6/23/16 Interview with Dr. Stephanie Seneff

stephanie seneff, phd, glyphosates trojan horse proteins, her latest research, june 23, 2016

Patrick: Dr. Seneff was telling me about some new and very curious research with glyphosate, and it involves proteins. Why do proteins even matter; is that something that’s a big deal?

Stephanie: Absolutely. For those who know biology, they should know that the DNA code, the triple code that comes from the four letters of DNA, each triple sequence codes for a specific amino acid, and there’s about 20 of these essential coding amino acids. Glycine is one of them. So you assemble a protein this way, from the code. This is genetics. It dictates how your proteins are made. And each protein folds in to some very special ways, such that it creates an active side and acts as an enzyme, or some of them are ion channels, or they’re signaling molecules responding to signals coming into the cell. The proteins are very exciting, really the workhorses of biology. They don’t have to have their proteins sequenced perfect always, sometimes they can have mistakes. In fact, protein coding is an errable process, which is something I didn’t realize until recently, that when you take that code and you turn it into a protein, you don’t necessarily get it exactly right. Mistakes can be made, where it sees another molecules lying around that looks a lot like the one it’s looking for, and it mistakes it and puts it in. And the mechanism is such that if that happens, and if in doing so the protein doesn’t fold correctly or doesn’t work correctly, the system knows how to recognize that it’s defective and mark it to say hey, you got to just clear this, get rid of this and make it again, because it didn’t work. That’s the way the mechanism works, which is really fascinating.

Patrick: So let’s hold up a second. Let’s see if we can understand this. Talk to us like we’re golden retrievers. Let’s go over this again of how this DNA and coding actually works. So you guys have figured this out? You can actually see how it works?

Stephanie: Yeah, well there’s a lot written on the whole process by which the DNA is used, the RNA actually. The DNA gets converted to RNA and then the RNA is similar to DNA and also still has the code. And it’s from the RNA signal that the proteins are assembled according to the code. Sort of like a computer code, really. You look up GCC and you say, oh that’s glycine, you go grab a glycine and put it in. It’s really beautiful how that works. It’s a miracle of biology.

Patrick: At some stage, it is information, as we talk a lot about. It’s just information, and it’s actually coded and it can actually go back to math at some point.

Stephanie: Yeah, it’s really very, very fascinating. It’s a great system.

Patrick: How this intelligence, whatever it is, God or universe or who knows. it created this at some point, didn’t it? It programmed it.

Stephanie: It was quite a design. But anyway, it doesn’t always get the right answer when it’s doing it.

Patrick: Why doesn’t it get the right answer?

Stephanie: Sometimes, for example, it can just grab glycine when it’s looking for alanine. Glycine can be toxic if there’s too much of it, for that reason, because it will substitute for alanine. And it could also mess up on methionine and homocysteine. It can make mistakes, along with calling amino acids, it can also grab an amino acid that is oxidized, that’s sort of defective in some way, or that’s had something attached to it. In fact, I read that 2,4-D, which is another herbicide besides glyphosate, (glyphosate is the one you mentioned in the introduction, and I’m obsessed with glyphosate), but 2,4-D apparently attaches itself to the branched chain amino acids, which is a subgroup of the amino acids. It attaches to them and turns them into something different. But glyphosate is a glycine molecule underneath it. Glyphosate completely contains a glycine molecule. And then it has this extra thing attached to the nitrogen of the glycine molecule. So if the machinery is careless, it could grab the glyphosate instead of glycine and put it in. And if it does so, it has devastating consequences. So this is what Anthony [Samsel] suggested to me last December. We’ve been studying glyphosate for several years now, together. And I’ve read everything I can find on the subject. And I’m linking it to all these diseases that we’re getting. And I have a whole list of diseases that are going up dramatically in step with the increased use of glyphosate that I couldn’t explain before. I couldn’t find the mechanism. There are things I found about glyphosate’s toxicity in terms of disrupting the gut microbes, disrupting the cytochome P450 enzymes in the liver, chelating minerals, these are all things glyphosate does that are disruptive. But they pale by comparison to this new idea of substituting for glycine during protein synthesis. It is absolutely huge if we are right. We haven’t proven it, but we have enormous amounts of circumstantial evidence.

Patrick: Circumstantial evidence. You scientists. So let’s see. So what you do is you make a connection between glycine, which is one of the essential amino acids.

Stephanie: It’s actually not essential in the sense that it can be made from other things, but it’s one of the coding amino acids. There’s about 20 to 22 of them. There’s a couple obscure ones, but there are 20 main ones, coding amino acids. And glycine is one of them. That makes them very, very important, because they’re in that DNA code.

Patrick: So they’re coding, and what is their job?

