How Glyphosate Affects Human Biology and Gut Bacteria
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Dr. Seneff: Thank you. I'm delighted to be here.
Mike: Absolutely, so you really instrumental in helping us understand the toxicology of glyphosate and how it affects the human biology and the gut microbiome. Let’s talk about how you got into glyphosate and maybe start at what is going glyphosate and how does it affect humans.
00:18 Glyphosate on Crops
Dr. Seneff: Glyphosate is the active ingredient in the pervasive herbicide Roundup, which is used, people buy it at the hardware store and use it to kill the weeds in the yard and it's extensively used in agriculture, more and more every year. The amount and being used has gone up dramatically over the last 15 – 20 years in step with the dramatic increase in the number of crops that are engineered, genetically engineered, to be resistant to Roundup. What’s happening is that we’re getting a lot more exposure to Roundup in the food every year than we did the year before.
Mike: Why is it? It increases yield or it prevents waste. What does it do?
Dr. Seneff: It makes it very easy to grow crops. The ones that are engineered, the core ones are the corn, the soy, the canola, the sugar beets, the alfalfa; these are all crops that we go huge amounts of in the United States and Canada. The canola's in Canada and you can just take an airplane just spray the field with the glyphosate as it goes all over the crop and you don't care because the crop won’t die. That's what the GMO gene has done. It has protected the crop from being killed by glyphosate, but it doesn't protect it from soaking it up. It makes it much easier to control the weeds. Ordinarily, you would have to kind of pretreat the soil with the glyphosate before you plant and then wait long enough for the glyphosate to work its way out before you can even plant the seed. This is a much more difficult way to measure, because whenever weeds grow, the crops are growing and you're stuck with those, because you can't spray the weeds, unless you have to be very careful to just spray the weed and not affect the crop, much harder to control the weeds if you can't just spray everything and not worry about the crop.
02:05 Human Consumption of Glyphosate
Mike: Wow, that’s amazing. Let’s talk about the effect it has on humans when we consume it. Some of the blogs that I've read that are pro-glyphosate and written by many farmers that are in some way affiliated with companies that make this material. They say that the wheat is sprayed, but it's so little and it’s late in the harvest and it doesn’t really get into the human finished product. Is that true or not?
Dr. Seneff: We don’t know, actually because there's so little testing on. This is one thing that really shocks me, because it is a huge amount of Roundup is used in the United States. We consume 25% of the world’s market in this country. Here we’re getting more exposure than anywhere else, on average. The government thinks it's perfectly safe, because Monsanto claims that they proved it was safe 30 years ago. I have friends who are actually studying those reports that supposedly indicated that it was safe and they are finding that it's not true. Even from their own studies there's evidence of harm, particularly things like cancer. My friends are starting to find this out. They found ways to sort of make it look as if it was safe and then they were able to force that through the regulatory agencies. I personally believe that the companies produce this product know it's not safe, but they're so thrilled with the amount of money they’re making off of it, that they don't want that game to end. They're willing to just let people get sick for some reason, which I find very surprising.
03:35 History of Glyphosate
Mike: At what point in human history or agriculture did this become so pervasive. You said about 30 years ago they did some of these toxicology studies. When did it become a major problem?
Dr. Seneff: They introduced glyphosate for the first time in 1975. Before that there was none in the environment. Of course, DDT had just been phased out. That was a big huge bonus. We had a short period of time of glory really when we didn't have either DDT or glyphosate. My personal feeling is that glyphosate is much worse than DDT, and DDT, of course, has been shown to be very toxic. Glyphosate was introduced in 75 and then they didn't introduce their GMO Roundup Ready crops until 1996. They were using glyphosate, but much less during that period. Starting 96 and they started ramping up all these GMOs now we’ve got like 90% of all those crops, 90% of the crop is GMO Roundup Ready. The government has tracked how much glyphosate is being used on corn, and soy and wheat, so you can get those numbers off the web, which we've done. You can plot those trends and you can see they are going way up in a in step with a dramatic increase in a whole bunch of diseases that match very well…
Mike: With consumption of those foods.
04:50 Glyphosate/Disease Correlations
Dr. Seneff: The diseases match with the amount of glyphosate that is being used on the crops. It is a very general measure of how much glyphosate as it is being bought and used on the crops every year in the country and then how much is this disease going up, like diabetes, and autism, and ADHD, and Alzheimer's, and chronic fatigue. Well, I don’t know about chronic fatigue, but various gut problems, celiac disease, irritable bowel syndrome, kidney disease, kidney cancer, liver disease, all these things are all going up in frequency in the population in step with this increase in glyphosate. The numbers match very well.
Mike: Maybe for those that haven't seen your other videos, how did you stumble upon this correlation in this data?
05:38 Tracking Potential Causes of Autism
Dr. Seneff: That’s kind of an interesting story all by itself. I didn't really start studying autism. I was interested in autism because I was seeing that the rates are going up dramatically. Even back eight years ago, I was worried, because I could see that it looked like exponential growth. Exponential growth is a scary thing. I was frustrated that it looked like most the research dollars were going toward genetics, looking at genetic predisposition factors there might be increasing risk. They weren’t getting very far, finding all kind of genes that had all kinds of small effects, a very complicated situation. I was sure it must be something environmental, because genetics doesn't change that fast. Genetics is a slow thing. Why would you suddenly begin getting so many more? I was looking for something environmental. I started looking with the vaccines, because I had heard a lot of parent’s testimonies that their child was fine. They got this vaccine and they ran a high fever. They had seizures and they dropped down into autism. I was pretty convinced. I am still pretty convinced that the vaccines are playing a role. I looked into the vaccines and I found aluminum, and of course mercury, which is well-established. MMR has glutamate and I didn't recognize the glutamate is potentially toxic, until I figured out the glyphosate. The glyphosate was a major breakthrough and that only happened three years ago. For me personally, I went to a conference in Indianapolis where I heard Prof. Don Huber speak for two hours. He is a plant expert in plant pathology, retired professor from Purdue, a wonderful man and he has been, like me, going all around the world giving talks saying glyphosate is toxic and we’ve got to get this off market. I heard his two hour talk and he specifically talked about the gut microbes. I was already well aware that there was a gut micro problem in association with autism. I was looking for something that might be causing that. It was very perfect that he gave me the answer I was looking for in that lecture. That lecture changed my life. I went back home and immediately started reading everything I could about glyphosate. I dropped everything else I was doing and I hit pay dirt. It was incredible how all of these features like glyphosate does to biological systems and you look at what is characteristic of autism and they lineup in multiple ways. It is so perfect. On top of that you have a .997 correlation coefficient between these curves that show the increased rate of autism in first grade, according to the schools compensation program and the amount of glyphosate that was used the previous four years on the crops, so it is looking at the age of two to the age of six in the child's life, a perfect match.
