#48 – GMOs and Vaccines ** October 29, 2014
Guest // Stephanie Seneff, PhD ** Host // Kelly Brogan, MD

Ever wish Google Translate could convert Science into Plain English? Wouldn’t it be great if your best friend was a scientist and you could ask her whatever you wanted?

We’re bringing you not one but two talented MIT alums who are fluent in science and health and not on the payroll of Big Food or Big Pharma. They’ll discuss:

• What does the latest research really say about why kids are so sick today, with autism, allergies, food sensitivities, ADHD, and sleep problems?
• How are these disorders connected?
• Which prevalent toxic chemicals cause the most concern?
• When it comes to toxins in our food, what should we eat and avoid? Does eating organic make a difference?
• How about toxins in vaccines? How do we sort out the scoop from the spin?
• Where are the biggest areas of disconnect between the scientific literature and what we read in the mainstream press about food and vaccines?
• Does she really believe that, at today’s growth rate, 1 in 2 children will have autism by 2025?

Dr. Stephanie Seneff gets down to brass tacks and points the finger squarely at the toxic chemicals in food and vaccines. Together, these poisons work synergistically to erode our health. Two of the most significant poisons are glyphosate (in the herbicide Roundup) and aluminum. These substances have become so common in our environment that we mistakenly dismiss them as harmless.

Autism is a complex condition but Stephanie can explain multiple known features of autism through direct links to glyphosate and aluminum. She can also explain sleep disorders, which are associated with many neurological diseases, and which are rising in frequency in the US in step with the rise in the use of Roundup on core crops.

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Kelly:  Hello, and welcome to Fearless Parent Radio where we aim to support unconventional parenting and healthcare decisions by making resources, research and community available to those interested in exploring this lifestyle.  I am Kelly Brogan and I am so thrilled, uh, really almost star struck to be here today with Dr. Stephanie Seneff.  I am going to tell you a little bit about her and then we are going to pick her brain for the next fifty or so minutes. Um, so she is a senior research scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence laboratory.  She holds degrees from MIT in biology with a minor in food and nutrition (BS) and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (PhD). Stephanie has authored over 150 peer-reviewed journal and conference proceedings papers. Since 2007, she has focused on nutrition, health, and the environment, and has published over a dozen papers on these topics in medical and biological journals. Her most recent research is on the pervasive toxicants: aluminum and glyphosate. Stephanie proposes that low-nutrient food combined with pesticides and toxic metals play a crucial role in many modern conditions and diseases, including heart disease, diabetes, obesity, arthritis, gastrointestinal problems, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, ADHD, and autism.  So welcome, Stephanie.

Stephanie:  Hello, I’m delighted to be here.

Kelly:     Like wise. Likewise.  So I was at the Fall Fair at my daughter’s kindergarten public school this weekend and I’ve sort of come to this place where I can only look through this lens and it’s very hard for me to take the glasses off. So

Stephanie: Yeah, I know what you mean.

Kelly: So, at this sort of, you know, I don’t know, fun for all type of event and I see all the kids eating blue cotton candy; we go into this gym room and its like thiolates everywhere with these bouncy castles and I see kids with inhalers, I see kids drinking from the water fountain. And for me, I look at all of these different exposures and I start to get a sense for the confluence that you’re referring to.

Stephanie: Right

Kelly: and, you know, to my mind, you really, gosh, I’m not sure, I’m not sure what we would do without you and to me, you’re really one of the most important thought leaders of our time and somebody who can help, uh, I think, really move the needle in terms of changing the conversation, you know,

Stephanie: Right

Kelly:  so that we’re not just looking for one smoking gun to help us understand why one in six of our children are neuro-developmentaly delayed, for example, but to understand how many guns are firing simultaneously…

Stephanie: Right, it’s really quite amazing….

Kelly: Right

Stephanie:   …situation that we are in…

Kelly:  It really is an amazing situation that we’re in

Stephanie:    Right

Kelly:  I’d love to hear a bit about, it’s so interesting hearing about your earlier sort of studies and how you were on this path, really for a long time and I’d love to hear just about how and when the light bulb started to go on for you even before we get into the wealth of information you have to share.

Stephanie:  Yeah, it goes way back because when, I remember very young seeing something special on TV. about autism and I remember being intrigued by it at that time.  And then I remember later on as a young mother a friend of mine had a child who was the same age as my son and her child got a vaccine, ran a high fever, a week later he had seizures and then was later diagnosed with autism and so I kind of connected it to the vaccines early on, kept that in mind and then watched the autism rates grow over time.  And really about eight years ago, I was very frustrated because I saw that it was going up and they all kept saying oh well were just, you know, diagnosing it more….

Kelly: right

Stephanie:           ….and they found excuses to deny it and of course what little funding there was went all into genetics, oh it’s all a genetic problem and you know, it’s not just a genetic problem if it’s going up.  Genetics does not change that fast.

Kelly:     Not in a generation.

Stephanie:           So I had science skills and I work with major sources on the web – that’s been my whole area of study um, building systems that allow people to access and browse information sources….doesn’t learn from them.  So I just basically switched over to, um, information sources related to medicine at the same time I was interested in studying drugs partly for personal reasons so I was studying a …. Drugs and then I looks at the VAERS database, Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, which is a great database that is maintained by the CDC, has hundreds of thousands of reports of adverse vaccine events.  I’m still digging through it making different statistical analysis and finding new information…….probably some papers on that clearly signal aluminum in the vaccine from the VAERS database.  So I really kind of thought of aluminum, um, and aluminum was kind of a sleeper because everyone thought of the mercury.

Kelly:     Mercury.

Stephanie:           People were talking about the MMR which contains neither mercury nor aluminum

Kelly:     Right

Stephanie:           and that one really puzzled me.  I think I understand MMR now which I’m very excited about but that’s only been in the last few months that I figured that out and I need to tell you about that in a moment because I get into a bigger story before I do that.