Stephanie: They have many jobs, actually. Glycine is a precursor to some important molecules like heme in hemoglobin. And glycine is also a supplier of methyl groups, which are really important in protein methylation and also DNA methylation to control the expression of the DNA. And glycine is a neurotransmitter. So it has all of these roles, and I have written about how glyphosate would disrupt these roles by virtue of being similar to glycine. But this most important role of glycine is it’s role in these proteins. And in fact, there are particular proteins, this is a set of proteins where glycine always shows up at a certain position. So if you look at one protein, say the insulin receptor, and you look at it across multiple species, or across multiple humans, and you see that everybody always has glycine at that particular spot, that says that that glycine plays a really important role. You can’t replace that with something else and the protein still works. So there’s lots of literature out there about specific proteins that specifically depend on glycine at certain spots. For example, there’s myosin, a muscle protein, really important in muscles. It’s what controls most of movement. And that protein absolutely has to have glycine in position 699, 699 amino acids in a row and the one at 699 has to be glycine. If it’s replaced by alanine, which is a very small change, alanine has an extra methyl group. If glycine is replaced by alanine at 699, in this protein, it only has 1% of its ability to move as it did before. Huge, huge destruction of that protein’s ability to do it’s job.

Patrick: And that protein’s ability to do it’s job is involved with many, many things in the body that are key to this internal programming, right?

Stephanie: Yeah. So in the case of that specific protein, myosin, your muscles won’t be able to move and you’ll have chronic fatigue syndrome. So I think that’s the cause of chronic fatigue syndrome, which only has appeared since glyphosate has introduced into the food chain.

Patrick: So chronic fatigue syndrome could actually be a symptom of this protein disruption in just one glycine?

Stephanie: One protein, one glycine at one position, 699, could do that.

Patrick: You’re kidding me. That’s just crazy.

Stephanie: That’s what I think, yes. It’s really exciting, because we’re finding all these diseases, there’s a huge list of diseases that are going up dramatically, new diseases like that one, it’s also called fibromyalgia. But you didn’t hear of this when I was a kid. It didn’t exist. And then things like diabetes, which existed before, but has become an epidemic. Diabetes is easy to explain, because the insulin receptor again absolutely depends upon glycine, and if it doesn’t have this particular glycine, it won’t go to the membrane. It gets stuck, and if it doesn’t go to the membrane, it can’t work to receive insulin, which means that you’ve got type 2 diabetes. That’s the definition of type 2 diabetes.

Patrick: But you’re arguing that this could happen, Dr. Seneff, with introduction of one substance like a glyphosate from the GMOs and Roundup that confuses the well-meaning DNA to think it’s what it is but it’s kind of like a Trojan horse, it gets in there…

Stephanie: Exactly. That’s a very good word, Trojan horse.

Patrick: and it could cause all…, just with this one element.

Stephanie: Yes. It’s remarkable the repercussions of this. I explain, Anthony and I have a new paper that’s about to appear, it’s a long paper. I pored over the literature, I was in Hawaii in December-January, and I just immersed myself in the research literature on glycine in proteins. And it was just astonishing what I found. Because I could say, oh yes, okay, that’s why it causes diabetes. Oh yes, that’s why it causes obesity. And then I just spaced and ticked them off one by one. It was so easy, it was amazing how easily it worked. And on top of that, even the mechanism by which glyphosate kills plants, according to Monsanto, is to disruption of the specific enzyme in the pathway called the shikamate pathway. And I may have talked about this before on this show, that the shikamate pathway is the pathway that glyphosate disrupts and it produces a defect so the plants can’t make enough of these aromatic amino acids. Those are also coding essential amino acids. So the plant becomes deficient in these aromatic amino acids and that’s what kills the plants. That’s the story that’s told regarding how glyphosate is toxic to the plants that it kills. Because it kills basically all plants except for those that have been engineered to be resistant by giving them a special bacterial gene in the GMO concept.

Patrick: So scientists 30-40-50 years ago, they dug into this code and doing the kind of work that you’re unwinding, they came up with the idea how to disrupt something in the plant or weeds or whatever their goal is and that same disruption is happening in the human body?

Stephanie: Yeah, and I think it’s interesting because this enzyme, which is EPSP synthase, which is the particular enzyme that it disrupts, that guy has an absolutely essential glycine-added active side. And if you replace that glycine with glyphosate, you completely explain why glyphosate would disrupt the enzyme. They know that it disrupts the enzyme by messing up the ability of the substrate to fit inside that active side. So it’s a perfect explanation. And in fact e. coli cleverly developed a strategy to resist glyphosate by replacing that glycine in that molecule with another amino acid, alanine. So it’s a slightly changed form of the enzyme, alanine instead of glycine, and that makes the enzyme not work as well as the one that has glycine there. It disrupts its function somewhat. But, it makes it completely resistant to glyphosate damage, so that really suggests that the way it’s happening is by glyphosate substituting for the glycine in that protein. That’s exactly how it is disrupting the plant. So that’s just further support that we’re right about this. Once you make the assumption that this is happening, all the pieces of the puzzle fall into place.