08:21 Gut Microbes
Mike: Let’s talk about the gut microbes, but before we do, I have heard you say that one and 52 children at present now in 2015 have autism. You said I that by 2025, 1 in 2.
Dr. Seneff: I did say that by 2025. Even I would admit that I probably exaggerated, but I didn't exaggerate by much. I even still think it’s possible. If you simply do the straight math, and you look at the CDC's own data going back to 1975, and you draw that curve and you will see that is exponential. If we take a log you’ll get a straight line that's the characteristic of exponential growth. That makes it very easy to just extend that line to find out where it intersects. If you do that, you find 2032 is the magic number. 2032, 7 years later than what I said, if we stay the course, which I see no reason why we won’t, because that's what we are doing. We’re making things worse every year.
09:13 New Glyphosate Product
Dr. Seneff: This year we’re introducing a new Endless Duo for the crops, which is going to be both glyphosate and 2,4-D. They're recognizing that glyphosate, there are certain weeds that are coming that are so resistant, they just can't put enough glyphosate on there to kill them. This is a reason why the glyphosate is going up. Well, they’re saying, we’ve go to put another toxic chemical with that glyphosate to kill the weeds. 2,4-D is a component of agent orange. It's a regulated herbicide. It’s supposed to be much more toxic than glyphosate. These things are always synergistically toxic. They work together and they cause really strange additional damage beyond what in each one would've done individually. All these chemicals tend to have that effect. I can't imagine what's coming down the road with this combo showing up on our core crops. They've gotten approval, no problem, the government’s fine with that. They’ve got resistance to 2,4-D, resistance to glyphosate, in the same crop and then they had this Endless Duo, which has those two things in it to poison the weeds and contaminate the crops.
10:18 Testing/Studying Toxins
Mike: I’d love for you to expand upon, if you would, the synergism there, because we often see in toxicology studies these new to market compounds, are studied in isolation. They are never studied synergistically together. So maybe talk about, for folks aren’t familiar with that term in toxicology and that synergism and it's not just one plus one equals two. It's more like a…
Dr. Seneff: You are absolutely right. This is something that people miss. Of course, the industry is happy it studied in isolation. They even made it formal that the requirement. Glyphosate, way back when, when they said “Oh yes, this stuff is safe.” They studied it in isolation. What that means it wasn't even in the context of the products in which it’s used in. Even forget about 2,4-D. The glyphosate itself, they add all kinds of stuff to that to make up the formulation and they add those things to make it more toxic to the plants. Guess what, if it's more toxic the plants, it is going to be more toxic to us too. But they don't have to study that, because that is not part of the protocol, 1000 times more toxic is what a study showed when they looked at the active ingredient for various herbicides, the active ingredient versus that ingredient embedded in the product, where they have these additional chemicals that are that are intended to make the membranes of the cells permeable, so that the glyphosate can get in. When you have the glyphosate it alone, doesn't get into the cell. It doesn't cause problems. You add these chemicals, the glyphosate gets in, the cell dies, a thousand fold more toxic. It's just crazy to me that the government’s fine with that. You study it in isolation and it didn't cause any problems. The other trick they use is only three months. They set up the rule that you study the exposure to a rat for three months, and as long as you don't see any difference between that and the control group, then you could go. Seralini did a study. He studied rats over the entire lifespan. Three months things look pretty good. Four months start to see problems. Whole lifespan you get early death. You get mammary tumors. You get liver and kidney damage. You get reproductive problems. All these things show up after three months.
Mike: These compounds, are they surfactants? You said that they put in there.
Dr. Seneff: They are serfactants.
12:31 Oxalic Acid
Mike: We are trying to get the glyphosate into the plant cell wall, basically to puncture the cell wall. Plants have cell walls. We have cell membranes. Does that translate?
Dr. Seneff: It does. That's what happens is that they dissolve the fatty acids and they make it permeable. They're also adding other things. I've been rummaging through the web looking at Monsanto patents, which is a great way to figure out what's in those products. We've come across several going back to the late 1990s that oxalic acid being added to the product. They talk in these patents about if you add this oxalic acid, it makes it more toxic to the plants. It makes it a better weed killer. And then they introduce new product lines, and you don't know if that has that oxalic acid in it or not, because everything is under patent control. We don't know what's in those products, but we can guess that if they're talking about patents and the come out with this new product, maybe they've got the oxalic acid in there, especially when you start to see increased incidence of kidney stones and cysts. These are things that are connected to oxalic acid. People are having issues of with oxalic poisoning. What is crystallizing out is calcium. Oxalate and causing a lot of problems in the kidneys and the cysts in the ovaries, ovarian cysts. It can also crystallize out in the brain and it can cause pain. It can crystallize in the blood vessels. That stuff's dangerous. I think that it's also interesting when you look at the chemistry, that oxalate is a breakdown product of glyphosate. In between, you have glyoxylate. If you're adding oxalate, it's going to be a product inhibition of the pathway which is gonna cause the glyoxylate to pile up, which is going to cause the glyphosate to pile up, so by virtue of adding that oxalate, I suspect it's inhibiting the ability to break down the glyphosate, which is going to make it stick around liver and cause more liver damage. They glyoxylate is also toxic. That’s a very strong glycating agent so it is like causing sugar damage to the proteins, similar to what glucose does.
14:51 Preventing Glyphosate Exposure
Mike: So there's multiple, what we would say in medicine, it’s pleotropic. There's many ways that it can cause damage. Before talk about the biology, and I want to get into the gut and all that sort of stuff, I want to just zoom out and say the easiest preventative solution for parents and mothers and kids and everyone to try and be healthy, is to just avoid foods that are sprayed with glyphosate. I was introduced to a study by my friend Alex Vasquez that it is found in our air and water. It gets everywhere. Talk to us maybe about where we’re getting exposed and how we can prevent it.
Dr. Seneff: It's very difficult. You can't avoid the exposure at some level. Even organic food has tested positive for glyphosate. It is not because they're using it. It is just because it's in the water. It’s in the soil. It’s in the manure. They can't get it out. There was a study, I think in Kentucky that showed something like 84% of the water samples they got from the rain, even it’s in the rain. It is in the air. If you're going to live near near agricultural field or if your neighbor and you have gone down to the hardware store bought your Roundup and you’re spraying it. You could be breathing it as you're applying it to your weeds. People think it's harmless, so people are using it carelessly. Certainly, you could stop using Roundup on your lawn and tell your neighbors to do that too, if you can convince them. Buy strictly organic food. In my household, we're hundred percent organic. When we buy groceries, we never buy anything that’s not organic. That means we have to not eat certain things because we can’t find them organically, but it's not too bad, because we live near a Whole Foods and they have quite a few selections. They are getting more all the time. We are really excited about the increase in the demand for organic, and also with, therefore, a greater supply. More products are being offered organically every day, which is really terrific. That makes you appreciate that people are getting the message.