Kelly:     Yes

Stephanie:           but many vaccines contain aluminum and many reduced the aluminum content after 2000 in the vaccine simultaneously with the mercury and they said oh you see the mercury didn’t reduce the autism rates so it’s not mercury

Kelly:     Right

Stephanie:           and actually the answer was that it is mercury and it is also aluminum. So they managed to sort of, you know, sneak past that one, I think. Um, both, mercury is very toxic, there is no question about it and I think it’s definitely linked to autism but it has been phased out.  But now they are giving infants these flu shots and they often contain mercury preservative

Kelly:     Correct

Stephanie: so they seem to be so complacent about the mercury how its fine again but it is causing all these problems recently because they are so compulsive about the flu shot these days, um, but the aluminum is serious and they got this Gardasil vaccine that just came out which is loaded with toxic form of aluminum and so that’s really scary too.  But anyway,  I was looking at the aluminum papers on that and felt dissatisfied though because I remember the last paper I wrote on the aluminum I talked about the gut dysbiosis which was very clearly going on in  autism and as I wrote the paper I was frustrated with myself because I could not explain. Once you had the gut dysbiosis I could explain the rest of it but I could not explain the gut dysbiosis and this really frustrated me.  And then I went to hear a talk, when to a conference, heard a talk by a professor Von Huber who is a retired expert in plant physiology and plant pathology and he has been going around the world giving his talks on the dangers of glyphosate.  So glyphosate is the active ingredient in the herbicide RoundUp and, uh, it’s been, we’ve been taught that it is practically harmless to humans, that you could drink the stuff and it wouldn’t hurt you.

Kelly:     Right

Stephanie:           We’ve been taught that it’s harmless; a wonderful solution to the weed problem.  Of course people use it recreationally in their lawns and what not.  It’s all over the food and it’s been going up dramatically over the past, over the past ten years but consistently since 1974. The, They’ve been using it more and more and they think it’s wonderful because it’s so safe and they’re not monitoring it because Monsanto supposedly proved that it was safe although those decades ago.

Kelly:     I heard the term; recently I think Dan Olson said it that, um, which is science by proclamation. And I loved that idea because that’s exactly what it was.

Stephanie:           That’s exactly what it was.  It’s so interesting to me how people can get settled in the idea when something is pervasive in the environment, and it’s true for both aluminum and glyphosate have that property. You know, we have aluminum foil and aluminum pots and pans, aluminum cans.  Aluminum is everywhere so they’re oh yeah, aluminum that’s perfectly safe.

Kelly:     Fine, yeah,

Stephanie:           Yeah and the same thing with glyphosate.  You can go buy RoundUp you know and put it on your weeds and your lawn and no problem you know, non-toxic to humans. I mean, people believe it after a while, you know, it’s like everybody’s using it, everybody’s doing it and because its effects are insidious, it’s because you don’t see all the trouble until down the road.  It’s not like you get an upset stomach.  If you get sort of a chronic, low dose exposure, it slowly kills you.

Kelly:     Right.  So there’s something

Stephanie:  So it slowly kills you.

Kelly:  Exactly.  So you are identifying a formula and I can extrapolate from that formula to other elements like use of anti-depressants and other elements of pharmaceutical drugs

Stephanie:           Statins

Kelly:     Right, so we have this sort of ubiquitous exposure and exposure becomes almost normative in our daily lives and it’s also this energistic sidious effect that can never be linked back to a single, causative agent and so

Stephanie:           Everyone wants to blame somebody else

Kelly:     Exactly

Stephanie:           Yes, it’s great for the chemical industry because you can never place the blame and because there is that gap, you know.  Too, I got emails, I get emails from people who have been poisoned by RoundUp and there was one, the person dramatically experienced, they got the RoundUp on their lawn and they were breathing it and they got an awful taste in their mouth and so they knew that it was coming from it and so they quit and they drank tons of water and it was like two months later they were still trying to get over the sickness. And of course the doctors are like oh it couldn’t be that glyphosate, that stuff is harmless and of course

Kelly:     Right, exactly, right.

Stephanie: But it takes those two months before you notice and they get by with it, they don’t connect the dots unless you’re looking and you’re aware.

Kelly:     Exactly, exactly. So, so did you kind of start focusing on glyphosate and sort of, you know, it sounds like you were sort of trying to answer the question ok so where does so where cause I’m very interested in uh, in the gut microbiota sort of like the lynch pin, you know.

Stephanie: Absolutely right, absolutely.

Kelly:     It’s the most important fulcrum of our health and it helps us to sort of, I don’t know, engage in the complexity of what you are addressing here. So it sounds like you had this question ok so if we know that dysbiosis is a pre-existing risk factor for subsequent toxicin exposure then where is this dysbiosis coming from?  It sounds like you feel that glyphosate the active ingredient in RoudUp, in Monsanto’s RoundUp, is a primary player.  Is that accurate?

Stephanie: Absolutely right and there’s no question in my mind.  And there’s enough, our research has been done to really, I think, show it conclusively.  And they have seen it disrupt the floral bacteria. They’ve done in vitro experiments where they’ve shown it disrupts lactobacillus which of course is an incredibly important bacterium in the gut.  It’s the ones that handle the milk. And they are so important to have those healthy in order for the rest of the gut to work because they sort of control everybody else, you know?  If the lactobacillus are down then the C-diffilis are going to over grow so you’ll get these pathogens causing trouble and then you get inflamed gut because your immune system comes in to attack the pathogens.  Then you get a leaky gut and you get things like proteins leaking out and you get things like celiac disease because of gluten intolerance, you know. It’s just a tremendous cascade of trouble.  Consequential to the gut dysbiosis, glyphosate has been patented as an antimicrobial agent.  It kills all plants except those that have been RoundUp ready engineered which I should really talk about that because that’s the key problem.  It really kills many microbes but it preferentially kills the ones that are good and that’s really the huge issue.  It’s been shown in chickens that it disrupts the gut.  There has been a paper on pigs that have shown an inflamed gut after eating GMO RoundUP feed; that’s the general feed that these guys eat.  The animals are getting huge amounts of glyphosate in their food and they’re getting sick.  It’s probably in the milk of the cows because Moms Across America did a study on breastmilk, human breastmilk, and found it there.  The cows are getting much more exposure than we are so you can guess it’s going to be in cow’s milk which is probably why we have all these issues now with casein intolerance.  The gluten intolerance and the casein intolerance can both be explained by glyphosate very easily.  Wheat is not RoundUp ready but it’s typically, these days, often sprayed right before the harvest, like three or four days before the harvest, they spray it with glyphosate in order to kill it because they want…..