Patrick: Wow. Do you think someday you could have enough people that understood this scientist like that and explain to some other scientists that would be open and they would say, wait a minute, we can’t put this stuff on the plants. That’s your hope, I guess?

Stephanie: I think we have to take it off the world. This molecule is so toxic, and Americans are enamored of it. We consume 25% of the world’s glyphosate with 5% of the world’s population. So we’re getting poisoned every day, all of us. You can’t avoid it. It’s in the water, it’s in the air, it’s in the rain, it’s in a lot of the food. Even in organic food, and it’s been tested and found in organic food, even though they can’t use it, but they can’t avoid it, if they just put water on that plant, they’re going to end up with glyphosate.

Patrick: I wonder if that’s true, that we’re all getting exposed to it, why there’s so many people that don’t get affected by it.

Stephanie: Actually I think everybody gets affected by it, they just don’t realize it. Because people have all kinds of issues with their health, and really almost everything that is dramatically going up right now is doing so because of glyphosate. I’ll go out on a limb and say that. I think it is by far the most toxic chemical in our environment, in particular, because it’s so prevalent. There are other things that are very toxic, but we know that, and we restrict them. But we don’t restrict glyphosate. People can go down to the hardware store, a pregnant woman can go down and buy some Roundup and she herself could put it on the weeds in her yard and breathe that air and not know that she is creating an autistic child by doing that. It’s really scary.

Patrick: And then it rains, and then that gets into the water supply, and then I suspect that traditional water treatment facilities in Austin or Boston, they don’t get that out of the water and most people don’t filter the water.

Stephanie: Right, it’s hard to get it out. There’s only a few microbes that can metabolize it.

Patrick: What do you mean, metabolize it?

Stephanie: Break it down. There’s only a few microbes that can break it down. One of them is pseudomonas aeruginosa, which has become a huge problem as a pathogen in human health. In hospitals they have a huge problem with pseudomonas aeruginosa infection that they can’t cure because it’s resistant to every antibiotic they can throw at it. But pseudomonas breaks down glyphosate. So maybe it’s become an epidemic, because it’s playing an important role, actually a protective role in your body, by getting rid of your glyphosate. But you pay a price, because it’s going to cause disease.

Patrick: This organism, the body creates it or latches onto it because it thinks it can help?

Stephanie: Well it thrives because it’s not being killed by the glyphosate. It can just get rid of it.

Patrick: I’m sorry, I lost you there. Say that again.

Stephanie: So pseudomonas has resistance to the glyphosate because it can just get rid of it. It breaks it down and turns it into useful material actually, like it can get the phosphorus out of the glyphosate and use it to its advantage as phosphorous. So it’s able to just break the glyphosate down, and therefor it’s not as poisoned by it as other bugs are. So it ends up becoming more popular in your gut, because the other guys are dying by their exposure to glyphosate.

Patrick: That’s the way it figured out how to survive.

Stephanie: Yeah, it happens to have the skills that are needed to break down this particular bond in glyphosate. It’s the carbon-phosphorus bond in glyphosate, carbon and phosphorus together, that are very hard to break down, and most microbes don’t know how to do that. So they’re stuck with it. And they’re going to be poisoned by it. Only a few know how to do it.

Patrick: The more you just kind of visualize what’s going on as you explain so eloquently on DNA and the coding, you can almost liken it to like a deep programming in a computer or anything, and it’s just code, just like computer code, isn’t it?

Stephanie: Right, but it’s like there’s a bug in the code.

Patrick: It’s a bug in the code, right, so you have a virus in the code.

Stephanie: Exactly, it’s like a computer virus, it really is. That’s a good analogy. I like to mention, by the way, I know you really care about sulfur, and so do I, I think sulfur is crucial for health, and that we have a massive problem with sulfur deficiency in this country. And one of the proteins that I found that is disrupted by glyphosate, because it has an essential glycine, is sulfotransferase. That’s a protein that moves sulfate from one molecule to another. And that’s really, really important in biology. They have all different kinds of sulfur transferases, various versions of them that transport from various molecules to various other molecules. Very complex stuff in biology. But it’s really, really important to be able to do that, because, for example, cholesterol sulfate, which I’ve talked about probably before on the show, which is a molecule I really love, cholesterol sulfate is very, very important for your health, and it delivers sulfate to the cells. But in order to deliver it, you’ve got to take a sulfate off of the cholesterol and put it on something else. And that’s where the sulfotransferase would come it, it wouldn’t be able to do that.

