95: GMOs with Special Guest Dr. Stephanie Seneff

Transcript of Episode 95: GMOs with Special Guest Dr. Stephanie Seneff

With Dr. Daniel Pompa and special guest Dr. Stefanie Seneff.

Meredith:
Thank you for joining us today. Happy Friday. We have a really special guest for you today. Dr. Pompa and I will be interviewing Dr. Stephanie Seneff, and we’re so excited to have her on the show. Before I introduce her, I’d like to read a little bit about her so you guys can learn a little bit about her. Then we’ll jump in to today’s topic.

Dr. Stephanie Seneff is a senior research scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. She received her BS degree in biophysics, MS and EE degrees in electrical engineering, and a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science all from MIT. In recent years, her research has mostly focused on the relationship between nutrition and health.

She has written over a dozen papers and various medical and health-related journals on topics such as modern-day diseases and the impact of nutritional deficiencies and environmental toxins on human health. Welcome, Dr. Seneff, so excited to have you here today, and hello, Dr. Pompa.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I’m here in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Stephanie, you’re in –

Dr. Seneff:
I’m in Hawaii.

Dr. Pompa:
What island are you in there?

Dr. Seneff:
Hawaii, my favorite, the one that’s lush and beautiful, Kauai.

Dr. Pompa:
We got a foot of snow last – I just came off the ski, and you just came out of a pool. Am I right on that?

Dr. Seneff:
I was in the pool. That’s right. We’ve got two different –

Meredith:
I’m in a rainy office builing here in Pittsburgh.

Dr. Seneff:
You’ve got the worst of the lot.

Meredith:
Oh, gosh!

Dr. Pompa:
Modern technology. Yeah. It’s amazing. We’re in some beautiful places, so that’s great. You know, I thanked you at the top of this show, before we even started the show, Stephanie, because I follow your work. I’ve read all of your studies. I’m so grateful, honestly. I’m so grateful, I can’t express how grateful I am.

I teach doctors around the country. My goal is to get out a message of cellular healing, and cellular detox, and, really, these unexplainable illnesses that we’re in just epidemics of today. Your work applies to this, I think, more than any other, honestly. I can’t get a sentence out of my mouth when I’m teaching if I don’t talk about the gut, leaky gut, and the causes, which, I believe, today’s show really is the number one cause of this epidemic , so hormone problems, autoimmune, autism, you name it, we can talk about.

With that said, Stephanie, our listening audience knows a whole lot about gluten. Would you agree with that, Meredith? Everyone knows about gluten. My gosh, I heard people joking about it in the restaurant this morning. Everybody knows about gluten; however, I wrote an article a while back called It’s Not Just About Gluten. Stephanie, what is the bigger culprit than gluten? At the top of the show, that pulls us right into what we need to talk about.

Dr. Seneff:
Right. I’ve got an echo. It really gets into the issue of glyphosate. Glyphosate is the active ingredient in the pervasive herbicide, Roundup, which is used enormously and increasingly every year on our core crops. I need to get into the GMO Roundup ready crops, of which, wheat is not a GMO Roundup ready crop. In fact, when I first saw the issue of gluten intolerance, I was puzzled for that reason. I thought, “Well, wheat’s not Roundup ready. It shouldn’t have a lot of glyphosate on it.” I was thinking, “Maybe glyphosate is causing this,” because there was a very strong correlation between the usage of glyphosate on crops and the increase that we’ve seen in a lot of things, one of which is celiac disease.

What I found out by looking is that, in fact, they do spray Roundup on wheat increasingly, routinely, right before the harvest. This is an increasing practice. I was stunned when I saw that because then I really got serious about trying to see could I explain this? Could I explain gluten intolerance on the basis of what I know glyphosate does to human biology? I launched a big effort with Anthony Samsel, and we published a long paper where we looked at all the different features of celiac disease. Every one of them, we could find a way that glyphosate could cause it, particularly the non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which they have a much higher risk to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. People who have celiac disease have a much higher risk. That’s been directly connected to glyphosate poisoning.

Dr. Pompa:
Let’s back up for one second because number one, I want you to say why do they have more of this chemical sprayed on it, and glyphosate, just for our viewers, is the number one herbicide/pesticide used in the world. I used to specify it with Roundup, which you mentioned the word Roundup ready, and I’ll explain what that actually is. This chemical used to be just in this Roundup, which is the number one herbicide. Now, I think their patent has opened up, that, really, every company around the world can get this glyphosate, which is this active ingredient. We’re going to talk about the problem with it, a lot of your studies showed, that are creating a lot of these diseases. Okay, what is GMOs, and why is glyphosate sprayed in a massive amounts on these crops?

Dr. Seneff:
Right. The GMO crops are – there’s only a few. There’s less than a dozen of these GMO crops. Many of them are the core crops of the processed food industry. You have corn, soy, canola oil, which is a very cheap oil that’s used a lot in foods, especially in the processed foods, sugar beets, that’s a source of sugar, and then cotton, tobacco, and alfalfa. That’s pretty much an exhaustive list of the GMO crops – of the crops that are GMO-engineered to be Roundup ready.

We hear so much today about anti-GMO movement and all this stuff about the GMO and whether there’s a problem with it. I’m not going to say there isn’t a problem with the GMO, but there is certainly a problem with the fact that the GMO allows the crop to be sprayed with Roundup without dying. This is a unique property of these crops. Every single plant on the planet dies if it’s exposed to glyphosate except for these special crops that have gotten the bacterial gene inserted into their own genome to protect them.