Kelly:     So tell us a little bit about that because that link, uh, was revelatory to the forward thinking medical community who is interested in these topics. Um, you made a couple of very important links so talk a bit about that because so many of my patients come in and have questions like why are we more gluten sensitive than we were even fifty years ago.  There is one interesting study that looked at old military blood samples and assessed that in fact we are more reactive to, even on an antibody level, to gluten than we were in the past and so some of theorize that it’s actually been this dysbiotic process or changes in our gut bacteria that are equipped to digest wheat in ways that we aren’t and you’re posing yet another layer which is that it’s actually glyphosate contributing to increased vulnerability so maybe give us some of the bullet points of what you are, um, what you reviewed.

Stephanie: No, I totally, it just seems so clear to me because this has become a common practice only recently of spraying it with RoundUp right before harvest.  Many benefits because it kills off the plant and reduces the amount of residue you have to clear, makes it easy for the combine, gets a head start on next year’s weeds.  It all sounds like good stuff but the thing is that when you are spraying it right before the harvest, it gets taken up right into the seed and nobody is measuring it of course so I can’t prove that that’s the case but I would really bet a lot of money that that’s the case.  And it binds to the gluten.  I wrote a paper with Anthony Sampson.  It’s a long paper; it was long and complicated but it was quite fascinating because once you start looking at all the…celiac disease is a very complex disease with a lot of co-morbidities and when you look at all the different features of celiac you can take them one by one and you can explain each one with glyphosate.  It’s quite amazing.  And I love doing this, I really love this.  It’s a passion of mine to do this at this point.  You know it’s really easy to explain it at this point.  Once you have the idea, it becomes very easy to explain.  So I would expect other people to pick up on this.  I mean it’s so clear that it’s true.  So the gluten gets bound to the glyphosate and the glyphosate then disrupts a process that is supposed to take place…that builds these cross connections, within the gluten between two different immune-acids and those cross connections are essential in order to be able to break it down.  So what happens is that glyphosate sort of gets in the way and those connections don’t happen and then you can’t breakdown the gluten and so then you have this gluten/glyphosate combo that your body thinks is some foreign object and its builds an immune reaction to it and that’s how you get, you know, an autoimmune disease associated with gluten.  It’s very clear to me.

Kelly:     So it’s tagged.

Stephanie:           So yeah, it’s tagged with glyphosate.  And of course, glyphosate is so toxic that it, ah, wakes up the immune system to say hey I got to fight this thing.  So it fights the wheat, it gets to the point where you are sensitive to the wheat.  It recognizes it as something toxic because it being bound to this glyphosate.

Kelly:     Yeah, no, I think, it’s a very provocative…It’s a similar idea to the aluminum adjuvant where you’re tagging…

Stephanie:           Yes, exactly.

Kelly:     ….tagging certain agents as um…

Stephanie:  Yeah, I even think the aluminum may be attacking the DNA and making it toxic because then you get into these autoimmune diseases where you are reacting to your own DNA, you know,  things like LUPUS and multiple sclerosis.

Kelly:     And I want to segway into that but first I want to talk a bit about just sort of RoundUp and the GMO topic.  Those of us, research clinicians who have grave concerns about what is going on and what may even be too late to reverse, um, are concerned about glyphosate, about the other ingredients in RoundUP, right?  Synergizing together in a toxic soup um, but also about, you know, what we are doing in terms of genetic engineering itself and why that may be relevant in ways that we couldn’t really appreciate at the inception of this technology.  So do you have specific concerns about GMOs that are above and beyond the fact that they are saturated with glyphosate?

Stephanie:           Well of course the saturation with glyphosate is a huge thing and I think that most of the GMOs are about building this resistance to herbicides.  They’ve now got this new one that’s resistant to 24D and now they have this corn that’s a combo to both 24D and glyphosate and I don’t even want to think about what that’s going to mean to our health once we are getting those two probably synergistically toxic as these chemicals often are.  But the glyphosate, you know you got the core crops – corn, soy, canola oil, sugar beets, alfalfa, tobacco and cotton.  You know it’s a short list but each one of them is a huge crop and they go all over by processed food industry.  I think even cigarettes have become more toxic I think because they have more glyphosate now than they used to have and it may even be the case that the toxic chemicals in cigarettes have always been one of the most important factors in their toxicity.  No one seems to talk about that but they have been using herbicides on tobacco for a long time, you know.  And glyphosate in particular because they probably have the same problem there that they have in other crops which is these glyphosate resistant weeds that come up and they have to use more and more then to kills those weeds; that’s why they want to put the 24D in because the glyphosate is not working anymore.  It’s less effective.   They are just pouring chemicals all over our food.  They have to get to a point where they say wait a minute, this is not working – we’re just going to poison our entire population, you know?

Kelly:     Very myopic, right?  We’re just thinking about putting out these small fires, well large fires, but

Stephanie:           It’s an escalating war that we cannot win, you know? And then of course there is also the GMO BT, which is horrible too.  That’s the inserted gene from a bacterium into the corn that allows the corn to produce a toxin, you know, so now you’ve got the actual corn that you are eating able to produce a toxin and it even could, theoretically, produce that toxin in your gut, you know, because the DNA is there ready to go.

Kelly:     Sure, and it could be transferred to your own bacteria.

Stephanie:           Yeah, then you could end up with gut bacteria that are producing that toxin in your gut.  The toxin has the effect of blowing up the stomachs of the insects that eat it so you might imagine it could have some trouble on your gut as well, you know?

Kelly:     Right, and it’s been found, as you mentioned about the Moms Across America in fetal circulation in at least one study where we have been reassured that it doesn’t go anywhere past your gut, right?