Patrick: And why wouldn’t it be able to do it, because the glyphosate disrupts the natural sulfur cycle in our body?

Stephanie: Well glyphosate disrupts the sulfate in many ways, and I may have talked about some of these ways in the past. But one of the other ways, which I wasn’t aware of until I discovered this concept of glyphosate substituting for glycine, is by substituting for glycine in this enzyme sulfotransferase, which is a protein that essentially depends upon glycine to work. So just like the one I mentioned, the myosin, and just like the insulin receptor, sulfotransferase is another one of those proteins that absolutely depends on glycine. So if you simply put the glyphosate in place of the glycine in the sulfotransferase, you will not be able to get the sulfate form the cholesterol sulfate to some other molecule such as the heparin sulfate in the extracellular matrix of the cell. So the cell won’t be able to defend itself with sulfate if it can’t put the sulfate there. Very, very important for moving around the sulfate.

Patrick: I see. So the sulfate it important because it’s kind of a God thing to move things out of where they don’t need to be. Like you talk about turning mercury into mercury sulfate and all of this.

Stephanie: That’s it exactly. Sulfur is very important for detoxing certain very toxic chemicals. And mercury is a very good example of that.

Patrick: I wonder if we take it as we like to take it internally, do you think it could be helping this process that is getting disrupted to give it more, can we make that assertion?

Stephanie: That’s what I think. If those sulfotransferases aren’t working, that is a huge problem in your biology. It’s just another one of those proteins that would be affected if they got glyphosate stuck into the protein in place of glycine, that it wouldn’t work. It’s one of the proteins that would be very strongly affected by that.

Patrick: So sulfur is more of a mineral that is used to detox more than anything, is that correct?

Stephanie: Well detoxing is one of the things sulfur does. And of course glyphosate chelates sulfur, so it prevents the sulfur from going up into the plant. So the plants are deficient in sulfur because of glyphosate. And I’ve talked about that before. But that’s not the same as this action of substituting for glycine in the protein, which is another way that glyphosate will mess up sulfate. Sulfate is severely disturbed in today’s world. One of the things sulfate does is in the macrophages of the immune system, the sulfate is important for making the immune cells able to clear the microbes. So when you get an infection, if your immune cells can’t clear those microbes, you’re going to get a raging infection, get a cold, get the flu, or something worse. Your immune system depends on sulfate very critically in order to get it to work properly.

Patrick: So then your conjecture is that perhaps in the 50s or 40s and they start using – did they start using it that long ago? Well they did chemical fertilizers.

Stephanie: Glyphosate was first introduced in 1975.

Patrick: 1975 for glyphosate. That’s the disruption of the sulfur cycle we’ve talked about.

Stephanie: But it didn’t really become big until 1998 when they introduced the GMO Roundup Ready crops. That’s when they started really switching from other toxic herbicides to glyphosate, because they could get by with it. They could just spray it all over the crop and the crop wouldn’t die. They thought that was a tremendous solution. It got rid of things like 2,4-D and Dicamba that they thought were much more toxic than glyphosate.

Patrick: So that was the whole connection with, well if you use our Roundup, this is gonna kill more stuff, and you can use more Roundup, right?

Stephanie: They think it’s basically almost nontoxic to humans. That’s the message that’s been delivered by Monsanto. And the US government buys that message as well. This is where we are in trouble with glyphosate, because we perceive it as being nontoxic to humans, but that’s a lie. And so we’re being very careless in our use of it. We think it’s great that we’re just replacing all these other herbicides with glyphosate because we think it’s nontoxic to humans. But that’s not true.

Patrick: I just keep going back to that image that you painted so vividly at the beginning, how this glycine-mimic glyphosate can get into a certain out-of-position on one, I guess it does it on all the cells at once, they’re all doing the same thing?

Stephanie: It can do it randomly anywhere, that’s why you don’t know. And it also will accumulate. I think you’ll get more and more glyphosate in place of glycine in various proteins, because it actually makes it hard to break the protein down. And this is why you have things like amyloid beta plaque in Alzheimer’s Disease. Alzheimer’s is also like autism, going up dramatically in recent decades, exactly in step with the dramatic rise in use of glyphosate. There’s a very good match between the autism rates and the glyphosate usage in this country. And Alzheimer’s is associated with this amyloid beta plaque. And that plaque, amyloid beta, actually also has two highly conserved glycines, which have actually become recognized as the potential bad guys in that protein, the things that are causing the trouble. They’re identifying, they find a piece of the protein that is particularly bad in association with Alzheimer’s, is a piece that contains these two glycines. And they think these two glycines are the troublemakers. What they don’t realize is that it’s not the glycines, it’s the glyphosates that are substituting for them.