16:49 Consumers are the Answer
Mike: That’s great it’s a grassroots effort. Consumers are changing the marketplace.
Dr. Seneff: Consumers are the answer. The government is so contaminated, at this point, by the influence of money. I would say that they are not willing to budge. I think we are going to get results from the government. I don’t think we can wait for that. Every single consumer has the power. You vote with your pocketbook and that is so powerful. The farmers will rise to the occasion. When they find they don't have to expose themselves to toxic chemicals, and they can produce a product they can sell for more money, more and more farmers, I think, are gonna start to figure out how to get their fields organic and then they'll be happy with that change.
Mike: Absolutely. Let’s talk about change. We know when seatbelts were made mandatory car, manufacturers try to boycott that forever, but seatbelts saved tons of lives. We know that smoking, for example, we know DDT, all the industries that had a financial interest in making or distributing those compounds would say that they are necessary. They don't have all these ill affects and the logical next step would be to look at all the glyphosate, the toxicity and say “Well, that's harming children, leading to all these diseases.” Why isn't the government jumping in? Why isn’t the medical community jumping in?
18:03 Why Isn’t the Government Jumping In?
Dr. Seneff: I honestly wish I had the answer to that. It puzzles me. I just feel if I were the government, I’d be worried, because we've got a huge health crisis in this country. We are so burdened by the expense of healthcare. We spend way more on healthcare than the next nation per person. We are way out front on healthcare. It really amuses me when people say “Oh well, the US has been eating these GMO crops for years and look they’re fine.” I’m like, they are? What planet are you on?
18:32 Effects of Glyphosate
Dr. Seneff: We've got ADHD. It is not just the autism, allergies, all these different food allergies, eczema, even my grandchildren, some of them have eczema. Luckily, I don't have any of the other things. I don't have any food allergies in my family. I am very fortunate, no autism, but the eczema is there. That’s such a huge portion of the kids in the population have eczema these days, asthma. The kids are sick and obesity. I think the ADHD is really affecting their learning. People are being dumbed down. It is very scary. Humans are losing their abilities that these to have.
19:13 Eroding Bones
Dr. Seneff: You see all these old people too, who are so physically frail and their bones are being eroded. I think the bone issue is directly connected to the glyphosate, because it depletes manganese. You need manganese to make chondroitin sulfate, which is very essential for bone development. You get a lot of issues with the osteoporosis and osteomalacia. You get a lot of issues with the bones. The list goes on and on. I didn't answer your question. The government thinks it’s safe. They definitely think it's safe. Monsanto has convinced them apparently so thoroughly. They’re busy people they can't take the time to read everything and they're getting all this misinformation. In my opinion, it is misinformation from the companies that is assuring them that this product is absolutely there's no question is safe. They probably can't admit that if they are wrong all those years, they are going to have a very hard time explaining that. So they have to just keep on being wrong in order to protect themselves from the embarrassment of being wrong, in a way, perhaps. I don’t know. I'm making this up because we've been frustrated. So many people have tried to contact the British government, the US government, the Canadian government. I’ve got friends, politically active people who have just written tons of letters. Often they don't even get an acknowledgement. It's just amazing. They’re not interested and so we’re going to take the country down. We have our 50% autism goal in 2032. We’ll have a healthcare costs that are completely out of sight. Anybody who's well enough, is gonna be spending all their time taking care of the people who are sick. We won't have an economy. They won’t be able to do anything else other than do that. I think the country isn't really big trouble if we don't figure out how to fix this problem.
21:01 Obesity and Toxins
Mike: It’s absolutely scary stuff, if you look at the obesity prevalence. 7 out of 10 adults are overweight or obese. Look at children…
Dr. Seneff: Look at that alone, the obesity. It’s interesting that I've seen a populist paper that was written was proposing sugar was causing obesity and they had this plot and they went all back in 1900 and went up slowly. It hit 1975 and it made a corner and it was like this after 75. That's when glyphosate got introduced. I can see how glyphosate would cause obesity, obesity because it messes up the enzymes in the liver, which are essential for detoxifying other toxic chemicals. You have all of the sort of organic compounds that are toxic, that go from way back like the PCPs and the POPs, all these organic, benzene-based, all these chemicals that are very toxic. If you can’t break them down in the liver, you’ve got to store them somewhere. The trick is to get fat, because then you can dump all these chemicals into your fat tissues, and sequester them so that the rest of your body will be protected. If you don't get fat, if you are determined not to get fat, you’ll get sick, because those chemicals will become poisonous and they’ll get into your brain.
22:08 Obesity Paradox
Mike: There's this hypothesis, the Obesity Paradox. Individuals that are lean, may go in and get their coronary arteries scanned, or they have a fatal heart attack, they have a lot more risk, and so maybe those people are were storers of toxic burden.
Dr. Seneff: Yes. I think so. I think it’s genetics that is gonna dictate whether your body has the smarts to build all that fat tissue to store all those toxins. You think it’s bad that you’re fat, but actually it's good because it's protecting you. I have read a lot of papers about the Obesity Paradox. It’s very fascinating. There's a lot of evidence that these various diseases, even like diabetes and heart disease, that once you are diagnosed with it, the obese people do better, looking into the future than skinny people.
Mike: Interesting. People are listening and they’re kind of going “Well, how would that be?” The obese people are sequestering these toxins, so they are buffering the toxic burden.
Dr. Seneff: Yes, that’s right. They have a way to hide it so that is not impacting their body as much as the thin person who can't do that.
23:04 Manganese
Mike: Wow. Oh, my gosh. Let’s get into the biology a little bit. So we talked a bit about cytochrome P450 enzymes. That’s one mechanism. How does that slow it down? Is it the manganese?