Stephanie:           Right and it’s supposed to be completely broken down in the gut and again, they just made that up, I think.  They are so sloppy in their testing it’s just amazing to me that they have this “oh what can go wrong” and it’s like anyone with a sense, a sensibility could think of a lot of things that could go wrong, you know.  You are really playing God when you mess around with these genes like this.  And we know so little about DNA and when you start inserting a gene somewhere and it could be that that gene is very mobile and could get into God knows what.  I think that the GMO itself is very scary, hard to explain, hard to be sure one way or the other.  Difficult science; really difficult science.  But I would not trust it.  I mean I eat strictly organic.

Kelly:     Right and we will talk about that.  Hopefully we will leave off on sort of a more inspirational note.  But we have to get this information out there I believe because there is so much parroting of this idea that they’ve been studied extensively and they’re safe so those of us that are concerned are engaged in pseudo-science and we’re just trying to wrap our minds around a conspiracy theory and you know the truth is that the animal data is accumulating and all you need is a couple of photos that go with these medical journals to sort of horrify you.

Stephanie:           Yeah, like the rats with mammary tumors.

Kelly:     Exactly.

Stephanie:           Yeah, that was a great paper and ____ is doing fantastic work.  He has many papers, I’ve read all of them, well I’ve read many of them, I’m not sure I’ve gotten to all of them.  Everyone I can find, I read.

Kelly:     And so what do you say to people, right, this is one of my favorite topics…what do you say to people who say _____ paper, which now of course he’s been vindicated but Serolina’s paper was retracted so that means it was faulty science.

Stephanie: It’s incredible to me that people are just like “oh great, that paper was retracted so we don’t need to worry anymore”.  I mean that is so incredible because they are going to go after any paper that they feel threatens their bottom line.

Kelly:     But aren’t the medical journals supposed to be objective?

Stephanie:           [laughs] Well they can retract it on such pathetic reasons, you know, that it’s inconclusive.  You never retract a paper on the grounds that it’s inconclusive, you never do.  And I think the whole thing was just pathetic really, you know?

Kelly:     I think it’s a very deeply, uh, I don’t know…destabilizing for people to even consider that even medical journals; even where our data is coming from are potentially, uh, I don’t know, rife with conflicts of interest.

Stephanie:           I have no doubt. I have no doubt.  I mean I see it very clearly.  They make sure that these people are on the board of the parent organization and they’re policing every time.  And every once in awhile a paper gets through and that if gets through and they realize it’s going to be potent they work their butts off trying to get it retracted.  You know, I think this is happening repeatedly.  It’s very frustrating.  They are trying to control the literature and they do a pretty good job, luckily and I love this, they can’t control all the literature and the web has been wonderful; the open network; the open access journals.  They are so fantastic.  And I read so many interesting really thinking papers where people are really thinking hard, building theories, hypothesis, you know, researching literature, summarizing their thoughts on these topics.  These papers are so rich and so important for us to figure out biology they almost never show up in that mainstream journal, you know, privileged, you know, prestigious, all those guys.  All those guys are being monitored.  They are not allowed because they are so vulnerable from these industries that they won’t do it. But luckily these open access journals they can’t control them.  And they are sprouting up like dandelions everywhere and there is always another open access journal you can try if other ones have been, you know.  And there was a great story, the journal Entropy where Anthony and I published our first article, I love that journal, they were so great and people don’t know this but back when Séralini’s paper got retracted, uh, just a few days later, right around Thanksgiving, we got a weird email from our journal asking if we would retract our paper.  And I wrote back and said no, we won’t.

Kelly:  Wow, wow.

Stephanie:           and then a week later we got another message saying oh never mind we didn’t mean it, you know.  And then they put a page up on their journal that explained why they will not bow to pressures from people who don’t want something published just because they don’t like it.  It was really amazing.  It was clear to me that they were being pressured to get our paper out because they were trying to get rid of all the papers that might…because Europe was going through this reevaluation of glyphosate and they didn’t want there to be any evidence that glyphosate was toxic so they got rid of Séralini and they tried to get rid of us but Entropy stood up to them and I was really proud of Entropy because of that.

Kelly:     It’s amazing that that integrity is so unusual.

Stephanie:           I know!  I just don’t understand how there can be so many people who bow to these guys, it’s like a mafia, you know.  It’s really amazing.

Kelly:     Well I think that’s why in many ways I’m very excited to even have you on this show and aligned with Fearless Parent because you do embody this sense of fearless.  There is so few…I even wonder how you maintain your status in affiliation with academia.

Stephanie:           I know.  MIT has been great to me.  SO far they haven’t given me any hassle.  Which is amazing.  MIT is a pretty liberal place.

Kelly:     Right, just protecting the freedom of information.  That’s really all it is.  And I think its unusual, because I’m such a data nut and I spend all my time on PubMed and I just, I read these papers at times and I have butterflies in my chest about them and there’s probably like fifteen people who have read the paper and nobody is going to ever talk about it and it’s not going to actually make the change that it should, uh, and I think about these researchers that are toiling and nobody is going to put a microphone to their work and so I think of that being one of my more important roles.  But you are such an unusual specimen because you’re getting out there and you’re spreading your own word and I think that’s the most powerful type of translation of the research.

Stephanie:           You know I would love to see more people do what I’m doing because it’s so valuable and there is so much of this.  I believe that the research has already been done that can nail these things.  People need to pull it out and organize it and tell the story.  That is what needs to be done right now and I wish more people were doing this because it’s so important and it’s so costly to do new research.  And it would be great if we could more or less prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt without having to do a lot of new research because the research is so expensive and it’s so hard to get funding for.

Kelly:     Right, right.  SO maybe we can just enact a precautionary principle based on the science that is already in existence.

Stephanie:           At least we can certainly enact it individually. The government may not get around to it anytime soon.  Individuals can certainly enact, they don’t need to be proven.  IF they believe it; if there is enough evidence that they believe it.  All they have to do is choose organic and that will encourage organic farming.  Maybe we don’t need the governments to regulate.