Patrick: They’re blaming the glycines, but it’s really the glyphosates that are make believing that they’re the glycine. And the body doesn’t know.

Stephanie: Exactly. It’s crazy to think that glycine would cause trouble, because the glycine has been there forever and didn’t cause trouble before. So why would it suddenly start causing trouble now. It doesn’t make any sense.

Patrick: Oh I see, yeah. We’ve had glycine in proteins, it’s an amino acid, forever.

Stephanie: Exactly. And it’s been exactly in that position in that molecule for many, many centuries, for probably millennia.

Patrick: Thousands of years, yeah.

Stephanie: And it didn’t cause trouble. But now, all of a sudden, it’s causing trouble. Well why is that? That’s because it’s not glycine, it’s glyphosate.

Patrick: Wow. It’s not nice to mess with mother nature.

Stephanie: No. And it’s actually really interesting, when I started studying this, I came to realize that there’s actually several other examples in nature of these fake amino acids. I have collected at least four other examples of toxins that are produced by organisms, plants or by fungi. Organisms produce toxins and those toxins are in fact amino acids. Just like glyphosate is an amino acid. But they’re not coding amino acids. They pretend, all of them are analogs for specific other amino acids, and there’s four different amino acids. So there’s a pairing, four pairs of noncoding amino acid coding amino acid, where the noncoding amino acid is a toxin that is produced by organisms as a defense against their own predators. And those toxins can produce ALS, multiple sclerosis, they can produce microcephaly, or they can produce a metabolic disorder where you just basically die of anorexia. You can’t eat, you basically die of starvation because your cells can’t metabolize food. Four different things, four different toxins associated with four different coding amino acids. It’s really amazing. It’s something that nature had already figured out. And so I think the chemists have also figured out that that’s a great way to do something toxic, is to produce something that is a fake amino acid. In fact, with glufosinate, glufosinate is another herbicide, people probably haven’t heard of it. It’s becoming more popular now by the way, because glyphosate is losing its effectiveness on the weeds. The weeds are becoming more and more more resistant to glyphosate, so they’ve had to use more and more on those GMO crops over time because of this problem of the weeds becoming resistant. And now they’re at a crisis point, where they realize they’ve got to put something else in there, they can’t just get by with glyphosate anymore. They have to add some other herbicide that has a different effect, such as glufosinate. Glufosinate is actually a natural compound that is actually produced in biology by some kinds of microbes. And glufosinate is a noncoding amino acid analogue of glutamate. So it’s exactly the same concept as the concept for glyphosate, except that it’s a naturally occurring molecule. It’s actually made by nature.

Patrick: What’s your first and where are you calling from?

John in Dallas: Dr. Seneff, I was wondering, as you were mentioning that the glyphosate can impair the sulfur metabolism, if that might that might explain why some people who try to take supplements like Patrick’s sulfur or sulfur containing foods like garlic and onion have sometimes adverse reactions and break out in sores?

Stephanie: Yes, yes, I’m well aware of that.

Patrick: Because it’s trying to get out?

Stephanie: I think the glyphosate is messing up their ability to use the sulfur correctly. That’s why sulfate is actually very tricky. There are many things that are very tricky, because there are many different molecules in biology or chemistry that are extremely valuable to living forms, but also at the same time toxic. Iron is a good example. Sulfate is actually very tricky to transport. And glyphosate messes up the ability to transport sulfate efficiently. So you can end up with a problem with too much free sulfate in the blood if you’re not careful. And so you can even develop sulfate reducing microbes that grow in your gut which produce hydrogen sulfide gas. If you’re eating things that contain sulfate, you can produce hydrogen sulfide gas. If you get too much of that, it can be toxic. So there’s ways in which your biology can get disrupted by glyphosate such that the sulfur is no longer something you can easily eat, and then you’re going to have a major, major problem with sulfur deficiency, because glyphosate has blocked the pathways by which the sulfur is utilized in the body.

Patrick: So if you got to that point, and we’ve had very few people, but every now and then somebody says man, I get break outs with the sulfur. Do you think they could do just a teeny, teeny bit and kind of work their way up?

Stephanie: I think they should go on an organic diet.

Patrick: Sure, that’s always first choice.

Stephanie: Go on an organic diet and then try again. Because it might totally solve their problem. And even take some probiotics to try to straighten out the gut microbes. Because they get really imbalanced in the presence of glyphosate. And they can cause the sensitivity to sulfur.

Patrick: You and others have talked about how there is drift and some organic foods are testing and they’re getting some glyphosate in. I would assume it’s not the same as really pure GMO food. Is that a good assumption or not?