Dr. Seneff: That relates to the manganese, but glyphosate is a fantastic metal chelator, and a particularly impacts manganese and cobalt. This has been shown in a study in cows in Denmark. They looked at 8 different dairy farms in Denmark and they found all the cows on all the farms had severe deficiency in cobalt and manganese. Those are the two. They look at all these different minerals and the manganese was just amazing. It was way below the minimum value that you would expect in the range, really depleted. I read that article and that's what inspired me to say “I’ve got to take a look at manganese” I didn't know much about manganese at that time because you don't hear much about manganese when you talk about nutrient nutritional deficiencies. Manganese is off the map. I didn't even know what it did in the body to be honest with you. Once I started reading, I was like “Oh my God” because it matched some things autism, including manganese is needed to detoxify glutamate. Excess glutamate in the brain is connected to autism and glutamate is neurotoxic. If you can't get rid of the glutamate, it is gonna cause damage to your neurons. Manganese is also essential for an enzyme in the mitochondria that protect them from the damage that they incur by virtue of doing their thing. If the manganese is not there, the mitochondria get broken and they are the energy source of the cells. They produce the energy. The cell’s gonna have no energy and then mitochondrial deficiency, mitochondrial damage is a very strong feature of autism, also of Alzheimer's disease. Then you have the manganese in the bones that I mentioned earlier, the chondroitin sulfate.
24:53 Chondroiten Sulfate
Dr. Seneff: Chondroiten sulfate is also essential in these perineuronal networks that are important for the brain structure. so you can see all kinds of ways in which the manganese deficiency would cause problems. It is also connected to the sperm, but as the sperm use a manganese -dependent enzyme to maintain their mobility. You can get sperm that can't swim very well, which is can impact fertility and we're seeing huge problems with infertility in the population today as well. It sort of fits all those things. It also fits damage to the sea life because we have sea stars in the Pacific Ocean that are really big trouble these days. They’ve got this weird kind of melting disease at they’re turning into goo. Their skeleton is really getting messed up. They depend on chondroiten sulfate to build to have that healthy skeleton. That is going to be that manganese deficiency problem. They are using glyphosate to control seagrass in the waterways along the coast. I suspect that that’s directly causing the sea star problem and potentially also causing the coral problem because the coral also depend on chondroiten sulfate for their structure.
26:09 Sequestering Minerals
Mike: Sequestering minerals is one of the inherent ways that glyphosate works. Manganese is one mineral. We know, for sample, magnesium is involved with 350 enzymatic reactions. Is it specific to manganese sequestering or is it manganese?
Dr. Seneff: That is an excellent question and I don't have a definite answer. I've been trying to find that out. I've been reading various articles about the plants, because you can really find out. There are some articles on plants that show reduction in the roots of a variety of different minerals. Manganese and cobalt are two of them. There's also iron and zinc. Calcium not as clear and magnesium not as clear too, but iron and zinc and manganese and probably selenium and sulfur are all depleted in the roots, even more so in the plant body. The plant is really depleted in these nutrients, which means when you eat that plant you're not getting a nutritional load. You’re getting a nutrition deficient food that's derived from that plant. We've got a huge problem and mineral deficiencies in our food that's exposed glyphosate. Then it further depletes the minerals in your gut and it deprives the lactobacillus of the manganese and the lactobacillus really needs manganese. It’s very interesting that they are unique in that they use manganese as a detoxifying element that other microbes don't.
27:32 Glyphosate is an Antimicrobial
Dr. Seneff: The lactobacillus is preferentially killed by the glyphosate. They are absolutely crucial microbe to get established in your gut when you're born. They're the ones that, lacto, that’s milk, right. Those usually would really flourish right after birth, and really get a foothold in your gut. Then they will keep the pathogens out, because of their presence. When the lactobacillus gets affected, the pathogens take over the gut and a particularly deadly pathogen that will take over is pseudomonas aeruginosa. They, quite uniquely can metabolize glyphosate. They can actually use glyphosate as a source of food for them. They are gonna really love that environment. We have an epidemic of infection with pseudomonas aeruginosa that you can't treat. You give them all kinds of different antibiotics they don't die. That's another issue. Papers have been coming out recently that, if you are exposed to a low-dose antibiotic over a long period of time, those pathogens in your gut actually develop a skill that allows them to very quickly to become resistant to other antibiotics. This has been shown. In fact, even glyphosate specifically is patented as antimicrobial agent. Another paper has shown that glyphosate itself, acting as a low-dose antibiotic, can cause certain microbes to become able to resist other antibiotics. That’s how we’re getting this kind of massive antibiotic-resistant problem that we face today in the hospitals. Pseudomonas is one of them. We have this MRSA problem and we have this C. difficile, c-diff. Lots of people are having lots of issues with C. diff these days in the hospital. I think these things are all due to glyphosate. It is part of the problem. We also have the antibodies that they're feeding the animals, which is also contributing to that problem.
Mike: Maybe since you touched on that, let’s expand upon it. We know that about 70% antibiotics are not even absorbed by the animals. They are excreted.
29:34 Confined Animal Feeding Operations
Dr. Seneff: Of course you know what that means. It’s getting into the manure, the antibiotics. Of course, that’s another issue. You have these CAFOs, confined animal feeding operations, with all these crowded cows growing in these in a very horrible conditions and their producing was manure and ordinarily the cows would be out on the grass and the manure would actually nourish the grass and provide fertilizer for it. The grass is very happy to have, but when you sort of have these CAFOs, you get this huge pile of this maneuver that is contaminated with these antibiotics that you’ve given them, plus the glyphosate. The microbes in the manure are not healthy. They can't actually deal with the manure appropriately in an organic environment. So that manure that gathers in these kinds of catchment basins, which becomes like a giant sewer, that becomes a very toxic environment to the people around it, and also a source of global warming, because you get improper breaking down of the nitrogen and carbon components and you end up releasing on a nitrous oxide, which is a very strong greenhouse, 300 times stronger than carbon dioxide. I'm suspecting that similar things are happening on the crops, that the nitrous oxide is being released or the nitrates are being washed into the waterways and nitrous oxide is being released from the waterways. I think nitrous oxide is a very serious greenhouse gas that we've overlooked and that agriculture is contributing significant amount of that nitrous oxide, significantly more because of the presence of the glyphosate, which would make me believe that glyphosate is a is a major contributor to global climate change.
31:11 Glyposate and Permeable Intestine
Mike: Yeah, we talked about that. It’s affecting the animals and it’s affecting humans. It affects our gut bacteria and minerals. Jeffrey Smith had talked about how glyphosate affects the gut barrier, the epithelium. These surfactants that help the material get into plants affects our tissues. Maybe talk this notion of intestinal probability, or leaky gut. How does glyphosate fit into that picture?