The fact that all the other plants are killed – this is a universal herbicide – out to tell you something about the toxicity of this chemical, in general, to life.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. The fact is is they’re raising these crops basically to be able to withstand a lot of this chemical. Number one, we’re able to keep the weeds at bay, supposedly – I know there’s problems with that, now – and pests, and obviously it’s going to help farmers having increased yields. You said something. You actually said, “Wait a minute. What about the fact that it’s being sprayed on every conventional grain today through a process called desiccation?” They’re actually doing it to kill the plant before harvest. It causes it to shrivel. It’s called desiccation. Then it increases yield. Now we’re being exposed with every conventional grain, especially the GMO plants that you just mentioned. Can we even avoid this chemical today?

Dr. Seneff:
I want to say that I just today discovered that it’s sprayed on peanuts right before the harvest. I’ve been hearing all of this about peanut allergy, and I’m suspecting now that that’s also caused by glyphosate with the same process that’s going on with gluten intolerance. It’s really disturbing, the amount.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

Dr. Seneff:
It’s been increasing every year because of their GMO Roundup ready weeds, essentially, that are developing. In these crops, of course, the industry somehow didn’t anticipate this. They should have. As they expose these weeds to glyphosate, the weeds got smart, and they actually became more and more resistant. They could tolerate more and more glyphosate, so they had to use more and more every year. They said they would use less, but they used more.

Dr. Pompa:
More.

Dr. Seneff:
Alarmingly more, like 800% increase over the last 10, 15 years in the use of glyphosate on crops, incredibly escalating exactly in step with the rise in autism in this country.

Dr. Pompa:
You have some of those graphs. I remember seeing – with the rise in dementia, with the rise of Alzheimer’s, with the rise of autism. As glyphosate amounts went up, these diseases went up. Again, coincidence? Maybe, but when you look at the numbers, it’s pretty hard to say coincidence. Tell me a little bit about your research there.

Dr. Seneff:
Right. I’ve just been amazed. In fact, I’m collaborating now with Nancy Swanson. It’s quite remarkable to me that when Anthony Samsel and I – he’s the one who got me started. I should go back – actual bit of history. Don Huber was the one who originally – Professor Don Huber, who’s a professor from Perdue. Outstanding man, very, very intelligent, and extremely well informed on plants. It’s his area of expertise. I heard him give a two-hour presentation a little over three years ago. It’s hard to believe it’s only three years because it’s been such an incredibly intense three years of my life.

Dr. Pompa:
I agree.

Dr. Seneff:
He gave this presentation, and I was on the edge of my seat. I saw right then and there that this was the reason why we had an autism epidemic. I had been looking at autism for the previous five years and coming up frustrated because I saw all these symptoms in autism, like the gut problems, that I couldn’t explain, and the vitamin D deficiency, all these things that I couldn’t explain with the things that I was looking at. I didn’t think to look at Roundup because, like everybody else, I believed it was harmless.

Dr. Pompa:
Right.

Dr. Seneff:
Don opened that window for me. Then Dr. Mercola is the one who introduced me to Anthony Samsel. He’s really a remarkable man. He and I have collaborated now on four papers. We’re working on a fifth one and a sixth one, probably, right now, working on more research to work out different aspects of glyphosate. It is an amazing molecule, really fascinating, actually, because of the many different ways in which it can disrupt biology. It’s just incredible. How they ever got it past the regulatory agencies is what puzzles me.

Dr. Pompa:
To this day, they’re claiming it’s still safe. When you look at Monsanto’s mantra, they’re still saying that it’s safe for humans. I know that they’ve changed their tune, right?

Dr. Seneff:
Yeah. The WHO, of course, just this past March, recognized that glyphosate is a probable carcinogen. That’s a big deal. The IARC in Europe, their regulatory agency, just said, “No, it’s not.” Different people are being influenced by different parts of the science. If you look at what the industry portrays, it’s in their extreme best interest to pretend that this chemical is not toxic. Then the regulators are just believing it because I think they don’t want to face that fact that they’ve got to find a different way to do agriculture.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s like overuse of antibiotics in the soil. Now you become addicted. Now, it’s like, how do you live without an antibiotic? How do you live without this chemical, even though it’s causing long-term problems? You brought up autism, and we’ve tailed on a few other diseases. How does glyphosate really affect all these different conditions? I think that’s the question that people might be skeptical about. It’s like one chemical, it can cause autism. It can be linked to Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and all these conditions.

 Dr. Seneff:
Obesity – yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
How is that possible?

Dr. Seneff:
I know. I would have been surprised, myself. I didn’t finish my story about Anthony. I got way bent in the history of things. I was working with Anthony. We wrote our first paper, and we tagged all these diseases that we suspected glyphosate would cause based on what it does to biological systems. After that paper was published, I got contacted by Nancy Swanson, and she showed me all her charts that were showing perfect correlation between the rise in glyphosate.

I hadn’t even looked at those data when we wrote our paper, so it was really serendipitous that the diseases she was finding were correlated with glyphosate were the same ones we had written about without knowing that there was that strong correlation. It was quite remarkable. Nancy and I have now continued to collaborate. I’m really enjoying working with her, and I’m covering all kinds of new correlations. Basically, we make a great team because she goes through and finds the things that are correlated, and then I go through the science to try to figure out, “Why would this be?” It’s incredible.

This molecule is a monster, and it affects biology in so many ways. One of the things is that’s it’s a patented anti-microbial agent. That was a patent that it received before it received a patent as a – first of all, it was patented as a chelating agent, so it would clear pipes of metals. It would clean the pipes. Then it was patented as an anti-microbial agent, and finally, it was patented as an herbicide.

Those two features, the chelation of metals and the anti-microbial effect have huge, huge consequences to our biology. You can imagine because the gut microbes are going to be sensitive. It’s just basically like having an antibiotic. I think all the problems we’re having with antibiotic resistance in the hospitals – we have this huge problem with these monster bugs that people can’t – you throw every antibiotic at it, and it won’t die.

Dr. Pompa:
Right.