Stephanie: Much less, much less. I strongly recommend going on a 100% organic diet. When I’m at home, we buy only organic food from the shop. We get the spices, the alcoholic beverages, everything is organic in this household. And we worry about it if we have to eat out too much. We get annoyed if we have dinner obligations that we can’t say no to. We start to get worried that we’re getting too much glyphosate exposure. We try to carefully order at the restaurant, but it’s impossible to avoid it. Because you know there are going to be foods that are highly contaminated, but you can’t avoid everything.

Patrick: Something else John?

John: If that’s the case and there are people that are sulfur sensitive to like garlic, onions, and foods high in sulfur, and glyphosate works by in part by substituting the glycine on the protein, then could you then use supplements that have glycine or other supplements that may improve the methyl detoxification pathways in the meantime, to try to clear out enough of the glyphosate to then allow the normal sulfur metabolism to return to normal?

Patrick: Good question.

Stephanie: It is a good question. And in fact, I think taking glycine could be recommended. Because if you have more glycine, the acids making the protein are more likely to pick up glycine. If you are glycine deficient and you also have lots of glyphosate, you’re going to greatly increase the chances of putting glyphosate into the proteins by mistake. However, free glycine itself can be toxic. So you have to be careful. Because glycine itself can substitute for alanine by mistake during protein synthesis. And that’s actually it’s mechanism of toxicity. It’s the same kind of effect as happens with glyphosate, but it’s substituting for another coding amino acid.

Patrick: It’s just like anything John, with all these things, there’s a double-edged sword to them, right doc? Everything, everything has got to be balanced in the body. Because if you get too much of anything, on the other end, it’s not good.

Stephanie: And I recommend, with respect to minerals, you have mineral deficiencies, many, many mineral deficiencies as a consequence of glyphosate. Because it chelates, it’s a very strong metal chelator, especially for manganese and cobalt. It’ll make those guys disappear. Manganese deficiency is I think strongly linked to autism, and I think the connection is through glyphosate. But you shouldn’t take mineral supplements, in my opinion. I think if you switch from regular table salt, sodium chloride, to Mediterranean sea salt, that’s a good thing to do, because you’ll get the balance of all the different minerals in the salt. And you can also make bone broth and you’ll get the minerals out of the bone in a natural balance. I believe in using natural ingredients, eating foods rich in minerals, such as oysters or organic eggs. This is a way to boost up your mineral supply while doing everything balanced. Because if you just take any particular mineral, you may cause some other mineral to become more deficient because they compete with each other on common pathways.

Patrick: So you know that idea, John, if you take calcium, then you push on the magnesium. If you take too much of this one, you push on another, zinc and copper, copper and manganese, there’s a lot of competitors. How you would balance that, sitting at home, I don’t know. That’s why you’ve got to be careful with those. If we can get the foods when they’ve got the most, that’s the best shot, right doc?

Stephanie: Absolutely. Eat the foods that are rich in minerals, and eat the highest quality versions of those foods that you can find. It is worth it to spend extra money on food. You’ll get that money back in the health care costs that you don’t accrue, because you don’t get sick.

John: One more question if I may. Basically there’s lots of research that shows that glyphosate basically has been tolerated by the pathogenic bacteria and strains of microorganisms like salmonella and clostridium and such. Is it possible the glyphosate is related to this increase we see in flesh-eating bacteria that are popping up more and more frequently?

Stephanie: I bet you’re right. I can’t say yes, because I haven’t researched that, but you’ve given me a tip, and that’s one of the things I’ll add to my to-do list, because I bet you’re right. I think it’s causing the fungus infections. It’s causing fungus infections, not just in us, but in a lot of different species. It’s causing species extinctions due to fungus infections. It definitely drives the overgrowth of fungus. And I think that’s because the cells become deficient in their ability to clear their own garbage. This is a huge problem that we have. This is almost the definition of aging, that you develop at the cellular level cellular debris that you can’t clear. Stuff called lipofuscin for example. And if your cell gets so loaded up with garbage that it can’t work anymore, it just dies. And the yeast can come in, and they actually come in when something’s dead, but you’ve basically got a bunch of dead tissue in your body. And those yeast come in to eat that. They feast on that dead tissue. So that’s how you can get the fungus infection, I think.

Patrick: So that’s what the whole sulfation cycle disruption comes in as well. Not being able to get rid of the stuff.

Stephanie: Right, because sulfate is actually essential for clearing the garbage. That’s something people don’t realize. The lysosomes in the body, in the cells, are the organelles that clear the garbage. And they depend on the highly acidic environment. And they get that acidic environment through sulfuric acid, through sulfate.

John: People have a hard time getting rid of candida, it’s because there’s so much glyphosate in the environment that no matter what they do to kill it off, there’s more glyphosate to contribute to the proliferation of the candida in the body.

Stephanie: That’s right. That’s exactly right, thank you. You obviously have a lot of knowledge.

Patrick: He studies this. How does it get in the air, the glyphosate? You had mentioned the air. Just transferance?