Dr. Seneff: That starts with the pathogens. It kills off the beneficial bacteria. This has been shown in chickens, for example, and also there have been studies on pigs that have shown inflamed gut when they were eating these GMO Roundup Ready crops. The pathogens bring in the immune systems. The immune cells come in and they start releasing all these oxidative agents that are trying to kill the pathogens and that’s also damaging. It is collateral damage to the tissues. There's also, I believe, is a serious sulfate deficiency problem that arises from glyphosate. That is a more complicated story, but I can see how glyphosate is, and I talk about that in my papers, it messes up sulfate synthesis. It messes up sulfate transport and it enhances sulfate loss through the urine. I believe sulfate deficiency systemically is behind many of these modern diseases. If the blood is deficient sulfate, it can't flow properly, but when the gut is deficient in sulfate then it becomes very leaky. You get all these issues of different undigested materials getting out into the blood, leaking out of the gut and, of course, the microbes can also escape the gut and you can get an infection. You can get things like sepsis and get some really serious problems because of your gut problems that are stemming back, tracing back to the glyphosate exposure to the microbes and the disruption of the sulfate supply.
Mike: To back up and kind of summarize, glyphosate depletes sulfate, which affects gut bacteria and gut permeability and then systemic health. Does it puncture the gut wall too?
Dr. Seneff: I don’t think it specifically punctures it, but I think that it causes, because of its disruption of the balance of the gut microbes, and the overgrowth of pathogens, that attracts the immune cells and the immune cells release these toxic chemicals that, in order to kill the microbes, but it also ends up damaging the tissues in the gut. The microbes also release toxins, which are going to have an effect. They are having a war. The toxins and the microbes they are releasing are also going to damage the gut.
33:41 Gut Brain Axis
Mike: That’s incredible. We know from gut bacterial diversity studies, Americans have generally, compared to Europeans and Africans, low bacterial diversity. It is not a robust ecosystem. Would you attribute that, our diet’s not very diverse. We are eating a lot of processed foods and not many tumors, but glyphosate just reducing bacterial diversity. Is that a fair…
Dr. Seneff: I definitely think that's what's going on. Also, of course, we don't at that many probiotics. We don't eat a lot of fermented foods. Almost every culture has various choices for fermented foods. We see things like sauerkraut and sour cream, I like actually, and yogurt, I guess is something that we eat, pickles. Those are the kinds of things that are often no longer alive because they’ve been totally killed. That's part of the issue. We are zapping our food with x-rays and microwaves. We are trying to make sure that there is not a single micro-left in it and that’s not good. We really want to be eating live food that has got microbes in it, because the microbes are really going to be important for replenishing, and keeping our diverse. That’s really going to be able to maintain the balance that you need to have a healthy gut. Once you don't have a healthy gut, you’re not going to have a healthy brain. There is really very interesting research going today about the connection between the gut and the brain, and how that microbes communicate to the brain, and influence the brain, and then you get into all kinds of brain issues, things like brain fog, when the microbes aren't happy. When you get leaky gut too, that also leads to leaky brain, leaky brain barrier. That’s the microbes communicating to the brain, really fascinating.
35:24 Glyphosate and Methylation
Mike: That is great stuff. Speaking of the brain, you talked about how there's this relationship between glyphosate, oxalate and folate, methylation. That is a hot topic right now with MTHFR SNPs and all that. Maybe kind of break that down a little bit for people who aren’t that familiar with that new understanding.
Dr. Seneff: Yeah and I'm still trying to figure it out myself. This is the lack of research right now. The folate turned out to be a very interest in topic. I've been aware that glyphosate, a folate is a product of the shikimate pathway that glyphosate disrupts, that they claim is a way it kills plants. The enzyme it disrupts depends on manganese. You can see how that would happen because of the manganese deficiency, but that's causing many other problems as well that they’re kind of overlooking. When they talk about the shikimate pathway, Monsanto likes to focus on that pathway because our cells don't have that pathway, and that's why Monsanto argues, and it’s a rather plausible argument, if you don't know much. That means that glyphosate doesn't hurt us. But the problem is that shikimate pathway is really important to us in its role that it plays in the microbes. Microbes are going to be damaged, if that pathways not working. But worse than that, that pathway produces products that we can't make. We can't make them because they don't have that pathway. Then those products made all kinds of amazing molecules that are incredibly important to us, all the neurotransmitters like serotonin, melatonin, thyroid hormone, melanin, the darkening agent your skin, NAD, which is really important in the liver, these things are all derived from that pathway and then also folate and vitamin K . The microbes are using that pathway to make our folate. And so, we are going to have a folate deficiency.
37:15 Folic Acid/Folate
Dr. Seneff: In fact, that can lead to things like spina bifida. They figured that out in 1996. They were saying spina bifida rates were going up our country, and then they had these meetings, and they worked out, and they decided too that folate was protective against spina bifida and so they decided that it was a good idea to start making it obligatory to put folic acid into the bread, into the flour based, wheat based products. They did that in 1998. They made it mandatory that you have to add this folic acid. Folic acid is different from folate, very different. It is a synthetic form. It is oxidized. The liver does have the capability of converting it into the form you need. The form you need is actually methyltetrahydrofolate. You’ve got to go a long ways to get to that from folic acid. Studies have shown that if the liver has to do this work of converting a lot of folic acid to folate, it will end up blocking the bile acids and causing fatty liver, because of this oxidation damage in the in the liver. Glyphosate also has been shown to block the bile acids, so they are going to work synergistically to cause harm. The folic acid, which is trying to fix the problem of the folate, the glyphosate is preventing you from having, is actually making the problem worse, in a sense it is supporting the toxic effect of the glyphosate in the liver. That's pretty bad. Then it gets even worse there, because if the liver can't convert all the folic acid to folate, than the folic acid gets into the blood. That's very abnormal, because it's already a synthetic thing. It is not a natural thing. The folic acid will cause the blood to become reduced in something called BH4 tetrahydrofolate. That's crucial for producing nitric oxide which relaxes the blood allows the blood to flow, so you will end up with an oxygen deficiency in the brain if you've got too much folic acid in the blood. That’s going to cause encephalopathy that's characteristic of autism. That's another whole way the folic acid, and in fact there was a paper I found that actually showed autism rates going up exactly in step with spina bifida going down, in connection with introducing folic acid into the diet. They were proposing in that paper that the folic acid was causal in autism and I think the right. It is another piece of the puzzle. That's all coming back to the fact that the glyphosate is wrecking the folate and therefore they are putting in this folic acid, in which they think is going to solve the problem, but is actually making the problem worse.
Mike: That’s amazing. I think our listeners are going to hit the rewind button a couple times to listen to that. Let’s back up here. Would the natural solution obviously be to get rid of glyphosate in the diet, but also take the activated, because there’s 5MTHF. Would this help to offset this effect?