Dr. Seneff:
There is the antibiotics that they’re feeding to the cows intentionally to make them grow faster, but there’s also glyphosate as an antibiotic being fed to the cows every day. They get GMO Roundup ready corn and soy feed. That’s their diet. The cows are being exposed to lots of glyphosate every day that’s causing antibiotic resistance in their gut, and then producing all these antibiotic resistance microbes in the world.

Dr. Pompa:
Part of the answer to the question is, “How does it affect so many diseases?” because it has such a negative impact in the microbiome, which is related to – speaking about gut bacteria as related to our immune system and even how the brain works. Matter of fact, if we look at autism, we know it affects this brain and the second brain, right?

Dr. Seneff:
Right.

Dr. Pompa:
We know that both brains are affected. Reading your research, you showed that glyphosate destroys certain bacteria that we need to make neurotransmitters – it’s called a Shikimate pathway – for our brain to work. Okay, so if we here via glyphosate, now we’re not making the chemicals that our brain needs to actually work.

I’ve got a novel concept. Let’s just give people serotonin uptake inhibitors and more medication instead of realizing what’s going on, why we have depressed teenagers, teenagers that are reaching out to drugs, and more and more autism. Then, not to mention the fact that your work showed that it created– opens up the gut, even opens up the tight junctions, which again, are making – I said that the big problems isn’t gluten. It’s just allowing to cross over. That’s part of the reason why we’re seeing it connected to different diseases, I’m sure.

Dr. Seneff:
Absolutely! Fortunately, researchers are now really looking into the gut microbiome. It took them a long time to realize how important it is to our health. Of course, because it’s failing, they’re noticing its importance. Lactobacillus is the microbe that gets started first in the gut. That’s the microbe that drinks milk, basically. When the baby’s born and it’s nursed, you’re feeding lactobacillus. You need to make that bacterium grow a lot because it will really keep your gut healthy.

Lactobacillus is especially sensitive to glyphosate because it is unusual in its dependence on manganese. Glyphosate really chelates manganese. This has been shown in studies on cows. It prevents access to manganese. The lactobacillus can’t thrive, and that means a vacuum to allow the pathogens to overgrow. That’s how you get all the disruptive gut problems.

The gluten, in fact – not only does the gluten leak out because the gut’s leaky, but also, there’s a problem with digesting the gluten because glyphosate gets in the way. Normally, there’s a step that takes place in the breaking down of gluten that involves forming cross-links among different amino acids in the molecule. Glyphosate gets in the way and prevents those cross-links from happening, and then also binds. Once glyphosate is bound to the gluten, the gluten looks like a foreign molecule, and the body develops and antibody to it. That’s how we theorize in our papers how it’s happening.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s safe to say if we can fix the glyphosate problem, we could fix the gluten problem.

Dr. Seneff:
I absolutely think so. If you look back before we had glyphosate, we didn’t have – we had very little gluten intolerance. Gluten intolerance was just – I didn’t even know about it when I was a child. I never heard of it.

Dr. Pompa:
Really, what came first, the chicken or the egg? Good old Norman Borlaug disrupted and changed gluten in dwarf wheat. That was all the way back in the ‘70s. My generation, I’m 50, I don’t know anyone that had a gluten issue. Nobody had a gluten issue. We can’t blame Normal completely. This glyphosate really is the bigger issue.

Dr. Seneff:
Absolutely. I really think it’s causing most of the food allergies, maybe even all of the food allergies. Obviously, we had food allergy before glyphosate, but the epidemic, the increase, I think, is being caused by glyphosate, mainly by glyphosate. I think there’s some issues with the vaccines, as well.

Dr. Pompa:
Talk a little bit about some other things that the glyphosate does. I know it makes heavy metals more toxic. This is another problem in autism, and Alzheimer’s, and, really, so many diseases today. How does it make things more toxic, and how does it affect the brain in other ways?

Dr. Seneff:
It’s amazing what it does to iron, actually. I’ve been looking a lot at iron lately. Very fascinating. Today, we have, actually, worldwide, an epidemic in anemia. Many, many people suffer from anemia, including in the United States. We also have issues with iron toxicity at the same time, too much iron. Both too much iron and too little iron are a problem. It’s very, very difficult to get to that sweet spot where the iron is just right. The reason is because our body is no longer able to manage iron properly because glyphosate messes up the whole system of managing the iron. That’s what glyphosate will do with all the minerals. It binds to them and builds this cage around the minerals so that – the cells can’t gain access if it’s hiding inside this glyphosate molecule.

Then it basically carries the mineral, whatever it might be. It might be a toxic metal like aluminum, or it could be iron, which is both toxic and essential at the same time. Many of the minerals are like that. Manganese is like that, too, both toxic and essential. The body uses these in very, very important ways. Many of the enzymes depend upon one or more metals to be able to capitalize the reaction. If they can’t gain access to those metals, the enzymes don’t work.

At the same time, glyphosate will carry that metal through the blood to get to the terminal vasculature areas, the places where the blood equilibrates with other fluids. That’s going to be, for example, the kidneys and the urine, or it’s going to be the cerebral spinal fluid in the brain. You can have the pineal gland and the pituitary gland, which are linked to the cerebral spinal fluid, or in the jaw, the salivary glands. All of those areas are the most acidic areas of the blood. Under acid conditions, glyphosate unloads its cargo.

What happens is glyphosate carries these toxic metals into those particular places, unloads its cargo, and at that point, both the glyphosate and the metal become toxic. It’s really a very big problem. That’s why you have kidney failure. Kidney failure is totally an epidemic in step with glyphosate usage on crops.

