Our Health is Being Held Hostage by Big Corporations
How can we break away from the toxic vicious food/health cycle?
As horrifying as it is to admit, we are unknowingly being held hostage by the food we eat.
Multinational corporations use the excuse of feeding the world to spread genetically modified crops, cancer-causing chemicals, and nutrition-less food throughout the world. Chemical and industrial farming sells the beautifully worded ‘solution’ of ‘food security for all’, while robbing us from right under our noses of our health and food sovereignty— the ability to choose what we eat and how we eat it. What they’re selling as a ‘solution’ to a growing human population is not only detrimental to our health, but also directly impacting climate change.
Rise of glyphosate herbicide use coincide with rise of many diseases
Looking at the graph above, the dotted blue/green line shows that autism took off with the rise of glyphosate use (the active ingredient in Roundup® and now many other brands of herbicides) in the 1990s, shown by the red line, remarkably after 1996. The same upward trend can be observed for intestinal infection, coeliac disease, Alzheimer’s disease in women, Parkinson’s disease in men, thyroid cancer, and end-stage renal disease.
Glyphosate has been found to cause the dysfunction of tight junctions — protein complexes that latch our cells together and regulate what passes through — in the human body. We have tight junctions in our intestines, kidneys, liver, blood vessels, blood-brain barrier, and more. When our tight junctions are no longer tight, foreign particles and toxins that were once kept out now have a free pass in our bloodstream, wreaking havoc on our immune system.
How does glyphosate work?
Glyphosate is the active ingredient in a non-selective herbicide, which means it kills every plant it touches. Therefore, it has to be used hand-in-hand with genetically modified crops, mainly soybean, corn, canola, cotton, sugar beets, and alfalfa. It’s produced by Monsanto, which Bayer acquired in 2018. These crops have been genetically modified to tolerate glyphosate, so they will thrive while everything else that is sprayed in the same field will die. It’s every mono-crop farmer’s dream.
While a lot of these glyphosate-sprayed crops don’t get directly ingested by us, they become animal feed, processed junk foods, and clothes. Due to its widespread use since the 1990s, glyphosate can also now be found in soil, air, and bodies of water and/or rain in many parts of the world, including US, Europe, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Malaysia, New Zealand, India, etc.
Glyphosate kills plants by disrupting the plant’s ability to convert sugars into important building blocks of protein, or amino acids (namely phenylalanine, tryptophan, and tyrosine), which are essential in the plant’s growth. This important biological pathway, called the shikimate pathway, is also present in microorganisms, so applying glyphosate also kills many soil microbes. This pathway is also used by human gut bacteria, which play an important role in our immune system. We now know that we and the soil need healthy microbes to be healthy. In other words, glyphosate is killing plants and soil, and invariably, us.
Factory farming and factory healthcare
“[After the two world wars,] Tanks became tractors; nerve gas became chemotherapies and pesticides; explosives became fertilizers; and powerful antibiotics and antiseptics made an easy transition from war to peacetime use.”
Excerpt from Farmacology by Daphne Miller
Growing in lifeless, microbe-less soil, plants can no longer draw on their natural innate defenses against diseases and predators. On a farm that uses chemicals, weak crops enter a vicious cycle of dependency on insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, and chemical fertilisers, which causes further soil death. As for humans, without healthy gut microbiome, our natural immune defenses become stunted. Just like the weak crops, we enter a vicious cycle of dependency on medications for our symptoms, side effects, medications for the side effects, more side effects… and so on.
“If you took a biologically inclusive census of the people in this town, the maples would outnumber humans a hundred to one. In our Anishinaabe way, we count trees as people, “the standing people.” Even though the government only counts humans in our township, there’s no denying that we live in the nation of maples.”
Excerpt from Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
What would a census look like on a farm? Surely if the ‘weeds’ had a say, they would vote ‘no’ for herbicide use. Many so-called weeds are native, edible or medicinal plants. Agriculture is ‘participatory ecology’, according to Vermont regenerative farmer Keith Morris. When we, human beings, can understand that every plant — ‘weeds’ and all — is a valuable life, playing their important role in the ecosystem, we just might stop subscribing to the use of chemicals in growing our food. A farm is an interconnected web of relationships between roots and fungi, microbes and plants, insects, animals, water, and air. The farmer is a steward that makes sure everyone — earthworms, bacteria, mycelia, birds, and lettuce — are all doing just fine.
It’s time we take back control of our health and food sovereignty.
Chemical-free foods shouldn’t be a luxury. Organic shouldn’t be a separate aisle for the rich. We all need to learn more about our gut microbiome, what we can eat to support their health and ours, explore holistic ways of healthcare. We can also support local chemical-free growers, learn to grow food (even if it’s basil on your kitchen counter or tomatoes on your balcony!), and let others know about the effects of chemical farming. We can resist by writing to local government representatives, campaigning and organising against large corporations that control our food systems, starting a local community regenerative farm/garden, educating ourselves on indigenous and regenerative ways of growing, and more.
A few studies on beneficial microbes:
Harmless soil-dwelling bacteria successfully kill cancer
The role of gut microbiota in cancer treatment: friend or foe?
A few sources on glyphosate’s negative impact on human health:
How The Weedkiller Glyphosate Affects Your Body And How To Avoid It
Glyphosate, pathways to modern diseases II: Celiac sprue and gluten intolerance
New study shows that commonly used herbicide crosses blood-brain barrier
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