Dr. Seneff: Yes, I would hope so. I always feel that supplements are a last choice. I really would much rather eating whole foods and eating organic and letting your microbes make the folate for you. That's the right answer. If you can, but I think if you have a major deficiency, it might be appropriate, and if so you would definitely, if you’re going to try to take a folate supplement, you definitely want to do that. You do not want to take the folic acid.
Mike: That's adding insult to injury. Just like we had talked about earlier when we started this synergistic effect where these toxins…so folic acid and glyphosate are not a good combination.
Dr. Seneff: They to work together to destroy the liver.
Mike: And then affect the brain.
Dr. Seneff: And then affect the brain, yes.
40:43 Bile Acids
Mike: And the bile acids, I think we’re seeing reemergence of bile…of how important they are for our physiology. There are bio receptors in our heart and our brain and all over. Wo we think they are just saponifying dietary fats, turning the fats we eat into soaps so we can absorb them, but they are doing so many beneficial effects.
Dr. Seneff: That’s true. They're actually really complicated and I don't have a complete handle on them yet, but I'm reading more and more every day about the bile acids. I think that’s actually a crucial part of glyphosate’s toxicity. Glyphosate disrupts the bile acids. That has been shown in studies in fish, that the bile ducts were blocked, and that makes sense because the CYP enzymes are being disrupted, and those are crucial for making the bile acids. It makes total sense. When the bile isn’t flowing, one of the things is that the manganese doesn't get distributed. That's one of the reasons why you’re getting problems of manganese. Manganese is going to end up staying in the liver and not going back, because usually it's exported through the bile acids, and then it eventually works its way into the blood. There is a district distribution system that needs to be working properly. The manganese becomes actually toxic in the liver, while it is deficient everywhere else. The liver has to unload that manganese some other way, so what it does is it just ships it up the vagus nerve to the brainstem and wherever else the vagus nerve goes. The manganese uniquely is able to travel along nerve fibers, which is really fascinating. I’ve have read some really interesting papers about manganism, which is caused by our oral exposure to manganese. People who work in an environment where manganese is it is released, and they breath it in and get it into their nose, and it goes down the olfactory nerve, and ends up in the brainstem, and causes manganism, which is very much like Parkinson's disease. I actually think the manganese that is coming from the liver is causative in Parkinson's disease. Parkinson's disease is one of the diseases that’s going up in step with glyphosate usage on crops.
Mike: That’s amazing. You’re such an abstract thinker. Where did that come from? How did you develop that?
42:41 Positive Benefit
Dr. Seneff: It might be my training in computer science. I think it might be, because I do think that computer scientists think very differently from biologists. I'm very surprised by the biology. The biologists are brilliant and they’ve done a lot of really great work, and I love it. My favorite thing is to get a new paper on a new topic that I'm really interested in, and it’s got some real good biological detail and I want to sit and read it. And I love that. I why I don't want to take away from them, but what’s puzzling to me is that they don't seem to be inclined to ask why. They’ll just write descriptive story of this is what happens, this takes this chemical pathway, and this thing gets disrupted, and then they’re just not, and I always think that everything the body does, it's doing it for a reason. Whenever I see something happening, like let's say, encephalopathy, I’m going to say “Why does the body want to react. I feel that the biology is really clever, and even encephalopathy, I say, “It has to have a positive benefit” and you look at seizures. It has to have a positive benefit and I am seeing that benefit of the seizures. Of course, autism has seizures connected to it. I wrote a paper, even before I had talked about glyphosate, before I even knew about glyphosate.
43:52 Taurine
Dr. Seneff: I wrote a paper on encephalopathy. It was really fascinating, what I found. I saw all this process that takes place in the brain in a situation where this encephalopathy attack, where you have this brain swelling, and then the mitochondria actually ditch their glutamate, and they replaced it with ammonia. They take the taurine out of the mitochondria, and they replace it with ammonia, and then they put glutamate, and all this orchestration of all this complex set of events, which has the, I believe, the consequence of producing sulfate from taurine. This is what the paper talks about and the sulfate is essential. What's happening is the brain is desperate for sulfate, and I think that the brain, the heart, and the liver, they all are known to have very high levels of taurine stored and that taurine, I believe is a reserve sulfate supply. Taurine is usually quite inert. They think that taurine can't be broken down because it's so stable. but you have to do all these shenanigans to get the taurine to react, including the seizures, and a high fever, and all these things are helping to provide energy, so that you can pull that sulfate out of that taurine. It is really fascinating stuff and I think that's what's going on in the heart attack as well, that the heart attack is causing the heart to be able to recover sulfate from taurine.
Mike: Wow. That’s fascinating. That’s the highest concentration of taurine in the body. Is in the heart, right?
Dr. Seneff: In the heart, you’re right. You know your numbers. It is very interesting that the heart stores huge amounts of taurine. It’s not something people can explain. Of course, I want to explain it and I know that sulfate deficiency in the heart is a critical issue in heart health, that it’s going to cause things like heart failure, so when the heart gets desperate enough, it's willing to do the heart attack in order to produce sulfate from taurine. That's what I think is going on.
Mike: Interesting. I’ve seen some correlation studies of elevated serum sulfate linked with heart disease and that maybe that the body’s trying to raise levels, like you're saying, because at the cellular level it’s deficient.
45:55 Sulfate
Dr. Seneff: That's the problem, actually, because serum sulfate has to be kept very low. Sulfate is so interesting because it will gel water. It will turn it into Jell-O and so you can't put a lot sulfate in the blood, or else the blood won’t flow. This is the problem that biology faces. It is a very big challenge and biology has lots of ways to get around it. Most of those involve attaching the sulfate to other molecules that will disperse the negative charge and prevent the sulfate from having that kind of an effect. The molecules that do that are members of two major classes. One of them is the aromatic amino acids that are produced by the shikimate pathway, so by virtue of glyphosate disrupting that, then you lose those sulfate carriers and you can't transport sulfate. The other one is the sterols and that's the cholesterol, the DHEA, the vitamin D. These things are all sulfate carriers, because they are all shipped sulfated, and so the body is distributing the sulfate on the backs of these molecules. When they are deficient, the sulfate doesn't get distributed. That's what's going in the liver with the bile acid blocking, because the bile acids carry a lot sulfates into the gut. That's why if the bile isn’t’ flowing, the guts to become deficient in sulfate, and also because the serotonin is not there. Serotonin is produced in huge amounts in the blood. It's also sulfated when it ships. That's part of how you get all the problems with the sulfate deficiency. Free sulfate becomes high in association with heart disease, because the heart is desperate for sulfate, and the carriers are not available, so the body’s desperate enough to try to raise the level of free sulfate, which is going to cause a risk of the blood not flowing, so when you get a no flow situation, you're in huge trouble in multiple organ failure, and that is actually a cause of death that’s rising in the US CDC hospital discharge data right now, multiple organ failure, which is because the blood is unable to flow blood.