In fact, agricultural workers in certain countries like Sri Lanka and in Central America, the workers that are working the sugar cane fields – sugar can is sprayed with glyphosate right before the harvest. These workers are dying in record numbers of kidney failure at a young age. Sri Lankans have linked it to glyphosate and have banned glyphosate as a country. The entire country has banned glyphosate usage anywhere in the country as a consequence of this evidence.

Dr. Pompa:
It seems like other countries are banning it, GMOs even. Here in the United States, we have your research and others, and yet, there’s no pullback at all. How do you explain that?

Dr. Seneff:
I don’t explain that. I am shocked. I really thought that I lived in a pretty decent country, and I’m telling you that I am getting extremely discouraged with my government. I just feel like they’ve been bought. It’s amazing. I’m not naturally an activist. I like to just do science. I love science. I’d be happy to just hide in my lab and write papers if I could get by with it, but I feel it’s necessary to get this message out.

I have friends who are activists, and they have sent off so many letters to legislators around the country, and they admit to me – one of them is extremely frustrated. He send out probably over 100 letters, and he hasn’t gotten anything back from anybody, other than maybe some form acknowledgement that the letter was received. Nobody has ever responded.

Dr. Pompa:
Have you had any threats? Monsanto has a lot of money. I’m sure they’re very upset about your research. Has MIT been – are they trying to come in at you?

Dr. Seneff:
It’s remarkable. I’m very proud of MIT. I think it’s a really fantastic institution. MIT is pretty tolerant, I think, of – we have Noam Chomsky, and he’s done a lot of activism. They have not told me anything about not doing – they haven’t tried to stop me from doing anything that I’ve done so far. Also, my funding agency has been very supportive, and they’ve continued to fund my work, which is remarkable, I think. It’s very hard to get funding, of course, to do the kind of stuff I’m doing.

Dr. Pompa:
I hope more shows like this make it more plausible, that’s for sure. I know that when we look at – I teach a lot about dementia, and really, this is a growing, growing, fast epidemic. I know that you – in some of your papers, you talk about how glyphosate disrupts something called cholesterol sulfate. I love telling people. I love the shock. Could heart disease actually be a cholesterol deficiency? Some of your work actually shows that it is. I love that. I call it the 180 degree opposite.I always say, “In health, if you want to know where health lies, it’s 180 degrees opposite of where you think.” Cholesterol is one of those topics. Explain a little bit about – how could heart disease be a cholesterol deficiency? How does that play into Alzheimer’s in the brain? Glyphosate is really a problem when it comes to this cholesterol sulfate or cholesterol topic.

Dr. Seneff:
It is. It’s really quite remarkable because the liver actually produces cholesterol sulfate and ships it out through the bile acids to the gut. That helps with the digestion. Bile acids, of course, help digest the fats. Eventually, the cholesterol sulfate ends up in the cheadle micron, which gets sent back into the body via the lymph system. It lands in the blood. The first place it joins the blood is right before it enters the heart. The body has set up a mechanism by which the liver directly delivers cholesterol sulfate to the heart via the cheadle micron. The heart loves the cheadle micron. It will take the cheadle micron as a source of fuel given a choice.

There was a study that was done in vitro on a rat heart. Even between LDL and cheadle micron, the heart would rather consume energy fuel from the cheadle micron. It’s really interesting to me that there’s a set-up to really, really supply the heart with cholesterol sulfate. I think both the cholesterol and the sulfate are absolutely essential for the performance of the heart. It’s a muscle that can’t relax. It has to work all the time, and it needs a lot of energy. The sulfate is really, really important for supplying the energy.

This is based on a very complex mechanism involving water, actually, gelled water. It’s a very, very interesting space that I’ve been studying with some very smart people. I’m learning a lot from these people who are experts in this area, such as Jerry Pollack, of water and the power of water to actually generate electricity under the right circumstances, but those circumstances involve sulfate. When sulfate’s deficient, the heart doesn’t have enough electricity. That’s going to cause heart failure.

Dr. Pompa:
People have to understand that sulfate and cholesterol come together because cholesterol just can’t be free-floating around by itself. It’s either carried in a particle or connected to sulfate. As a matter of fact, that’s part of the link of why we’re seeing it as a link to Alzheimer’s, etcetera. Back up. Glyphosate affects this cholesterol sulfate, and we need this cholesterol sulfate for our heart. We need it for our brain. Therefore, cholesterol – and people who are low in cholesterol, for goodness sakes. We have this combination of cholesterol and sulfate being attacked. Is this why we’re seeing so many increases in these brain diseases?

Dr. Seneff:
Absolutely! Cholesterol is really, really important in the brain. The brain has 5% of the body’s weight and 25% of the body’s cholesterol. The brain loves cholesterol, and it desperately needs cholesterol to be able to transmit nerve signals. You don’t want to have insufficient cholesterol in your brain. In fact, I’ve seen studies on the elderly.

There was a wonderful, 17-year study that showed – and they looked at three different measures of cholesterol. All three measures, and of course, all three together, especially showed the people who had low levels of cholesterol has increased dementia, increased problems with their brains, and increased frailty, and also shorter lifespan. Everything was bad with respect to low cholesterol. It’s amazing to me. Of course, also, there’ve been studies on Alzheimer’s, and they’ve shown that people with Alzheimer’s have low cholesterol. The ones with worse Alzheimer’s have lower cholesterol. Very, very well correlated with these problems.

Meredith:
What are you saying is low? What would you recommend as far as good cholesterol levels go?

Dr. Seneff:
That’s not a question I can answer because I really feel that whatever the level is is good. Your body is smart. If you’ve got a problem, your body’s going to raise the cholesterol, and that’s a good thing. The issue really is more about oxidation. If you have oxidized LDL, that’s an indicator of a really big problem. You’re going to have oxidized LDL if you’ve got glyphosate poisoning. Glyphosate causes the oxidation damage. It’s been shown in multiple studies in the liver to cause increased release of these toxic oxidizing agents that are going to mess up molecules in the body.

