Universal microbiome decline

June 2022

" ... there is a microbial component inherent to all known systems on Earth with cumulative evidence supporting that niche-adapted microbial communities ('microbiomes') play unequivocally important roles in total ecosystem functioning

... Emerging ideologies such as "Planetary Health" and "OneHealth" emphasize these fundamental roles of microbial metabolic processes in supporting macroscopic reality at the systems-level, and further suggest that microorganisms should be viewed as unified constituents rather than as separate entities, as they have been historically regarded."

(Daisley et al.)

How likely is it that glyphosate, an agricultural product with the capacity to kill all green plants, except those genetically modified to resist it, will have no adverse effects on the health of other living things?

Because glyphosate disrupts a vital enzyme present in all plants, but entirely absent from animals, it has always claimed a reputation for safety. Indeed, the herbicide appears to have no acute toxic effects on animals (including humans). However, many kinds of micro-organism do have the enzyme targeted by glyphosate, and it is certainly harmful to them. By extension, the individual 'microbiomes' - the functional communities of diverse microbes which live around, on and inside all animals and plants - will be altered by this herbicide: the inevitable adverse health effects of this have never been considered.

We have only recently become aware of the functional interdependence between an organism and its microbiome. Micro-organisms play a key role in making nutrients available, in excluding pathogens, and in the immune systems of all higher forms of life.

Our crops need the support of a healthy microbiome in a healthy soil for their own health. In many GM and non-GM fields, the soil is subject to glyphosate from multiple sources, such as, spraying, GM root exudates, treated plant debris, and in some soils the release of accumulated mineral-bound herbicide residues.

Unaccountably, regulators seem to ignore the fact that fungi are plants and are a vital sector of the soil microbiome. The anti-fungal effects of glyphosate lead to long-term stunting of plant growth and a gradual reduction of crop yields.

Many plants also depend on visits from healthy insect pollinators. Insects with a glyphosate-damaged gut microbiome don't do much foraging, or help much with our food supply.

Since 2000, feed rations of UK farm animals, particularly poultry and dairy cattle, have included significant quantities of GM maize and soya, both likely to be laced with glyphosate which will damage to our livestock's gut microbiome and health. Indeed, the herbicide has been detected in the urine of up to 96% of farm animals.

Shockingly, animals have been exposed to glyphosate and other microbe-killing chemicals for so long that we no longer have access to any baseline healthy microbiomes with which to compare and investigate the extent of the damage. It's possible that there's already been a mass-extinction of the microbes essential to health.

Indirectly, humans are on the receiving end of all the glyphosate-induced disruption to the health of our plant- and animal-based foods.

Modern industrial-age populations have undergone a systematic depletion of their essential microflora due to the use of antibiotics and disinfectants. Pesticides in our food and water are just another nail in the microbiome coffin.

Glyphosate and its derivative, AMPA, were found frequently in the urine of dogs and cats too, reflecting the GM components in pet food brands. How healthy are our pets?

Regulators have defined an 'acceptable daily intake' (ADI) which is the amount of glyphosate judged safe to ingest on a daily basis over a lifetime. The ADI is one hundredth of the largest dose at which no adverse effect has been observed (i.e. the 'no observed adverse effect level' or NOAEL). Perplexingly, the US 'no adverse effect level' is three and a half times that in Europe.

The amount of glyphosate residues legally allowed by US regulators in food has increased dramatically over the years. These approved increases seem to be in response to commercial farming demands rather than any science-based safety considerations.

A recent study on rats fed three regulatory-relevant doses of glyphosate (the ADI, the EU NOAEL, and the US NOAEL) and using up-to-date analytical methods ('omics'), found alterations in the gut microbiome at all levels of the herbicide tested.

Glyphosate is not, of course, the only suspect but, with its use boosted by the widespread growing of herbicide-tolerant GM crops, is the most frequently applied agrichemical in the world. Much the same issues arise for all the other GM-linked weed-killers now emerging on the market [1,2,3].

Canadian scientists, Daisley et al., who have carried out a detailed analysis of the "Deteriorating microbiomes in agriculture" due to the "unintended effects of pesticides on microbial life", conclude there is a pressing need to reassess the use of agrichemcials "through the lens of microbial ecology and the ... effects on host (animal and plant) physiology". This reassessment should include the updating of the legislative framework and long-term studies to reveal subtle, accumulative consequences.

OUR COMMENT

To protect your long-term health , you might like to draw your regulators' attention to the call for legislative improvement to include all levels of microbiome damage.