Mike: Yeah. Blood viscosity we had Ralph Holdsworth. He has written a lot about this and has found that it's really independently correlated with many organ issues, but also heart disease, but it’s not looked at. It’s like C-reactive proteins, lipids look good. You’re okay. We know that the blood can be viscous and that's really interesting.
Dr. Seneff: Without enough buffering, you are walking a tightrope between hemorrhaging and blood clots. That's what’s happening to all the old people. They’re in such a fragile state with their blood. The minerals are not there. The buffers aren’t there to maintain healthy blood, and particularly the sulfate.
Mike: Fascinating. So we have the mitochondria being perturbed, minerals being sequestered, we had changes in gut bacteria, we have bile acids, we have this relationship for folic acid. Is there anything else you want to talk about?
48:48 Estrogen Disruption
Dr. Seneff: Estrogen disruption. Actually, Sam Sul, he told me a long time ago, glyphosate is an estrogen disruptor. It is an estrogenic agent. I was like, well I’m not sure I believe that. It took me a while. I wasn’t sure. But then I saw this article on breast cancer cells grown in vitro and they exposed them to parts per trillion levels of glyphosate. That is an incredibly tiny amount. Those breast cancer cells started proliferating. The glyphosate, in a very small amounts, could cause those cancer cells to proliferate. They respond to estrogen. These people were saying, it’s an estrogenic agent. Things that have that hormonal behavior, have an unusual characteristic of their toxicity where it's U-shaped, so when you are saying here is my lower limit and here is my upper limit, and I'm seeing this linear rise. I can go below the lower limit and I can also see linear rise, and I don't realize, that so when they study the glyphosate, the folks that claimed it was safe, they got nowhere near the levels that they needed to be at, and on the low end to demonstrate this estrogenic behavior. I'm seeing, for example, in Kauai, where I have a second home, I love Kauai, but in the south side of Kauai, there is a major problem with the agrichemical companies developing their new GMOs that are resistant to toxic chemicals in the fields around this area in the small town of Waimea, and in that town the women have incredibly heavy menstrual cycles. Their periods are really heavy. That is an indication of excess estrogen exposure and you’re also seeing, in the country, you are seeing, of course, there's the infertility issues. There’s the endometriosis and fibroids, all this kind of growth of the uterine growth is evidence of excess estrogen exposure. I think that's making sense to say that estrogen. And of course, there’ rising breast cancer incidence. I have been hearing so many people, multiple people that I know right now are experiencing issues with breast cancer. It seems like an incredible epidemic. Unfortunately, I can't get numbers from CDC, because the numbers end in 2010, but it was going up starting in 2006, and then it just ends in 2010. I suspect it's continuing to go up, the breast cancer. I'm suspecting that that's due to the glyphosate. They saw that and Séralini saw that in his studies, where he looked at these rats and all the massive mammary tumors that these rats had when they were exposed to glyphosate over their lifetimes. All that's pointing to estrogenic behavior.
Mike: Do you know the mechanism? Is it a phytoestrogen? How are we affecting our own endogenous estrogen?
Dr. Seneff: Yeah and I guess it might be, and I don't actually know the answer. It is acting as if it is estrogen, and whether that means that it just happens to have a physical shape that fits the estrogen receptor, I'm not sure. I don't actually know. That's one reason why was resisting believing that, because I didn't quite understand how that is happening. All the things I've talk about, I can understand how that would happen, but this one I don't really quite understand how it would do that. There are all these chemicals that are estrogenic. It seems to be quite a common feature of these toxic chemicals many of them that are in our environment, which is quite fascinating, quite surprising to me. Really tiny amounts have huge impact, which is what’s so scary with these estrogenic chemicals. We’ve got a huge problem with them, not just glyphosate. There’s many others as you know.
Mike: What's scary about that is our own hormones, testosterone, estrogens have binding proteins, globulins, sex hormone binding globulin, these other minute estrogen. Like you said, small levels have a profound affect, because they exist in the free state, so that when they’re in bloodstream, and they are bound up to these proteins, they can go stimulate receptors.
53:05 Working on a new Paper
Dr. Seneff: That’s a really good point. They are completely unregulated. You have no control over it, because our bodies are very good at producing the exact right amount that’s needed. When you can go through pregnancy and you orchestrate this progesterone increase, and all these different changes that happen in your sex hormones during pregnancy, and if you superimposed on that all this junk that's coming in, and just adding noise, then how's the baby gonna develop appropriately. We are seeing all kinds of issues with genetic defects in the children. I’m actually shocked. I have a new paper that's been accepted for publication, collaborating with Nancy Swanson, who is the one who has really found all these correlations, all these health correlations with glyphosate usage on clients. She and I are having a delightful time collaborating and we’re collaborating with a third person, Judy Hoy, was an expert on wildlife in Montana. She seeing all kinds of damage to the wildlife, which are being exposed to the chemicals that are being used on the adjacent farms. We took Judy Hoy’s data and saw what was happening with them and then we looked at the humans data from the CDC hospital discharge data to see what was going on in humans, and then relating that to the glyphosate levels. Everything’s matching up. It's really pretty amazing. We are finding, for example, congenital heart defects going up dramatically in the infant population in step with glyphosate usage on corn and soy crops. We are finding lung issues and issues with the lymph system and failure to thrive. All these things are going up. The US is doing terribly on infant mortality, and then all these different issues that the infants are having with their health. Very bizarre new problems are showing up with infants today that the doctors can't even explain. It’s just really tragic what is happening.
Mike: Pretty scary, yeah.
Dr. Seneff: It is. It's very scary.
Mike: Thanks for doing all the research and helping us spread this message. It’s very important and anything else you wanted to talk about that we didn't get to cover?
