Urinary Glyphosate Linked to Higher All Cause Mortality
A prospective cohort study consisting of a secondary analysis of data from three different National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey cycles (2013-2018) linked to national death index data, found that among adult participants with complete urinary glyphosate measurements and mortality data (n = 4,740) each 1 ng/mL increase in urinary glyphosate is associated with a 40% higher all cause mortality rate in a logistic regression model adjusted for all covariates, with an inflection point at 0.38 ng/mL where all cause mortality was significantly higher for participants with urinary glyphosate above the limit of detection compared to those below the limit of detection. To put this in perspective, a nanogram is a billionth of a gram and is several magnitudes less than what you find in cases of acute poisoning. In other words, this is background level exposure.
As I mentioned two years ago in a previous post an estimated 80% of the general public is exposed to residual glyphosate through the food supply and have an average urinary glyphosate concentration of 0.4 ng/mL (2/5 ppb) which is around the inflection point for significant increases in all cause mortality found in this latest research.
Major Government Study Exposes Glyphosate Biomarkers in Urine of Farmers and General Population
The biggest lie that Monsanto, now owned by Bayer, has peddled for decades is that glyphosate is only toxic to plants because its action only disrupts the shikimate pathway of plants. It should be remembered that the gut bacteria in your intestines also have a shikimate pathway and killing them off is detrimental to your gut health which affects the rest of your body through the lung-gut and brain gut axis. Glyphosate alone and with co-formulates can cause oxidative stress in multiple human organs at a fraction of a part per billion concentrations.
As a narrative review published this year in Reproductive Sciences points out, glyphosate’s main effect on human health occurs through the oxidative stress it causes via excess production of reactive oxygen species which can deplete intracellular ATP, impair protein synthesis within cells, disrupt cell membrane integrity and deplete intracellular zinc which itself has antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. Glyphosate induced oxidative stress has also been found, within both animal models and cell culture studies, to cause malfunction of three critical enzymatic antioxidants that eliminate excess free radicals. This can lead to epigenetic changes that create multiple pathologies such as increased incidents of ovarian disease, mammary tumors, obesity, premature birth abnormalities, and kidney disease (found in rodent subjects).
Is Zinc Supplementation the solution to chronic glyphosate poisoning?
An extensive rodent experiment found that zinc supplementation prior to subchronic glyphosate exposure prevents lymphocyte (white blood cell) depletion otherwise found in rats after subchronic glyphosate exposure, suppressed increases of serum tumor necrosis factor and mitigated decreases in serum immunoglobulin G and M concentrations which suggests that zinc has antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects that counteract the oxidative stress and immunotoxicity of glyphosate.
Another rodent experiment that gave zinc supplementation to some subjects prior to glyphosate exposure found that supplementation prevented microscopic lesions in the stomach, diminished hepatotoxicity (oxidative stress in the liver), mitigated neurodegeneration and protected the pancreas during glyphosate exposure as well.