If you're interested in knowing more about the effects of glyphosate on people, check out MICROBES ON THE GLYPHOSATE CHOPPING BLOCK - May 2022 (coming up next).


Background

[1] DICAMBA - WORSE THAN GLYPHOSATE - October 2021
[2] ISOXAFLUTOLE - THE NEXT HERBICIDE HEADACHE? - October 2021
[3] 2,4-D ON THE MENU TOO - October 2021

SOURCES:

• Brendan A. Daisley, et al., 2021, Deteriorating microbiomes in agriculture - the unintended effects of pesticides on microbial life, Microbiome Research Reports
• Patrick Holden, Are glyphosate-based herbicides poisoning us and the environment? Sustainable Food Trust, 5.02.21
• Robin Mesnage, et al., January 2021, Use of Shotgun Metagenomics and Metabolomics to Evaluate the Impact of Glyphosate or Roundup MON 52276 on the Gut Microbiota and Serum Metabolome of Sprague-Dawley Rats, Environmental Health Perspectives
• Carey Gillam, New glyphosate papers point to "urgency" for more research on chemical impact to human health, USRTK, 23.11.20
• A. H. C. van Bruggen, et al., October 2021, Indirect Effects of the Herbicide Glyphosate on Plant, Animal and Human Health Through its Effects on Microbial Communities, Frontiers in Environmental Science
• Glyphosate and Roundup disturb gut microbiome and blood biochemistry at doses that regulators claim to be safe, GM Watch 27.01.21
• Don M. Huber, AG chemical and crop nutrient interactions - current update, Fluid Fertilizer Foundation Proceedings Fluid Fertilizer Forum, Scottsdale, February 2010

Photo Creative Commons

Super toxic Bt cowpeas

May 2022

In 1990, Monsanto scientists published their latest discovery about the new 'Bt' insecticides generated by GM crops which were soon to become every farmers 'must-have'.

Their exciting finding, with an "immediate commercial implication" was that the insecticidal power of Bt could be increased many fold if its degradation was prevented by the plant itself. Many plants produce substances which prevent the breakdown of proteins, such as the Bt toxin, possibly to keep herbivores at bay by interfering with their digestion. The authors suggested this would confer "significant and long-term implications and benefits" on Monsanto's "genetically improved" Bt-generating plants.

Safety assessment of the new Bt crops was based on two strands of evidence.

Gene edited 'healthy' bread

January 2022

One elusive, and potentially very lucrative, holy grail long pursued by the biotech industry is GM wheat. Not just any GM wheat of course, but one which is acceptable to consumers and to their food suppliers.

Realising that the ace to play in winning over a biotech-sceptical public could well be the anti-cancer card, the US market is being sounded out using gene-edited potatoes designed not to give you cancer [1] and cancer-busting GM purple tomatoes [2]. In the UK, the government is forging ahead with a field trial of gene-edited wheat which they claim, like the GM spuds, won't give us cancer. 

Impossible, incredible, awesome, beyond...

January 2020

'... common sense?

The 'Impossible' bleeding plant burger started out back in 2017 as textured wheat protein with fake soyabean 'blood' from GM yeast and some other stuff collectively described by its manufacturer, Impossible Foods, as "simple, all-natural ingredients" [1]. By 2019, Impossible Foods had realised their Impossible burgers weren't sufficiently beef-like and were unpopular with the gluten-intolerant sector of the population. The non-meat burgers were accordingly re-formulated with soya protein.

It seems, however, that sourcing sufficient quantities of affordable non-GM soya to suit its clean, green image and marketing aspirations proved impossible: Impossible Foods' answer was to switch to cheap and plentiful GM soya and hype its way out of the image problem [2].

Pesticides in the population

October 2019

In 2017, a study was published indicating yet another possible chronic health effect from eating glyphosate, the herbicide sprayed on, and accumulated by, most GM crops.

The biotech industry has tried to claim that the presence of glyphosate excreted in urine proves the weedkiller is safe because the body is able to clear it out. However, tests on cows (not possible on humans) have shown glyphosate is distributed evenly in their organs and urine, suggesting the herbicide is retained in the body.

The case for diversity

September 2019

The need for diversity in our food supply has been a hot topic lately [1, 2].

Green Revolution agriculture gave us monocultures of a tiny range of high-calorie crops.  The Gene Revolution of recent decades compounded this with GM versions of the same crops. Commercial GM plants are overwhelmingly designed to be used in conjunction with a single herbicide, and many generate a small range of very similar insecticides.