55:02 Anemia
Dr. Seneff: We covered a huge amount. I am very pleased with this conversation. I thought it went very well. I thought you allowed me an opportunity to talk about many different aspects. This chemical. I like to talk about the many faces of glyphosate, because it’s just amazing how many different ways it can disrupt your physiology. I guess there is actually one more, which I don’t know if I touched enough on, which is anemia. Anemia is another one of these things, the epidemic and they are thinking iron deficiency, so they are giving iron supplements, but that's not actually going to fix the problem, because the problem is that the red blood cells are being attacked by the glyphosate. I've seen many different ways in which the glyphosate is going to disrupt the red blood cells. One of those is the sulfate issue, because if the red blood cells don't have enough cholesterol sulfate, they will hemolyze. They will fall apart. They're getting on a shortened lifespan, and then when the body tries to produce new blood cells, they need to make heme. You basically breaking down the heme, and that's releasing free iron, which is toxic, and then you need to construct new heme to make the hemoglobin that is going to go into the brand-new red blood cells that have been minted and glyphosate disrupts the first step in heme synthesis, which is the first step in the production of the pyroreme that goes into heme. It’ll get you coming and going on the red blood cells. It is no wonder we've got anemia. You see these people with these sort of dark shadows under their eyes and I suspect that's being caused by glyphosate.
Mike: It’s really common. I worked in a clinical setting. A lot of women have real low ferritin, real low serum iron and you just blame it on, just take iron. Here’s IV iron. Why are we seeing all these issues?
56:43 Apathy
Dr. Seneff: I'm glad to hear you say that. I am just seeing that in the data and you're experiencing it firsthand. That's amazing. We are just having this silent epidemic that's going on, all these different things, and people just going about their lives as if everything's fine. That’s what’s really puzzling to me. Why aren’t people seeing? People like you are seeing it, because you’re in the trenches. Most people, they just hear about some neighbors got breast cancer and some other neighbor who’s got this autistic kid. You’re just like, it’s just the new normal. It’s just the way the world. It is just like amazing to me that people just sit back and say “Oh, yeah, that's fine, and you know, life goes on” and we just going over the cliff. We live in a very strange world. We need to wake up. We need to do something different.
Mike: Along those lines, if you were to bump shoulders with Pres. Barack Obama or a future president and they turned to you and said “Why is glyphosate bad?” or “What should I know about glyphosate?” In a short 30 seconds, what would you share with them? What kind of message would you want them to…
Dr. Seneff: In 30 seconds? I would have to say that “Although you think glyphosate is safe, because you think the companies have proven that it’s safe, that is simply not true, and glyphosate is a, and it's clear they were getting huge problem in the gut microbes, and it’s very clear that glyphosate is going to disrupt them, and then following that, there's all kinds of other issues with respect to the product that those microbes would produce for you if they were working that aren’t there and that has a cascade effect, the disruption of your gut is going to cause the disruption of your brain, because of the gut brain axis, and you are going to get various issues with diseases like autism, and ADHD, and Alzheimer's, and all these things they were finding. Then on top of that, other physical problems and so we're facing an incredible health crisis today, because, I think because of glyphosate. Glyphosate is a huge issue that, if we don't fix it, we are going to basically bankrupt the country with the expenses, the medical expenses. This is an emergency that absolutely needs to be dealt with immediately. We need to withdraw. We need to ban glyphosate from the market in the country and we need to do that right now.
Mike: Well said. Awesome. Now, if we could wrap up the prevention tips: eat organic, take 5MTHF or get whole foods like… what would you tell the parents or parents to be and just people who want to be healthy?
59:08 Prevention
Dr. Seneff: Yes, eat organic is absolutely the most important. Eat foods that are rich and as much organic, then you can eat foods that are rich in sulfur, rich manganese, rich in cholesterol and healthy fats. For example, organic eggs is a wonderful choice, because they're not that expensive and, I think they’re a bargain compared to the poor eggs, because they have much more nutritional value, and they don't have the toxic chemicals. Eggs are providing the entire nutrition that the egg needs to make a chick. When you think about that, it has got to be a lot of balanced nutrition with a lot of minerals and vitamin A, and cholesterol and healthy fats and all these great things. Seafood is also very healthy, and fish, and grass fed beef, and then lots of green vegetables, and especially the ones are good sources of sulfur, like broccoli, onions, and garlic. Garlic is fantastic. I try to eat a lot of garlic for the sulfur. If you try to detox, what I've heard, and I have heard this from the animal husbandry domain, is elements from the soil, fulvic acid and humic acid, bentonite clay, that those are all, they have found that if they feed those to the cows, they've actually tested the glyphosate before-and-after in the urine, and found that it reduced the levels of glyphosate in the urine, and it also improved the cow’s health and they believed that that would to that. They think it maybe binds the glyphosate and gets it out. I'm not sure exactly how that works, but that's really good to know. They have also got some exotic herbs that are, actually dandelions, apparently have something in them that is it effective for detoxing glyphosate. I found an interesting paper that talked about these herbal plants that I hadn't heard of before. I can’t give you their names, but there is some interest in some herbal possibilities for detoxing glyphosate. I would imagine those things will start to catch on. People can look into that.
Mike: Right. So, that’s amazing. I'm sure our listeners want to connect with you and follow your work. What is the best channel or resource or webpage where people can learn more about your work?
Dr. Seneff: Yeah, I have a webpage and its people.csail.mit.edu/Seneff. It is not pretty, but I just kind of slap a bunch of stuff up there so you can get my papers and my slides from my talks. I try to put a lot of that material on my page, also some of my interviews, and things like that. That’s the place to look and then there's also, of course, just googling my name, and you'll find the articles that are saying that I'm quack, so you can start with those. Then you can decide if you still want to watch. It’s up to you.
Mike: Fantastic. Keep up the great work and thanks for being on the program.
Dr. Seneff: Thank you.
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About Stephanie Seneff, PhD
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[op_liveeditor_element data-style=”e30=”][text_block style=”style_1.png” align=”left”]Stephanie Seneff is a Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. She received the B.S. degree in Biophysics in 1968, the M.S. and E.E. degrees in Electrical Engineering in 1980, and the Ph.D degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1985, all from MIT. For over three decades, her research interests have always been at the intersection of biology and computation: developing a computational model for the human auditory system, understanding human language so as to develop algorithms and systems for human computer interactions, as well as applying natural language processing (NLP) techniques to gene predictions. She has published over 170 refereed articles on these subjects, and has been invited to give keynote speeches at several international conferences. She has also supervised numerous Master's and PhD theses at MIT. In 2012, Dr. Seneff was elected Fellow of the International Speech and Communication Association (ISCA).
In recent years, Dr. Seneff has focused her research interests back towards biology. She is concentrating mainly on the relationship between nutrition and health. Since 2011, she has written over a dozen papers (7 as first author) in various medical and health-related journals on topics such as modern day diseases (e.g., Alzheimer, autism, cardiovascular diseases), analysis and search of databases of drug side effects using NLP techniques, and the impact of nutritional deficiencies and environmental toxins on human health.
Connect with Dr. Seneff
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