I didn’t finish the story about glyphosate and bile acids. Bile acids don’t flow because glyphosate messes up the enzymes, which are the cytochrome P450 enzymes in the liver, that make the bile acids. Those enzymes also activate – the same enzymes activate vitamin D. We have a vitamin D deficiency epidemic today, also in this country. I think it’s directly attributable to glyphosate’s poisoning of those enzymes that active vitamin D in the liver.

Dr. Pompa:
Wow! That’s amazing. The cholesterol subject is – I’m so glad you said the fact that wherever it is is where the body wants it. Actually, I had low cholesterol before years and years ago. I was probably 170, which is an open window for neurotoxicity and ended up becoming neurotoxic. The irony was this: When I was trying to figure out what was wrong, all of a sudden, I saw that I had very high cholesterol. I said, “That must be a mistake,” learning now that cholesterol actually raises the blood brain barrier. Again, my innate intelligence knew better.

There’s a higher mortality, meaning death, for lower cholesterol than higher cholesterol. I want people to understand that and hear that loud and clear. The cholesterol sulfate combination that this glyphosate disrupts is why we’re seeing – with the increase of glyphosate, we’re seeing a climb in all these different bring conditions and hormone conditions. Cholesterol stabilizes hormone receptors, so there must be a correlation there, as well, with the cholesterol sulfate.

Dr. Seneff:
Because glyphosate disrupts the adrenal glands’ ability to make sulfated sterols. There’s things like DHEA sulfate, and there’s all the sex hormones that are sulfated like testosterone sulfate and estrone sulfate from estrogen. Cortisol is also sulfated. All of these things are sulfated in transit, and that sulfation process is messed up by glyphosate.

The adrenals have been shown to be a huge decrease in the production of testosterone, for example, in the presence of glyphosate. It messes up the ability to produce all these really important hormones. Of course, it also messes up, as you mentioned before, the neurotransmitters. Both of those together – neurotransmitters also transmit sulfate. They also are sulfated in transit. This process of sulfation is just a marriage. Sulfate by itself, free sulfate, is a problem in the blood. It’ll make the blood turn into – it’ll gel the blood just like it gels the blood to make electricity. It can’t gel the flowing blood. Flowing blood has to flow.

The body has come up with these clever mechanisms to transport sulfate by attaching it to either all these sterols like the vitamin D sulfate, cholesterol, the sex hormones, DHEA, all of these things, cortisol, and also thyroid hormone. They’re all sulfated – and methionine – I mean, not methionine – all these neurotransmitters, which come from that pathway that glyphosate disrupts. The gut microbes make the precursors to these neurotransmitters, and that’s serotonin, melatonin, and melanin, the skin-tanning agent, thyroid hormone. They all come from that pathway.

You’ve got both of these enormously important groups of molecules disrupted by glyphosate, all of which are able to transport sulfate. You get a huge problem with sulfate deficiency under these circumstances.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s remarkable! Here we are today, everyone’s trying to lower their cholesterol, which you’re saying cholesterol’s the most important thing for the cell, the nerve system, and then sulfate. We have glyphosate affecting the sulfate, and it’s amazing that we don’t even see more disease, really. Cholesterol is being targeted. The sulfate’s being targeted. Our gut bacteria are being targeted. Glyphosate literally affects the most important things that we need, but it explains why we’re seeing the rises in all these different conditions.

When I heard that – how does glyphosate affect diabetes? I was saying, “How could that be?” It even affects the ion transport, which affects ATP, our energy, which is another thing that we’re going to see linked to fatigue, I’m sure.

Dr. Seneff:
Absolutely.

Dr. Pompa:
You might want to explain that a little bit.

Dr. Seneff:
Oh, yeah. It definitely hits the mitochondria very badly. It’s been shown in multiple studies with multiple animal models that glyphosate messes up the mitochondria, which are the organelles in your cells that produce ATP. ATP, of course, is the energy currency of life. When you don’t get enough ATP, you get tired. That’s how you get chronic fatigue syndrome, I’m sure. I really feel confident that that’s a consequence of the muscle cells’ impairment in their ability to make ATP. That probably comes back from their deficiency in cholesterol sulfate.

Dr. Pompa:
It causes these ion leaks, which we need to make ATP in the mitochondria. Last week, I interviewed Thomas Seyfriend, and he’s saying, “Look, cancer is a metabolic problem.” What happens first, and this was all the way back from Warburg’s theory, is mitochondria gets affected. Something damages the mitochondria. Then all of a sudden, we have this odd fermentation in [00:32:03] produce ATP in a different format. He’s saying this is the problem. My gosh. You need to get together with Seyfried because this will be another paper.

Dr. Seneff:
I know.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. It’s damaging mitochondria, what’s causing damaging mitochondria and ion leaks. Come on. Glyphosate has to be – leading to cancer in this route.

Dr. Seneff:
Absolutely. In fact, it’s remarkable, the correlations between glyphosate and a number of different cancers that Nancy Swanson has found, pancreatic cancer, thyroid cancer, colon cancer, kidney cancer, liver cancer, all of these, and probably prostate cancer, as well. Not as clear there. All very strongly correlated with glyphosate usage on crops.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. If it affects ATP in the mitochondria, it’s going to lead to cancer and host of other unexplainable illnesses that we see today. Meredith, I know you have other questions. I don’t want to hog all the questions because I’m all excited.

Meredith:
Just thinking with a layperson’s frame here, too. This is some heavy science that you guys are talking about. I think it’s so important for us to understand these episodes. I’m going to have to re-watch, too, because it’s a lot of amazing information. Perhaps someone’s just sitting here, and watching the show, and wondering, “Okay. How does this affect me? I feel like I eat pretty well,” but maybe – a lot of people out there want to lose weight, especially this time of the year with the new year coming up. I know that you’ve said that GMOs increase likelihood of being obese. Maybe if you can talk about that a little bit.