Kelly:     Do you think…and I obviously support that rhetoric and that’s certainly what I preach but do you think that with glyphosate in the soil and the water, do you think exposure is a foregone conclusion.

Stephanie:           Absolutely, I don’t think you can avoid.  In the air, I mean the rain, they studied the rain in southern U.S. somewhere, I don’t remember where, but 84% of the samples had glyphosate in it, in the rain, you know.

Kelly:     Yeah, that’s what makes my heart hurt.  You know?  That’s what makes me feel a bit, I don’t know, this heaviness of sort of how deep in we are.  And it’s not that we can’t potentially, you know, remediate or some creative scientist can come up with some strategy to do so but I read an interesting article this week about how, it was a med-analysis looking at the, sort of the life cycle of awareness of chemical toxicity, maybe you saw it.  IT talks about how it’s sort of a fourteen year lag from the first signal of harm around a chemical, so things like dioxin and DDT, to when actions start to happen to remediate or minimize or even ban a substance and so the whole cycle is thirty years from the first marketing or use of chemical to its removal from the market. And that’s really exactly what you are talking about, right? It’s how we can obscure the science that actually exists and how this raging signal of harm needs to be blaring before we actually think about.

Stephanie:           Yes exactly and it’s actually been forty years since glyphosate was first introduced it into the market.  It’s really surprising to me.  We’ve let those forty years go by without even barely noticing it.

Kelly:     And without ever a human trial, right?

Stephanie: Right, no, no one is even measuring the amount that is in the food particularly.  There is a document from the U.S. Department of Agriculture 2012, that had, um, 200 to 300 pages of stuff on the toxic chemicals in the food, using it in the agriculture, measuring it in the food and then they had the one line on glyphosate, one line and it was not good news.  It was 300 samples of soy and they had 95%, 96% had either glyphosate or ampor which is the breakdown product in the soy.  96%. So clearly it’s there, that’s all that proved. In the soy. That’s not surprising because it’s the GMO roundup ready soy which is all over the processed food and of course the kids are drinking soy milk.  The babies if they are on soy formula, they are really in trouble.  And of course if they are on milk, they are in trouble too because the moms have the glyphosate unless they are buying organic.  So it’s no wonder we have the autism, I think.  There are very clear links between glyphosate and autism.  I’ve studied that very deeply.  It’s shocking how many different ways I can explain.  It’s helping me to understand autism which is great because all I have to do is find out what does glyphosate do and then I go look and see if that can explain autism and sure enough it gives me more insight into what autism is about.

Kelly:     So here is where the rubber meets the road for me because there are, I’m always shocked that there are almost two camps.  There are two camps.  There is GMO activists and there is sort of vaccine information activists or vaccine injury advocates um, in terms of the parent community and they seem to be fairly well segregated…and I find that remarkable because you know, part of me thinks it’s very consuming to learn about anyone of these given topics and maybe people just don’t have time to honor all of this information that is needed to join these two concepts together.  I feel very passionately that they have more in common than they don’t and you seem to agree so maybe so for someone who cares about the integrity of our food supply why should that person also start to maybe think more skeptically about vaccine science?

Stephanie:           Well, I mean it’s just very clear to me from the biology…so of course I zeroed in on aluminum and aluminum got much more toxic in the VAERS database you saw many more people reacting to the aluminum containing vaccines more than the increase in the aluminum in the vaccines.  If you sort of multiply…the multiplicative factor going on after 2000 it puzzled me until I figured out the glyphosate connection. So what’s happening is that the kids are getting more and more exposure to glyphosate and the glyphosate is opening the door for aluminum.  It’s very clear to me.  And that’s why I’ve written this paper about the disrupted gut.  Once you have a leaky gut, the aluminum gets into the gut even if you are getting it from your food sources.  And then it’s going to make its way to the brain.  And if you have a vitamin D deficiency too and that’s going to drive the aluminum into the tissues rather than having it get exported through the kidney.  Glyphosate induces the vitamin D deficiency.  When you look at the hospital discharge data, you see a tremendous increase in vitamin D deficiency being identified in recent years.  And you probably know it’s like a vitamin D deficiency epidemic, everyone is getting handed vitamin D supplements all over the place, even newborns.

Kelly:     Right and it’s far beyond what can be explained by latitudinal exposure to the sun.

Stephanie:           It’s irrational.  Why should we suddenly all be…the sun didn’t disappear, why are we all suddenly deficient?  And no one says well wait a minute, why is this going on?  And this is something that frustrates me.  It’s the same thing with the gluten intolerance.  We’ve got all these gluten intolerance sections in the grocery store.  Everyone is oh yeah, yeah, sure I’m gluten intolerant.  Why don’t people think why is everyone gluten intolerant?  People don’t want to seem to ask that medi-level question they should be asking.  Why all of a sudden is this happening?  And the vitamin D deficiency is very clear because glyphosate disrupts the (unintelligible) enzymes in the liver that are needed to activate it.  So as soon as you get enough glyphosate in your liver then you can’t activate vitamin D and that’s why it’s deficient.  Once it’s deficient you are going to retain aluminum.  Because it’s going to cause, there’s this parathyroid hormone that gets increased and it causes you not to release the calcium that is going to build up in the wrong places do to this cascade effect.  So you end up with the aluminum being retained in the tissues instead of being exported through the kidney and um, that means the brain.  The aluminum gets into the brain; particularly the pineal gland and I’ve written papers about that, the effect on the pineal gland which of course controls the wake/sleep cycle.  And so sleep disorder comes into play.  Huge problems with sleep disorders today.  Again if you look at the CDC hospital discharge data that’s going up right in step with the use of glyphosate on corn and soy crops.  Very good match between sleep disorder and everyone is having trouble sleeping because their pineal gland is getting wrecked by aluminum and by calcium due to the affects of glyphosate.  So it’s complicated the interactions but it’s very clear to me.  And I’ve written papers that describe it in more detail.  Glyphosate allows the aluminum to get in because it binds to the aluminum, erases the positive charge and makes it easy for it then to slip past the gut barrier, especially if the gut is leaky and glyphosate introduces a leaky gut so it’s kind of like doing everything it can to get the aluminum in.  If you are eating aluminum in your food for example just drinking from an aluminum can but of course also the aluminum in the vaccines gets completely past the gut barrier because that’s delivered, it goes past all the barriers so you get 100% of that aluminum in your body and if your body is setup in the way that glyphosate sets it up then the aluminum is going to go to the brain instead of going out the kidneys.

