One of our readers posted a question in response to our recent blog on wheat: “What are your thoughts on the use of glyphosate in GMO varieties?” The question about glyphosate and GMO varieties in relation to wheat comes about from a scientific paper titled “Glyphosate, pathways to modern diseases II: celiac sprue and gluten intolerance,” published in 2013 by independent scientist and former chemical engineer Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Seneff, a research scientist in the computer science laboratory at MIT.
Here’s the connection: Glyphosate, otherwise known as Roundup, is an herbicide that is used in growing a large number of crops, including wheat. As an herbicide, it kills plants – in fact, you might have used it yourself to kill weeds in your lawn or yard. Its manufacturer, Monsanto, sells it in association with crops that they have genetically engineered to be resistant to Roundup. These GMO crops include wheat; among its other uses, Roundup is frequently sprayed on wheat shortly before it is harvested to help dry it out and eliminate weeds.
Wheat, of course, is at the heart of gluten sensitivity, and is the first grain that must be avoided by people with celiac disease. Samsel and Seneff noticed that diagnoses of celiac disease and gluten intolerance have risen sharply over the last 10 years, along with a number of other diseases, including autism, some cancers, dementia, depression, Parkinson and others (in fact, they published a previous quite controversial paper discussing these other diseases and their connection to glyphosate, which received a lot of criticism and discussion on the internet and elsewhere). In their more recent paper, they hypothesized that Roundup use on wheat might be causing celiac and gluten intolerance through effects on normal intestinal bacteria and on detoxifying enzymes in the body. The paper they published is a review article examining studies that indicate possible effects of Roundup on normal bacteria, on these enzymes, and on agricultural workers, who are, unfortunately, sometimes exposed to excessively high quantities of herbicides and pesticides. A review article is one that summarizes and puts into context a large number of studies done by many different scientists. It’s not a specific experiment that examines what happens to an organism when it’s exposed to a particular substance. Review articles have an important role in the scientific process, though, in presenting hypotheses and evaluating bodies of literature.
While there have been some criticisms of some of the papers that Samsel and Seneff cite, that’s actually pretty typical in science. There are concerns, for instance, when studies use higher concentrations than one would normally find in nature to study the effect of some chemical. But studies of high concentrations of drugs – and phytochemicals – are routinely used in medicine to investigate mechanisms of how drugs work. So that’s not all bad. But we do have other concerns about the paper. For one thing, when you assess this paper, along with the earlier paper that Samsel and Seneff published, it looks like they are attempting to pin an awful lot of diseases on a single chemical. Nature and the human body are pretty complicated, and most attempts to attribute too many things to one factor have ultimately not held up.
In addition, there are a number of other conditions that have become more common in the last few years, ranging from food allergies to colony collapse disorder in bees. Surely we can’t pin all of these on the use of Roundup?! At the same time as these diseases have been increasing, we have seen substantial increases in environmental influences – for example, increasing levels of air pollution and light pollution – and lifestyle factors, both of which impact our health. The latter include excessive sugar consumption, the use of computers – which can disrupt our circadian rhythms by exposing us to bright light when we use them late at night – and too much sitting. In fact, a study published just last week suggested that too much sitting can result in levels of inactivity that can have a significantly negative impact on our health. And this holds true even for those of us who exercise!So, in this context, it seems rather questionable to single out one factor as the cause for the increase in a myriad of diseases.
We’re also concerned by what happened when we looked this paper up in PubMed, the premier database of scientific articles on health. We frequently use PubMed to locate articles about diet, exercise, supplements and cancer. Think of it as Google for the medical publication world. Because we weren’t sure where we might locate information on glyphosate and gluten, we simply entered “glyphosate” and “gluten.” This paper came up. This was, actually, the only paper that came up. Which is quite unexpected. For most subjects that have a real research base behind them, many, many papers come up. Gluten is a really hot topic in the nutrition arena right now, and with almost any other search using “gluten,” a great number of papers come up. If the relationship between Roundup and gluten was really strongly established, we would expect to see more than one lone paper on it. Now, it’s fair to say that there are a lot of agricultural scientists who would not be inclined to publish articles critical of a Monsanto product. But, on the other hand, there are a lot of nutritionists – with the supporting science in-hand – who would like nothing better than to do just that! And yet, more than a year after the publication of this paper, they haven’t published anything.
So what can we make of the question of whether Roundup is affecting GMO wheat, and thus causing celiac and gluten intolerance? In our opinion it is, at this point, just a hypothesis. It’s perfectly reasonable for Samsel and Seneff to form a hypothesis based on observations of the correlation of two different variables, like Roundup use and human diseases. And it’s then appropriate to write up a scientific article and explain why they think there is something to it. But it’s important to remember that the publication of the paper in and of itself does not mean that the hypothesis is correct. Roundup might very well play a significant role in the increase in the diseases Samsel and Seneff identify in their papers. Or, it might play no role at all. It may also be that its significance is somewhere in between! Based on the data we have available today, we just don’t know. Hopefully someone will soon investigate this hypothesis with some critical experiments that can shed light on the subject.
In the meantime, what should you do as a potential consumer of GMO products? As far as we’re concerned, there are a number of reasons to avoid GMO products and crops grown with Roundup. Some of these are health-related, and some of them are related to our environment. For instance, it looks like Roundup is destroying the milkweed species that the iconic monarch butterfly depends on for its legendary migrations between the Midwest and Mexico. Do we really want to stamp out such an amazing phenomenon in our natural world?
Regarding the potential health implications, our recommendation has always been to use organically grown foods whenever possible. By doing so, you can significantly cut your use of GMO products and their questionable health consequences. There are a number of reliable internet resources on how to avoid GMOs, and they include recommendations for brands that can help you do this. Also, most of the major national brands that are prominent in health food stores and the natural foods movement seem to be free of GMOs. The good news is, if you try to be organic as much as possible, you’ll be doing a good thing not only for your health, but you’ll be doing our planet a favor as well!