Dr. Seneff:
I’d be delighted, yeah. In fact, it’s very interesting. Early on, when I started looking at glyphosate, I came across a paper. The paper was arguing that sugar was contributing to the obesity problem in the US. They showed a plot that went all the way back to the 1700s, and they showed the trends of obesity. You could see that we were getting obese slowly over the – say, the second half of the 1900s, like 1950 to 1975. There was a positive slope. We were getting fatter.

Nineteen seventy-five, it hit a corner. All of a sudden, we started getting fatter faster, much steeper slope. Nineteen seventy-five was when glyphosate was introduced into the food chain. I don’t think that’s coincidental. I think that glyphosate was causing – is continuing to cause the obesity epidemic, which is, by the way, still getting worse today. We’re about as obese as you could possible imagine, and we’re still getting fatter. It’s incredible, so many people in America that are just insanely overweight. You wouldn’t have ever – if you saw someone like that when I was a child, you would stare at them because you’d be so surprised. Now, we see so many of them that it’s just part of the – normal. It’s considered normal to be 300 or 400 pounds. It’s incredible.

There’s a reason for that because glyphosate – I mentioned the CYP enzymes in the liver that make the bile acids. Those CYP enzymes are also really, really important for detoxifying a whole bunch of toxic chemicals including drugs that we might take. We have all the PCBs. There’s lots of stuff out there in our environment that’s also toxic, the insecticides. Many of them are not water-soluble. We depend upon the CYP enzymes to convert them into a water-soluble product that can then be excreted. If the CYP enzymes aren’t doing that job, those fat-soluble, toxic chemicals have to be stored somewhere in order to keep our body from being damaged by them.

Dr. Pompa:
Fat cells.

Dr. Seneff:
It’s very convenient to have a big belly where you can just dump all these toxic chemicals that you can’t deal with, just dump them into that big belly. If you start losing weight fast, you’re going to release all those toxins, and they’re going to cause damage to your brain, for example.

Dr. Pompa:
We see that, Stephanie. Here, a new epidemic is weight loss resistance, the inability to lose weight despite what people eat and how much they exercise. I’ll tell you, we people all the time lose 10 or 15 pounds, and not only do they plateau, but they also stop losing weight and even gain weight back. I keep saying, “Weight loss today has more to do with toxins’ effect on hormones than anything else.” Here, glyphosate playing a major role in that. I didn’t know that correlation like that, exactly at 1975, we saw that rise. Very interesting.

 Dr. Seneff:
Yes, very interesting. Nancy has shown that hospital discharge data that obesity is highly correlated with glyphosate usage on corn and soy crops. It’s going up with a very strong correlation just like, also, diabetes, and, as I mentioned – and even LDL, by the way. LDL levels in the population are going up despite this aggressive use of statins. They’re going up in step with the increase use of glyphosate. I think it’s causing high LDL, and I’ll tell you why.

When the liver can’t produce the cholesterol sulfate and ship it out through the bile acid, it has to ship the cholesterol out some other way. The way it does it is by packaging it up inside those LDL particles. It’s stuck having to send out LDL instead of sending out bile acids directly into the blood instead of sending bile acids over to the gut where they can be used to help digest the fats. It really messes things up in the liver.

Dr. Pompa:
The number of particles of cholesterol’s more damaging than your total cholesterol.

Dr. Seneff:
Yes, the small, dense LDL particles. Those are the ones that cannot return to the liver because they’ve been oxidized and glycated. They’re such a mess. They’ve just been completely gummed up, and the liver won’t take them back under those circumstances.

Another thing interesting – I could get into statin drugs for hours, but it’s also PCSK9 inhibitors. I don’t know if you’ve heard of those. That’s a new drug that they’re really getting excited about to lower cholesterol even more than what you get with statin drugs. It’s a shot that you take. It’s really scary. PCSK9 inhibitors inhibit this enzyme called PCSK9 in the liver. What’s really interesting about that enzyme is that it binds to sulfate and becomes inactive. That enzyme prevents the LDL from coming back.

If there’s enough sulfate, then that enzyme is naturally inactivated, and the LDL comes back. An important reason why the liver can’t take back the LDL is because it doesn’t have enough sulfate. The reason why it doesn’t have enough sulfate is because of glyphosate. If you just poison that enzyme, you let the liver take back the cholesterol, even though it can’t afford to do so because that’s methyl sulfate, you’re going to end up with fatty liver disease. We have an epidemic right now in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. I think it’s caused directly by glyphosate. PCSK9 inhibitors are going to make it worse.

In fact, the early evidence coming out already is showing that PCSK9 inhibitors cause fatty liver disease. They’ve never shown that they actually improve heart health. They’ve only shown that they lower cholesterol. They’re marketing them like, “Oh, this is a great solution for getting your cholesterol down to 0,” which is so insane. I just get so upset by this craziness that we live under right now with the medical system.

Dr. Pompa:
Doctors are just buying into it because they don’t have time to look at the literature. They don’t read literature. They’re just doing what they’re told. The drug companies come in, the reps come in, and, “Here’s another lowing cholesterol” – look, most doctors believe that cholesterol is the enemy. They do, Stephanie.

Dr. Seneff:
I know.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I know.

Dr. Seneff:
I know that because I have people who tell me, “My doctor has told me I simply cannot – I have to take this statin drug. What can I do? My doctor says I have to.” I sort of say, “Don’t listen to your doctor,” but you know. Doctors need to get aware of what’s happening.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I send people papers all the time, and they bring them to their doctor. The doctor gets very mad. We’re in a hard time right now with the cholesterol problem. How is it linked to diabetes? To me, diabetes is leading to – diabetes and thyroid are almost the same condition these days. It’s like one gets one, then the other. How is it linked to these conditions?