Kelly:     And so that’s even actually part of the design, the retention of these eighteen, I think, aluminum containing vaccines is that they be retained so I think you mentioned earlier you know people think about aluminum cans, aluminum foil, aluminum cookware and they think it’s a small amount how big of a deal can it be so maybe you could speak a bit about why you find aluminum specifically concerning.

Stephanie:           Yeah, and of course it’s also in sunscreen which I find very worrisome also.  These aluminum nanoparticles zinc oxide and titanium dioxide in sunscreen.

Kelly:     Baking soda and deodorant…

Stephanie:           Yeah, yeah, deodorant and anti-acids.  A lot of the anti-acids contain aluminum.  The gut is supposed to be able to keep most of it in the gut and if you have a healthy gut, that’s true – very little of it gets absorbed.  But many guts are unhealthy, you know.  Then all bets are off and if you’ve got glyphosate chelating it then it’s just going to show it the door, it just sends it right in, you know.  So you’ve got these complicating factors making it…aluminum is very toxic by the way.  I mean, I’ve written several papers on aluminum with various collaborators.  Chris Shaw is a really big person on aluminum and you can find these papers, there’s lots of them.  Not just by me but a lot of other folks too.  Talking about the toxicity of aluminum to neuronal systems.  They really are a train wreck for the neurons.  Aluminum is, it’s very toxic and people don’t realize that.  That’s the reason the body probably keeps it out.  Normally the gut knows how to keep it out but because of all these other weird things like the glyphosate and the leaky gut, that’s not working anymore.  Aluminum will mess up the red blood cells too.  It displaces the iron in the hemoglobin in the red blood cells and then it becomes highly toxic.  Red blood cells fall apart and that’s the cascade that is going to lead to anemia.  And glyphosate prevents you from synthesizing hemi because it disrupts the synthesis process.  So you kind of have a one-two game going there too, you know.  It’s amazing, it’s just amazing how these two collaborate with each other to wreck your body, you know.  Aluminum and glyphosate, those are the two that I’ve really zeroed in on.  There are many other toxic chemicals of course that are also causing trouble but I can’t study all of them so these are the two I picked because they are the most insidious, the most pervasive, the ones that are going up.  They’re the only a third one.  In fact, Cynthia Nevinson wrote a lovely paper recently just published looking at…the same thing I had done; sort of I was looking for things that were going up because I figured things that were going up because if it’s going down then it’s probably not causing the epidemic, right?

Kelly:     Right.

Stephanie:           …so you have to look at the things going up in recent history and that’s one reason I zeroed in on aluminum and glyphosate because those are two that you see right away.  Our exposure to those is going up dramatically in step with the increase in autism.  And so Cynthia pointed that out.  She had a third one which is these flame retardants.  She looked at a whole bunch of chemicals and she narrowed it down to those three – the flame retardants.  So this makes me want to also look at the flame retardants but I haven’t done that yet so I can’t comment on what role they might also play but I suspect they do.

Kelly:     I think why we have to look at the many different, uh, paths to complex presentation, syndromal presentation – things like autism or ADHD or neurodegenerative disease generally, why we have to think about all these potential exposures coming together is because we aren’t going to just find one cause.  But I think part of the specific concern about vaccine exposures and the lack of informed consent around them is that one single exposure can cause a dramatic adverse event.  And I think based on the types of PDBE — flame retardants or even ultrasound or even glyphosate exposures as far as we know unless it’s like some whopping quantity, a single exposure doesn’t have that type of potential.  So that’s why I think there is such an outcry.  There’s so many parents – the Hear This Well campaign – who feel very strongly that there is a very clear signal here.

Stephanie:           Absolutely and you know I think that some of the parents have experienced it – like my friend – you know, where there was this obvious, very clear reaction to the vaccine followed by an autism diagnosis.  That is so clear, you know.  I’ve written about the encephalitis.  I believe that autism is kind of low grade encephalitis caused by the vaccine…

Kelly:     And so does the government because that’s what they call it in the VAERS.

Stephanie:           Encephalitis or encephalopathy and I think that’s what’s going on and I explained it in great detail in a paper that I wrote before I knew about glyphosate wondering what was causing the underlying thing…

Kelly:     What’s going on…

Stephanie:           Yeah, I didn’t have the full explanation but I could see this brain was behaving in such a way to create this chronic low grade inflammation that the vaccines could induce.

Kelly:     So one of the many challenges inherent in the vaccine schedule is that it doesn’t study individual vaccines, vaccine ingredients or  long-term effects and uses this passive reporting system as a vehicle of “science”, right?  So what I find really profound is that so many “studies” on aluminum containing vaccines contain in the placebo aluminum.

Stephanie:           I know!  I cannot believe they put aluminum in the placebo when they did the test to see if the vaccine is safe or not.  That was so shocking to me when I read that, I was in disbelief when I read that.

Kelly:     You have to wonder.

Stephanie:           Absolutely.  You know that they know what is going on then when they do that.  Even the placebo group is getting a very high death rate compared to what you expect from that age population. How can you just say “oh well, it just so happens that these people died” and that’s crazy.

Kelly:     Right.  And I think that’s why so many of us are asking for -we know we’re not going to get a saline control any time soon sponsored by a pharmaceutical company,  so we’re asking for more naturalistic data comparing vaccinated to unvaccinated populations.

Stephanie:           You could easily look at the Amish.  It seems to me that someone ought to be studying them but of course no one is going to fund that because that’s the thing – these industries don’t want us to find this out.

