Genetically engineered crops, glyphosate and the deterioration of health in the US

Written by Nancy L. Swanson, Andre Leu, Jon Abrahamson, Bradley Wallet on March 24, 2015. Posted in Current News

A huge increase in the incidence and prevalence of chronic diseases has been reported in the United States (US) over the last 20 years. Similar increases have been seen globally. 

The herbicide glyphosate was introduced in 1974 and its use is accelerating with the advent of herbicide-tolerant genetically engineered (GE) crops. Evidence is mounting that glyphosate interferes with many metabolic processes in plants and animals and glyphosate residues have been detected in both.

Glyphosate disrupts the endocrine system and the balance of gut bacteria, it damages DNA and is a driver of mutations that lead to cancer. In the present study, US government databases were searched for GE crop data, glyphosate application data and disease epidemiological data. Correlation analyses were then performed on a total of 22 diseases in these time-series data sets. 

Conclusions

These data show very strong and highly significant correlations between the increasing use of glyphosate, GE crop growth and the increase in a multitude of diseases. Many of the graphs show sudden increases in the rates of diseases in the mid-1990s that coincide with the commercial production of GE crops.

The large increase in glyphosate use in the US is mostly due to the increase in glyphosate-resistant GE crops. The probabilities in the graphs and tables show that it is highly unlikely that the correlations are a coincidence.

The strength of the correlations shows that there is a very strong probability that they are linked somehow. The number of graphs with similar data trends also indicates a strong probability that there is a link.

Although correlation does not necessarily mean causation, when correlation coefficients of over 0.95 (with p-value significance levels less than 0.00001) are calculated for a list of diseases that can be directly linked to glyphosate, via its known biological effects, it would be imprudent not to consider causation as a plausible explanation. We do not imply that all of these diseases have a single cause as there are many toxic substances and pathogens that can contribute to chronic disease.

However, no toxic substance has increased in ubiquity in the last 20 years as glyphosate has. The disruption by glyphosate of the detoxification pathways in the human body can intensify the effect of other toxic chemicals. The disruption of the Cytochrome P450 pathways by glyphosate could account for it causing numerous diseases (Samsel & Seneff, 2013a).

The Cytochrome P450 enzymes are the superfamily of enzymes that are responsible for around 75{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the reactions involved in drug metabolism and the oxidation of organic molecules (Guengerich, 2008). Another critical issue is that glyphosate is an endocrine disruptor and it has been argued that there are no safe levels of endocrine disruptors (Vandenberg et al., 2012; Bergman et al., 2013).

This would imply that the current permitted residue levels in food could be causing multiple Swanson, Leu, Abrahamson & Wallet Journal of Organic Systems, 9(2), 2014 ISSN 1177-4258 33 health problems that have been documented in the scientific literature to be caused by endocrine disrupting chemicals.

Trackback from your site.