Dr. Seneff:
Yeah. There’s complicated links, but one thing, of course, is that diabetes causes high blood sugar, right? You’re going to have too much sugar in your blood. Sugar is actually toxic because it can be converted, and it will actually react with things in uncontrollable ways if you just have it in your blood.

That’s what causes glycation damage. When you measure hemoglobin A1C, that’s a damaged hemoglobin product from sugar attack. When the proteins in your blood get damaged, and including the protein APOB in the LDL particle get damaged by the sugar, they don’t work anymore. The LDL particle gets damaged by the sugar such that it can’t be taken up. It can’t even be taken up by the cells to deliver its goods. It just becomes sort of a useless remnant.

You get these small, dense LDL particles that have nowhere to go because the liver won’t take them back. They’re all gummed up. Nobody wants them, in a sense, so the only cell that’s willing to take these things are these macrophage clean-up cells. These are the cells that go into the artery wall in the heart, and they take in these damaged, small, dense LDL particles, and carefully take them apart, and recycle them. They want to keep the cholesterol because cholesterol’s so important, but they’re storing it in the artery wall, waiting for an opportunity to unload it as cholesterol sulfate. The reason why they can’t unload it is because there’s no sulfate. Sulfate deficiency is the problem.

Dr. Pompa:
Your work has linked glyphosate, the overuse of GMOs to all these different things. What do we do? Can we avoid this?

Dr. Seneff:
I have to say, the US has no GMO labeling, very frustrating. You don’t know if it’s GMO or not, but we do have Certified Organic, and it’s a pretty respected label. I really, really appreciate Certified Organic. We are very careful when we go shopping. We’ve stopped eating things that we can’t find them as Certified Organic. We buy everything including our spices, our wine, and beer. Everything in our house is Certified Organic. I would encourage everybody to do that.

Luckily, you can in this country. I think Certified Organic is probably more available here than almost anywhere else in the world, except for places like Butan, where they’re organic. They’re just all organic. This is a good place to be able to get Certified Organic. I don’t know about other parts of the country, but certainly where I live, I have not had a problem with getting most of the things I eat organic.

Meredith:
I’m wondering, too, because I know, perhaps, not everyone is able to afford 100% organic. Are there certain crops that they should definitely avoid if they can’t buy everything organic, corn, soy, some of these other – sugar beets, but give that list.

Dr. Seneff:
Yes. Of course, there’s the GMO Roundup ready crops, which I said before, are the corn, the soy, the sugar beets, the canola oil, and then alfalfa, and cotton, and tobacco, of course, weren’t really foods, although cotton seed oil is used as a cheap oil, and that’s probably contaminated. Then there are all the crops that are sprayed with glyphosate right before the harvest, and that is, in my mind, a growing list. I’m still trying to figure out exactly which crops that is. I said I just figured out – I just found out today that peanuts can be sprayed with glyphosate right before the harvest, and legumes, and sugar cane.

All the sugars are bad. You have the high fructose corn syrup, which is derived from GMO Roundup ready corn. You have sugar beets, which are GMO Roundup ready, and you have sugar cane, which is sprayed with glyphosate right before the harvest. We’re hearing a lot these days about sugar being bad for you. I think it’s the glyphosate that’s in the sugar that’s causing the problem.

Meredith:
Wow!

Dr. Seneff:
We’re really getting mixed up in our studies because we’re really studying how much glyphosate would – people have different studies that get contradictory results on some particular food. I think it’s just because you have to look at how much glyphosate is in the particular form of that oil or that sugar that they’re studying to judge the toxic effects of it. They’re missing that entirely when they study these things. Yeah, the sugars, and then – Cheerios, for example, even if you got non-GMO Cheerios, which they now have, you could not guarantee that doesn’t have glyphosate because oats are sprayed with glyphosate right before the harvest. That won’t work. Natural’s not good enough. Non-GMO’s not good enough. I wouldn’t buy any cereal that wasn’t organic.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I wouldn’t eat any grain.

Dr. Seneff:
Yeah, period. That’s right.

Bread – right. It’s a big list. It’s most of the foods that you eat, unfortunately. Of course, if you’re taking butter, and cream, and that sort of thing, if you’re not eating organic, it’s coming from a cow that’s been fed huge amounts. It’s been shown to be – glyphosate has been found in human breast milk, so you can pretty much guarantee it’s going to be in cows’ milk, which may be a reason why we have a lot of milk allergies today. We have a lot of casein intolerance, which I’m suspecting may also be due to glyphosate in the milk.

Meredith:
So connected. Wow!

Dr. Seneff:
I have to say it goes into the animals, too. There were studies on cows and on chickens. They found glyphosate in all the tissues, including the muscles, which is going to be the meat. If you’re eating non-organic – not eating grass-fed beef, you’re probably eating glyphosate in your meat.

Dr. Pompa:
I was going to ask that because I refuse to eat corn-fed meat. My meat is grass-fed. The best part about it is when you go to restaurants now, it’s shocking to me. Average restaurants have grass-fed choices now.

Yeah, it is. It’s really become easier. I remember watching one of your lectures. I added it to one of mine, just about – look, we’re poisoning our infants from the get-go. When you look at the amount of – the highest glyphosate-containing foods, soy and corn, this is what formula is made of. Oh, and then if they make it to be a senior, look what we’re feeing our seniors, all these products made for seniors in the senior homes.

 Dr. Seneff:
Ensure has got to be really toxic.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh! It’s remarkable!