Kelly:     Right.  So it needs to be sort of a crowd funded endeavor.  So what you, you know cause I have a bit more radical perspective than some of the folks concerned about mercury, uh, specifically or even aluminum specifically like Shaw where I have concerns about the premise based upon what we have learned about the micro biome; based upon what we have learned about low dose toxic effects of adjuvant.  But what about vaccines that don’t have adjuvant?  What about the MMR?  You said you have a bit of a light bulb about that.

Stephanie:           Well I’m glad you brought that up because I kind of teased you with it earlier and I feel like I might have an answer.  Now I don’t have proof but it’s very good hint and I’ll have to go back and tell a little more of the story about glyphosate.  Because glyphosate I’ve been studying every which way and I was aware that it chelates manganese and that the plants have very low manganese in exposure to glyphosate.  That’s been shown in studies with plants; it depletes their manganese.  Then I came across a paper on cows coming out of Denmark.  They had done eight different farms and they looked at several cows on each farm.  They were looking at minerals in their blood to see which ones are deficient and they found two.  They were dramatically below even the lower limit of the range and they were cobalt and manganese.  And so cobalt is cobalamin, B12 and we have all kinds of issues – autistic kids have issues with B12.   Manganese I was like, huh, manganese?  I didn’t really know about manganese because you don’t really hear about manganese in humans.

Kelly:     It’s like the step sister, yeah.

Stephanie:           Yeah, so no one worries about manganese.  So I had to go back and find all the manganese literature, which enzymes and I was like oh my God because every single thing that depends on manganese is a problem in autism.  And I really hit a home run with the manganese. Anthony and I have a new paper that’s under review right, cross your fingers that it can get out of the review process, on manganese.  I mean it’s so amazing.  And so one of the things that manganese does is that it’s a co-activator for an enzyme that converts glutamate to glutamine.  And this enzyme is extremely important in the brain because the brain…glutamate is a neurotoxin if it’s too high.  It is too high in autism.  Autistic kids have both high glutamate and low glutamine in their blood.  That’s been shown in studies.  So they have a problem converting glutamate to glutamine.  Well guess what? You need manganese to do that. And in the brain, the helper cells called the aster cites, take the glutamate and convert it to glutamine and hand it back to the neurons as glutamine.  The neurons take the glutamine and convert it to glutamate and hide it away in these little organelles to keep it safe.  Until they release it as a neurotransmitter.  Glutamate you need it as a neurotransmitter but you have to be careful with it if it’s in the wrong place at the wrong time.  So they have this lovely mechanism to protect the brain from neurotoxicity but if there’s not enough manganese, the aster cite can’t do that so you get glutamate toxicity in the brain which is something people have written about. I have written about it myself actually in association with autism.  Extra-exciditory stimulus in the brain is causing damage, you know?  So this totally makes sense to me.  It turns out that MMR is one of the very few vaccines that contain glutamate and I was like “oh my God, this has got to be it”.  Because I’ve been frustrated by MMR – no mercury, no aluminum, very clear in the VAERS.  I did a study and I saw huge correlation between MMR and autism in VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Effect Reporting System.

Kelly:     Right.

Stephanie:           So I think it’s the glutamate.

Kelly:     That’s very powerful.  That’s very powerful because I’ve been focused mostly on the fact that its, uh, you know, live attenuated so what do we know about an immune-compromised, dysbiotic patient getting exposure to a live attenuated virus and all the potential, you know, sort of like unquantified material that can be transferred.

Stephanie:           You know I do think that is part of the story too of course because you are getting this live measles virus and what not and your body is going to respond with an immune reaction and that’s going to raise the bar on the game because you’re going to have more inflammation in that circumstance which is going to be more damaging with the glutamate.  The glutamate is sort of pushing you over the edge with all of the rest of it.  You know, it might be that if you just had that much glutamate injected you’d be alright but you’re trying to induce an immune reaction; you need to induce it in order to make the vaccine take.  So they’re kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place with these vaccines, you know.

Kelly:     Absolutely.

Stephanie:           I don’t think you can do it where you produce a….the thing that’s really sad is the people that are healthy, who have really health blood and get plenty of nutrition, very low toxic burden, they don’t need the vaccine, you know.  They get the measles it will be nothing.  They don’t need it.  The ones that need it are precisely the same group who will be damaged by it.  So I don’t think the vaccines make sense.

Kelly:     What a catch.

Stephanie:           They don’t make sense.

Kelly:     Yeah, it’s powerful.  And what folks like you and I are trying to do is to try to elucidate exactly why these injuries are occurring but nobody is really asking the question “Does this really make sense?” and based upon what we are learning about, you know, transfer lets say of genetic material.  There’s a paper just out, just last week, and I actually just have it on my desk here. It’s Adventitious Agents in Viral Vaccines:  Lessons Learned From Four Case Studies.  You can say “Oh, case studies – that’s not science” but the fact is that these adventitious or sort of unquantified agents that are sneaking in along with this injection are what may very well be wreaking havoc, right? So we the SV40 in polio vaccines which may be the most notable one that’s cancer causing viral agents.  So they talk about something called reverse transcriptase in the measles and mumps vaccine.  So what happens when no one has ever looked at this?  Nobody has ever looked at it let alone in a placebo controlled trial. Do we really know exactly what we are doing and can we, for just a moment in history, for just a moment in time, can we stop and with the claim that vaccines are safe and effective when we have this, again, is it blaring yet this signal of harm?

Stephanie:           I know, I know.  It’s so frustrating.  They have done a really good job of convincing the public that you need to be terrified of these diseases and that these vaccines are so awesome.  People instinctively at this point have that in their brain.  It’s very difficult to change that mind set and they know that, you know.  They have worked very hard to maintain that policy and that position.  Most people are very receptive to it.  “Oh great, we’ve got these vaccines, we won’t get smallpox”. I mean you know the concept that we don’t have to have vaccines is almost so forward that no one can wrap their heads around it.

Kelly:     I know.  It’s amazing and I think part of it is the allure.  It’s the allure of the pharmaceutical product – the one pill or one injection for one pill.  It’s the idea that the solution is out there no strings attached.