Paradoxically, the end-products of these staple crops have diversified.  The excuse for developing them may originally have been feeding the hungry, but large quantities of that 'food' are now diverted into biofuel-production, industrial chemicals and animal feed.

Those that do reach the human stomach are highly processed carbohydrates and chemicals (a.k.a. junk food, or food-like substances).  In the dietary desert we now inhabit, our animals' nutritional needs are better met than ours.

'Biofortification' - reinforcing malnutrition

August 2019

'Biofortified' crops, with increased levels of one, or a few, micro-nutrients, were first released in 2004. Since then, their use has been eagerly embraced by governments of developing countries as a cheap way to address malnutrition*.

*micro-nutrient deficiencies

In particular, iron, zinc and vitamin A in staple foods, such as rice and millet, have been a focus for biofortification schemes. Both conventional breeding and, increasingly, GM techniques are being used to achieve these 'nutritionally enhanced' crops.

Re-thinking the yield obsession

June 2018

"For the last 60 years we have been on a pesticide merry-go-round, where successive generations of pesticides are released, and a decade or two later they are banned when the environmental harm they do emerges. Each time they are replaced by something new, and each new group of chemicals brings new and unanticipated problems. Considering our intelligence, it is remarkable that we humans can keep making the same mistake over and over again" signed by 12 scientists who have spent decades studying the fragile web of insects, the environment, and the crops on which we all depend for survival. 

This merry-go-round is harming both ourselves and our environment: why can't we get off it?

Glyphosate and AMPA in the air

May 2018

GM crops are still hanging on to their 'environmentally-friendly' image.

Resistance to glyphosate-based herbicides is a feature of most GM crops. This GM trait enables soil-preserving no-till farming, and provides easy weed control with a single chemical reputed to be toxic only to weeds and to disappear readily from the environment. All this, plus glyphosate's early 'safe-as-salt' tag for humans [1] provided little incentive for scientific study of side-effects of the herbicide during the past decades of increasing use.

However, things are changing since the International Agency for Research on Cancer came to the conclusion that glyphosate is 'probably carcinogenic to humans' [2]. Questions are gradually surfacing about where glyphosate actually goes when it 'disappears' from the environment.

The emerging answers don't paint a comforting picture.

Roundup impairs soil fungi

December 2017

Modern farmers are proud to grow crop plants in isolated splendour; they make sure nothing much ever gets a chance to live alongside them in the fields. Their yields are impressive, and the drain on soil health even more so.

Soil is a living material. It generates the nutrients plants need, and its resilience comes from a vast living, interacting biodiversity of bacteria, fungi, single-cell organisms, plants and animals. Agrichemicals designed to kill change all that.

Scientific methods are, of course, used to check out the effects of agrichemicals on select representative soil life-forms. For example, tests of key features of the well-characterised soil fungus, Aspergillus nidulans, include growth rate, spore germination and germination delay, pigmentation and organisation of the fungal strands. If no effects are detected at some measured level of exposure to a pesticide, the chemical is pronounced safe for the soil at any lower concentrations.

However, science has moved on a long way from looking at gross changes under a microscope such as the above. And, none of the chemicals tested in isolation in the laboratory is ever present in isolation in the field.

A recently published study based on state-of-the-art 'proteomic' analyses revealed subtle biochemical disturbances in A. nidulans exposed to glyphosate. This raises a number of concerns.

Glyphosate in European soils

December 2017

A snapshot survey of European agricultural soils in 2015 has revealed a worryingly extensive presence of glyphosate herbicide and its break-down product, 'AMPA'*.
*aminomethylphosphoric acid

Glyphosate is widely used on GM herbicide-tolerant crops in the Americas, but in Europe, it's typically applied only once a year to cereal and oilseed crops, or three times a year in orchards and vineyards. This doesn't sound like very much.

American agricultural suicide

November 2017

A retired Senior Executive of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently described how American agriculture is on a "treadmill to oblivion", blinding itself to the reality of what's happening on the farm and of where that pesticide treadmill isn't going. Add to this, an "unparallelled ability ... to forget what we once know" about how to keep the soil healthy the pests at bay, and the crop yields high without fertilisers and pesticides.