Stephanie: They spray it.

Patrick: But it could also be transferance with rain and humidity and how the clouds fill up too, right?

Stephanie: That’s true. It comes in the rain. But they spray it from the air, to deliver it to the crop. And if it’s windy, the organic farm next door is going to get exposure.

Patrick: Has Dr. Seneff ever heard of a product called Restore that claims to heal the gut from glyphosate?

Stephanie: Interesting. Interesting that you should bring that up. Yes, I talked at length with the person that’s been promoting Restore. Zak Bush I think his name is.

Patrick: Does it work, do you think?

Stephanie: He’s a nice guy. He gave a talk that I listened to, and he talked with me in private. We had a nice meeting. In fact he’s done experiments on glyphosate that are very interesting, where he’s shown that it causes the opening up of the tight junction in the gut, leading to leaky gut syndrome. And he’s shown that this Restore actually protects from that. So that’s very, very impressive to me. There’s a lot of marketing going on. I don’t like to promote products, but I think there may be something there. Also it’s coming from the soil, which is also very encouraging, because I know that fulvic acid and humic acid from the soil are known to be good treatments for glyphosate poisoning in cows. And so organic soil material seems to me like something very special that could help to detoxify. So I suspect there’s something to it.

Patrick: Good. Thanks for that. We’ll check it out and maybe we could put it in our store or something. I’ve heard about it, but I’ve never taken it. Is taking sulfur enough to offset the effects of Roundup Ready products, or what else can we do?

Stephanie: Certainly eating high sulfur containing foods. The only “supplement” I use regularly myself is Epsom Salt baths. I really like that as a way to get sulfate absorption through the skin, which bypasses all the complexities that can go on in the gut if you’ve got problems with sulfur reducing bacteria and things like that. You can bypass the gut by soaking in epsom salt baths. You get magnesium and sulfate directly through the skin. And that is a nice way to beef up your sulfate supplies. Speaking of products, my husband actually takes this combination of MSM and chondroitin sulfate and glucosamine sulfate. Those three together. If you ask me to recommend something, that one is probably on my short list of supplements that I would endorse. In terms of foods, of course garlic, I love garlic, onions, cruciferous vegetables, and sulfur containing meats. Eggs of course, eggs are very, very good source of sulfur. Seafood also, oysters and clams, crabs, all seafood is really healthy.

Patrick: Here’s an email from James in Connecticut. Why would someone have horrible detox reactions from epsom salt baths? For over 10 years. Also, what is the difference between the sulfate in epsom salt baths and the sulfur, which I’ve purchsed from Patrick, which I’ve also had reactions to.

So here’s a very sensitive being that is actually having both reactions to the internal, the sulfur, and also the external. So obviously there is something curious going on there. Is it the same reaction, he’s asking?

Stephanie: It might be severe, severe problem with endothelial nitric oxide synthase.

Patrick: What did you just say?

Stephanie: eNOS. Nitric oxide synthase. It’s a really, really interesting molecule that I have studied deeply. By the way, it is a protein. And it has a terminal glycine unit that it absolutely depends on to be able to hook onto the membrane. And so if you replace that glycine with glyphosate, that enzyme won’t work. It won’t go on the membrane and it won’t make sulfate. So in our papers, we’ve talked about this enzyme being able to moonlight. It makes both sulfate and nitrate. People know it as nitric oxide, it makes nitric oxide. There’s a pathological form of eNOS that makes superoxide. It’s supposed to be making sulfate, but it gets screws up, because it can’t hook onto the membrane. It’s very highly regulated. There’s some extremely complicated stuff that goes on to the side, to decide whether eNOS should be making sulfate or nitrate or nothing. Each individual molecule is making that decision. It makes that decision in part by where it hangs out. So if it’s stuck to the membrane, at the cavioli it can make sulfate. If it’s off the membrane, in the cytoplasm, it can make nitric oxide, which will oxidize eventually into nitrate. And sulfate and nitrate are opposing. They are on the scale of chaotrophs and cosmotrophs. One is a cosmotrope, one is a chaotrope. And cosmotropes made the blood more viscous, and chaotropes make it more fluid. And so the blood, all over the body the blood has to maintain exactly the right amount of viscosity. And it does so by switching eNOS back and forth between sulfate and nitrate. It’s a really cool system that can help to maintain the viscosity of the blood exactly right. Because the blood doesn’t want to be too thin, otherwise you can bleed to death. It doesn’t want to be too thick, because then it won’t flow. So it’s very important to get it exactly right. And so these eNOS molecules take care of that, but they get impaired if they’re messed up by glyphosate.