Stephanie:           And what’s happening of course is that as you vaccinate against more and more bugs then you have more bugs coming along.  There’s always more bugs to be had.  These guys are very inventive and we’re getting worse things coming along.  Things like Lyme disease, even AIDS, all these viral infections, HPV, um, Ebola.

Kelly:     (Laughing) We won’t go there in this hour.

Stephanie:           We just get more and more toxic things coming along we actually chased away the ones that would have been more benign.  It’s sort of like an opportunisms that comes in with the other ones when you cut back on the ones that ought to be there.  You’ve messed everything up.

Kelly:     Once you’re messing with Mother Nature

Stephanie:           Yeah, exactly.  She knows how to come back roaring.  You know you can’t really fix it that way.  You can’t just take a vaccine and fix it.  You have no idea the ramifications of what you are doing.  We are so reckless, you know.  We think we’re so smart with all this wonderful biology and we’re just using it incredibly recklessly.  And there’s this naivety among these so called experts who think they can just throw these things out there and everything will be fine.  It just astonishes me that they don’t think in terms of what might be the consequences that you can’t even possibly dream of that will come down the road.

Kelly:     And you know some of the retorts, because I always listen to what the other side is saying, and some of the retorts are “well of course not all pharmaceutical products are safe for everyone” but when you undermine the indications of the efficacy and then you take into account the safety concerns.  We have sort of like a three prong threat that really we need to take a look at.  I’m surprised that more people are not suspicious of the sort of campaigning, you know.  You can’t even buy a toothbrush at CVS without being offered a discount on your order for getting a potentially lethal injection.

Stephanie:           I know!  I hate all these flu vaccine ads.  They just drive me nuts.  I’ve never had a flu vaccine and I never will.  Unless someone makes me do it at gun point, I won’t do it

Kelly:     Hey that could be happening with martial law so hang on to your hat.

Stephanie:           I’m worried about that.  I’m really worried about that.

Kelly:     I want to sort of…I could talk to you all day…I want to leave people with

Stephanie:           (laughing) A note of optimism?

Kelly:     (laughing)  With a bit of useful information here because you know I think that part of we’re trying to do at Fearless Parent to just encourage people to think a bit differently when they engage with the medical system and around consumerism. Right, so you if you can look through your lenses, let’s say, you’re somebody who is now thinking differently when you see a doctor, or don’t; when you go to the supermarket or go to the farmer’s market; you’re thinking differently about it.  If you could just leave us with a bit of a pearl, a spontaneous pearl about what it is that have influenced you more profoundly in your lifestyle.  Like how are you using all of this complex science to inform the day to day decisions that you are making.

Stephanie:           Right and of course the most important thing is to eat 100% organic and we are religious about it when we buy food.  We buy organic spices, organic beer, you know everything is organic in our household. I do still eat out at restaurants and then I know it’s probably not organic but I try to eat at high end restaurants and then I make very careful choices to try pick the foods that are less likely to be exposed.  So I haven’t yet gotten to the point where I bring my own food when I travel.  (laughing)  I may get there eventually because you know when I’m traveling I’m always really nervous about what I’m eating. But yeah, we’re very careful.  And I would just encourage everybody to just think the same way I do.  I would encourage anybody who has a plot of land to consider putting food in it to basically grow your own food.  I mean we need sort of a massive, taking ownership of your own food sources because then you can know, you can grow your food without using any chemicals and you can know that it’s safe.  In your own yard, whatever food you love.  It’s not practical in many cases but I think I would really encourage many people to do that because we are going to have a tremendous shortage.  I’m worried about a shortage in organic coming down the road once everyone gets the word.  There’s going to be a tremendous demand and I think that’s going to pressure farmer’s to grow organic.  I think many farmers might be delighted to do that if they think they can get a better ah, you know, a higher price and they don’t have to deal with these toxic chemicals that might be poisoning them.  I would think many farmers would embrace that opportunity.  So as long as people will pay the extra money which I think is worth every dime because if you think of any one of these diseases you’re going to have down the road, if you don’t.  They’re very expensive.  Not only that, but how much they ruin your life, you know.  Being sick is not fun so if all you have to do is spend 40% more for your food and in return you don’t end up in the hospital with some terrible disease.  It’s totally worth it.

Kelly:     Pay the grocer or pay the doctor.

Stephanie:           Yeah, exactly.  And if you just think about yeah, I can eat really good, wholesome food and stay away from the doctor, who wouldn’t do that? You know? If they knew that was the case.  The problem is that they don’t know and they don’t believe, you know I eat the hamburger and it tastes fine.  I mean the signal is not there in the food.  That’s the problem I think.  It tastes the same.  Really, it’s hard to tell the difference. I mean I think it does taste better but it’s not a dramatic difference.

Kelly:     Absolutely. And that’s why what you’re doing is so important because it’s about connecting the dots and it’s about forcing us all out of our sort of our FDA approved, CDC endorsed comas so that we actually start to take a good look at what’s going on and what choices we can make on a day to day basis like the one you described.  I want to thank you.  It’s just been a total honor to spend this time with you and I want to thank you for everything you do.  I think you’re making…you’re some of the only hope for turning this around and for making this world and planet revert back to the way it should be.  So thank you Stephanie.

Stephanie:   Thank you so much for what you do to fight this cause.  It’s so important.

Kelly:     Thank you.  So next week, Chandler Mars will be talking about menstrual pain and what its connection to endometriosis might be which I think is really fascinating.  She is brand new to our platform and she’s a brilliant thinker and women’s health pioneer.  I want to thank everyone for listening and be well.

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Stephanie Seneff, PhD is a Senior Research Scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. She holds degrees from MIT in biology with a minor in food and nutrition (BS) and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (PhD). Stephanie has authored over 150 peer-reviewed journal and conference proceedings papers. Since 2007, she has focused on nutrition, health, and the environment, and has published over a dozen papers on these topics in medical and biological journals. Her most recent research is on the pervasive toxicants: aluminum and glyphosate. Stephanie proposes that low-nutrient food combined with pesticides and toxic metals play a crucial role in many modern conditions and diseases, including heart disease, diabetes, obesity, arthritis, gastrointestinal problems, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, ADHD, and autism.