Glyphosate causes crop disease

June 2017

In 2003, during a 5-year study of crop disease, the first alarm was raised that wheat appeared to be worse affected by 'fusarium head blight' in fields where glyphosate herbicide had been applied just before planting. Laboratory studies at the time also indicated that fusarium grows faster when glyphosate-based weedkillers are added to the medium they're growing in.

Fusarium head blight is a devastating fungal disease which destroys a fifth of wheat harvests in Europe alone. This fungus produces 'mycotoxins' (poisons) known to cause cancer of the liver and kidney, disorders of the blood and lung, vomiting, and damage to the immune system. Anything which promotes fusarium is a serious business.

Science-free wildlife death traps

May 2017

Documents from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in early 2017 show that almost 100% of GM corn is pre-treated with neonicotinoid insecticides. In addition, although the EPA has concluded that neonicotinoid seed treatments have no economic benefit to soya growers, incomplete data indicate that over 50% of soya beans are also coated with the insecticide.

Neonicotinoids, of which there are several brands and classes on the market, are used as seed coatings. They end up throughout the mature plant, its flowers, pollen and nectar, and 95% of the coatings spread through the wider environment including soil water and dust in the air. UK trials have found that at least one neonictinoid accumulates in the soil with increasing toxicity over several years.

Across America, tens of millions of acres of land are planted with corn or soya (often year about), each producing its own fresh wave of neonicotinoids.

Bt insecticide risks in the agricultural landscape

April 2017

As the biotech industry and regulators cling to the notion that 'Bt' insecticide is toxic only to the target pests and is easily digested by mammals just like any other protein, science is throwing a few flies in their ointment.

GM crop plants have been created which generate one or several artificial versions of 'Bt' insecticides. These proteins, in their natural forms, are produced by soil bacteria, Bacillus thuringiensis.

It's disturbing to read in a recent scientific paper that:

"Bt toxins can be transferred via the food web and accumulate in organisms to different degrees".

Undefended maize

March 2017

The Green Revolution has been an exercise in creating extremes. We now have extreme uniformity in our staple crops and in our agricultural practices, with an extreme dependence on agrichemicals, and a globalised crop market (you can't get much bigger than that).

This has led to an extreme reduction in our crop gene pool, unstoppable pest problems, and a problem-solving mind-set limited to more-of-the-same single high-tech solutions to 'key' difficulties.

We now have food from crops which have been intensively bred for extreme yield with scant attention to whole nutritional value, taste or pest resistance.

In this one-size-fits-all agricultural system, the answer to poor soil is to add chemicals, and the answer to pests is to kill them with chemicals.

Metallic rice

February 2017

Global mapping shows an "unequivocal overlap" of poverty, micronutrient deficiency and rice consumption.

Estimates suggest some 15% of the world's population suffer from iron-deficiency anaemia, and a similar number from zinc-deficiency. These have serious consequences for health and energy, immune- and nervous-system function, gene regulation and child development, and for productivity.

Part of the problem is that rice doesn't have enough iron and zinc in it for people with little else to eat. From the biotech scientist's point of view, this is the rice's fault. The answer is therefore to insert artificial genes which drive an unnatural accumulation of iron and zinc in the rice plants.

US court notes GMO concerns

January 2017

Photo: Creative Commons

A US court has ruled that Federal law doesn't prevent States and Counties from passing their own local laws to regulate or ban commercial growing of GM crops.

Most importantly, the court acknowledged that growing GM raises "several well-documented concerns", including economic impacts due to gene pollution, and environmental impacts from increased use of pesticides, superweeeds, pest-resistance, and reduced biodiversity.

This is significant because GM crops and life-destroying chemicals are inseparable. 

GM 'solutions' for the phosphate problem

 November 2016

 

Photo Creative Commons

As governments and environmentalists worry about the pollution of our waters by phosphates pouring out of intensive pig and chicken farms, and worry about the dwindling supplies of phosphate needed for fertilizers and feed supplements, and worry about increasing human micronutrient deficiencies, genetic engineers have come with their own 'solutions'.

Smart plants are for real

October 2016

Ripe barley: Photo Creative Commons

We tend to view plants as having 'characteristics' rather than 'behaviours'. The latter suggests senses, reactions and communication at a level impossible without a nervous system.

Biotech scientists seem to view plants as lego-like structures into which they can slot characteristics of their choice, even animal ones. Belief in their ability to custom-build plant life is such that testing the whole-picture reality of what they've created has never been big on the GM agenda.

Plants, however, aren't simple bystanders in their environment, or passive sugar factories running on solar power. They're far smarter than we think.