That doesn’t really explain the problem of sulfate absorption, because that’s not making sulfate, that’s supplying the sulfate already made. So it could be that the sulfotransferases are playing a role in that defect, because remember I mentioned sulfur transferases as also dependent on essential glycine. So if those are replaced with glyphosate, they won’t work. And you probably need them, you certainly need them to take that sulfate that’s coming through the skin and hooking it to something, like making cholesterol sulfate or Vitamin D sulfate or making heparin sulfate in the external glycocalyx. So if that sulfotransferase is impaired, then you could be in trouble with too much free sulfate in the blood that could be causing toxicity.

Patrick: So mercury sulfate too, which is key, right?

Stephanie: Right, mercury sulfate. Yeah.

Patrick: So that may explain the wide variance of people who take this organic sulfur we promote. Some people just go bonkers and have the-best-thing-they’ve-ever-had results, it’s like wow, wow, wow, wow, OMG, give me 10 pounds, I’m going to give it to my kids. We get a lot of that. Maybe it all has to do with the level of the glyphosate disruption thing they have going on, possibly.

Stephanie: Yeah, I think so. I’d love to be able to know conclusively. I’ve heard this also, from people who say no, I can’t take sulfur. And that really worries me when I hear that. They may have already switched over.

Patrick: Don’t you have to be able to have sulfur? Isn’t sulfur a key? How can you be allergic to it?

Stephanie: One possibility is that they are switching over from sulfate to phosphate. Glyphosate hyperstimulates the phosphate system so it creates a lot of phosphorylated molecules through its disruption of the kinases that are the enzymes that make the phosphate. They hook the phosphate to the molecules. So you get like excess phospholipids. We have something called anti-phospholipid syndrome, which is another one of these epidemics that’s occurring right now, where your body develops an immune reaction to phospholipids. And I suspect that’s also due to glyphosate. It’s over-phosphorylating all kinds of things. So it could be that there’s a metabolic switch that your body decides, we’re just going to use the phosphate in place of the sulfate for as much as possible the things that the sulfate normally does for us. I’m sort of fussing with this idea right now. It’s not attack bait.

Patrick: I have an inherited skin condition called steroidal sulfatase deficiency. Do you know anything about this enzyme in general? Or specifically in connection with glyphosate in the Roundup. I wonder if lanolin which contains cholesterol might help, since the study using pure cholesterol did help.

Stephanie: That’s quite a question. Well sulfatase is something that takes sulfate off, and if you have a sulfatase deficiency, you won’t be able to take apart cholesterol sulfatase into cholesterol and sulfate. And that will certainly be a problem, because I think the cholesterol sulfate is delivering both the cholesterol and the sulfate to the tissues. But it wants them to be separated so that they can go their separate ways. And so if you can’t detach the sulfate form the cholesterol, that’s a problem. That’s certainly going to cause disease. I’m not sure exactly what.

Patrick: Steve writes in. Do you think that a water filter could be developed or is there one that utilizes the microbe that metabolize glyphosates form the GMO foods?

Stephanie: That’s an interesting question. Contaminate the water with a microbe that actually metabolizes the glyphosate. That would probably be a good thing to do in a sewer system, to make sure that you’ve got microbes in there that can get rid of the glyphosate. I suspect that would be a good thing to do. It might be a little scary to put it into your water supply, because you could end up with a pseudomonas infection or something.

Patrick: Do we know of a filter or distillation that does get the glyphosates out of the water?

Stephanie: I think people are working on that. I unfortunately can’t tell you exactly what you could get, but I think people are working on that. It is hard to get it out.

Patrick: A friend of mine avoids eating all sulfur containing vegetables because she lived next to a sulfur plant when she was a young girl and got overloaded in her tissues. Now she has to give blood all the time because she has too much iron in her liver. Could the iron overdose be caused by a lack of sulfur in her body, which would sulfate the excess iron out of her body?

Man, we got some questions for you this morning.

Stephanie: I don’t know how to comment on that, but iron definitely is a problem with glyphosate. That’s one of the areas I’m studying. People have both anemia and iron overload at the same time, because it messes up the whole transport system for iron, just as it does for sulfur. And also for manganese. There’s several minerals that are both toxic and essential, ironically. And the body has come up with excellent mechanisms for dealing with their toxicities. But glyphosate disrupts those, so you end up with this contradiction, where you’re both overloaded and deficient at the same time with respect to iron.

Patrick: Dr. Stephanie Seneff, senior research scientist at MIT. She’s all over the glyphosate Roundup GMO thing and about to publish a new paper on the glycine connection getting into the DNA because the DNA could be just regular glycine and it could be a Trojan horse of glyphosate which really messes things up. And you’ve seen some curious graphs, and I’ve seen some of them, that the influx and increase in these things called chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, and Alzheimer’s are almost identical with the introduction of the GMOs. You can almost follow the pathway.