. The introduction of RoundUp ready products has vastly reduced much of that damage. That much is proven. True, the long term consequences are not known. So far, I'm not seeing much more than activist fear mongering driven by wealthy foundations with an interest in reducing global population by any means, including starvation.
What has not been admitted by the agricultural community, including many scientists, is the critical need for a pastoral rotation in soil development. Even then, one cannot simply plant grasses and expect the soil microflora to operate correctly. Post disturbance annual forbs play a critical role in developing that soil microbial community.
Guess who is the only researcher anywhere in the Western United States who possesses a landscape wrecked for 200 years by weeds that is now dominated by NATIVE post-disturbance annual forbs? That would be me.
If you knew how much work it is to crawl on your hands and knees for a decade doing work nobody else will do, if you understood the drive it takes, you would have been a bit more circumspect and a lot less condescending.
I grow my own heirloom vegetables and eat them within 30 minutes of picking because the chemicals they produce in response to picking are FAR WORSE than any pesticide available. These chemicals are for the most part, untested, yet they have stood the test of millennia for their ability to deter pests. That is why so many insects are host-specific; their larvae are tolerant to the toxins. You eat 5,000 to 10,000 times by weight naturally occurring carcinogens compared to synthetic chemicals. And yes, this information has been around for over 20 years.
This is about relative and competing risks among numerous hazards. Yet when has life been any different? I own a patent on a business method to manage those competing risks, a system of which a corrupt and incompetent monopoly government is incapable.
I'm going back to my Bromus carinatus harvest. I do it with a hand sickle, a plant at a time. It's going to be over 90° today.
Interesting post ... studies are showing the GMO inserted toxins ending up in blood samples:
GM firms claimed toxins were destroyed in the gut
Toxins implanted into GM food crops to kill pests are reaching the bloodstreams of women and unborn babies, alarming research has revealed.
A landmark study found 93 per cent of blood samples taken from pregnant women and 80 per cent from umbilical cords tested positive for traces of the chemicals. link