Dr. Seneff:
I know. It’s really crazy. We have to wake up. I can’t understand why people aren’t seeing this. I think more and more people are, but it seems so obvious to me. It’s so frustrating that people are just going about their lives as if everything’s fine because it’s not. We’re going to be really in a crisis. My projections of the curve – if you just look at the autism curve from the CDC since – for the past 20 years, two decades, and you look at the shape of that curve, you can tell very clearly its exponential growth.

It’s very easy to extend the curve to predict – if it continues along the same curve, where will we be when, and you’ll find out that in 2032, half the kids born, 80% of the boys, will be on the autism spectrum. That’s not going to be something we can tolerate. We’re going to have to do something. It’s going to become obvious to everybody soon enough, I think. We need to do something huge.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh! We just talked about the damages of this glyphosate that’s being sprayed on our food. The over-vaccinations, one vaccine after another, they still have all these heavy metals, which the glyphosate exemplifies the toxicity. Think about this. What are we headed for, Stephanie?

 I mean, honestly.

Dr. Seneff:
I know. It doesn’t make any sense. You can’t understand why the country wouldn’t be worried about the fact that it’s pretty much destroying the next generation as far as I can tell. It’s like we were just walking happily over the cliff.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I teach something called true cellular detox. I talk about how we have to – real detox. You have to get the cells functioning first. When you look at glyphosate, and how it disrupts cellular energy, and how it disrupts the cell membrane, and how it disrupts methylation and glutathione. I have something I teach, my 5 Rs of how to fix a cell, and it’s a roadmap. This is the issue. This is why my passion is teaching. True cellular detox is really what it is. You can’t just do a colon cleanse and walk away thinking you’re going to fix this problem today.

Dr. Seneff:
Yes.

greexDr. Seneff:
Anthony Samsel just told me recently that zeolite is actually used by the industry to clear any remaining glyphosate. In places where they manufacture glyphosate, they use zeolite to get rid of the glyphosate. They know about that. I understand that zeolite is being used, also, for autistic kids. I think that it’s amazing that they haven’t sort of connected those dots, that zeolite is being used to remove the glyphosate.

Dr. Pompa:
One of the big problems – and this is my criticism of zeolite – has been in the human body. Number one, most of it’s contaminated. It holds onto certain toxins that it will let go of in certain acids in the gut. Number two, we tested them, and really, even the solution ones, the ones that claim to be a solution, but they were really a suspension, they didn’t leave the gut, let alone get into the cell.

This one actually leaves the gut. I had to see the research myself to believe it because of my criticism of some of these products. The problem has been that zeolite didn’t leave the gut, really, so it bound well in the gut. This one actually gets into the cell. CytoDetox is the product. I’ll introduce you to it. You can ask Meredith. She’ll get you some information on it. It’s a product right now we’re just selling to physicians and doctors, but it works. We know it works for glyphosate.

We knew it worked for glyphosate outside the body. This one actually goes into the cell, into the membranes. This is a major defense against this glyphosate problem.

Dr. Seneff:
Wow. That sounds encouraging.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

Dr. Seneff:
It’s a good question, and I don’t have a good answer as to how long would it take, if forever, to actually get rid of glyphosate if you simply stopped eating it, like if you went to a strict organic diet. Even then, of course, it’s not guaranteed to be glyphosate-free.

A theoretical question is if somehow, you could stop eating glyphosate, would it eventually work its way out of your body naturally, or do you have to do something special to actually coax it out? Is it impossible to get it out? Maybe it’s just settled in the bone marrow, and it’s impossible to get it out. I don’t know the answer to that.

Dr. Pompa:
The damage that it causes to the natural cellular detox pathways is the problem. It comes in.

 Dr. Seneff:
I know.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s what we’re doing. Part of true cellular detox is upregulating these cellular pathways because of the toxic damage that’s been there. The answer is most people probably wouldn’t get rid of it even if you got rid of it in your diet without upregulating the cellular.

Dr. Seneff:
Right, especially once your detox system is already shot to hell, right, because then you can’t fix it. Very frustrating.

Dr. Pompa:
We’re talking about almost – we have to do the best we can to avoid it, obviously, eating 100% organic and grass-fed. I agree. That’s the way we live our life, too, Stephanie. I feel, today, people cannot afford not to do that in really upregulating the cellular pathways. We have some new products that are coming out that are really trying to combat it from another side of detoxification. We are up against something so much bigger than you and I, and we’re just small voices in this. You’re a large voice, so we applaud you and thank you for that.

Dr. Seneff:
Thank you for what you’re doing because I am not involved in the issue of how to fix the problem. I’m just studying what is the problem. It’s very, very important, the kind of work you guys are doing.

Dr. Pompa:
We appreciate it. We’re on opposite ends.

Dr. Seneff:
You’re in the cold, and I’m in the hot.

Dr. Pompa:
We’re still on opposite ends. Any questions for Stephanie?

Meredith:
Wow. I think you guys have covered so much. I think the most important message is to avoid GMOs and glyphosate as much as possible. Education is so, so important, and so many people just don’t know. It’s really that simple. If you’re watching, please share this with your friends and family, anybody you care about. Get educated. Get informed.

Thank you, Dr. Seneff, so much for what you’re doing on the research end. Thank you, Dr. Pompa, for what you’re doing to help people once they do experience the health challenges from these toxins in our environment.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

Meredith:
Thank you both so much for this amazing show, for this amazing information. Dr. Seneff, I’ll definitely send you that information. Once again, if you have questions, if you have responses, we want to hear from you. Send in feedback on the info form on Podcast.DrPompa.com. If you wanted to check out Dr. Pompa’s article on It’s Not Just Gluten, which references Dr. Seneff’s work, you can find that on DrPompa.com, as well. In the search engine, you can just type in gluten, and it’ll pop right up. Thank you so much again. Have a wonderful weekend, everyone. We’ll see you next week.