How Soil Microbes and Intracellular Communication Affect Health

How Soil Microbes and Intracellular Communication Affect Health

In 1976, glyphosate was introduced. This is the active ingredient in a vast majority of weed killers on the market today, including Roundup®. However, this chemical does not selectively kill weeds. Any plant sprayed with this chemical will die — which is why Monsanto and other pesticide producers came up with the idea of creating herbicide-resistant plants through genetic engineering.

"It's worthwhile noting why it kills plants," Bush says. "Glyphosate blocks an enzyme pathway … called the shikimate pathway. These enzymes are responsible for making some of the most important compounds in food [including] ringed carbon structures, such as tryptophan, that are the backbone of hormones.

If you take away tryptophan from the plant chain or the plant kingdom by killing this pathway in bacteria and plants, the plant cannot make these essential signaling molecules … It wipes out about four to six of the essential amino acids, which are the building blocks for all proteins in your body … There are only 26 amino acids. You take away four to six of those [and] you just lost a huge percentage of biology.

But that's just the beginning of the problem that we're talking about in nutrition. This is, I really believe, the answer to why we were feeding all these healthy foods to our patients [yet] not seeing health benefits: There's a family of compounds called alkaloids … [When you] remove the alkaloids from food, what you see is the disease burst we have going on across so many organ systems in our bodies.

There's a family of [alkaloids] that are anti-parasitic … [others] are antidiabetic … anticancer … antihypertensive … anti-mood disorder … antiasthma, anti-eczema type of compounds. You go through the list of alkaloids and [realize that if you add a] chemical to our food chain that wipes out the production of [alkaloids] …

we [lose] the medicinal quality of food that has existed for thousands of years … [By using glyphosate] we robbed the soil and the plant from the ability to make these essential medicinal [compounds]."

According to Monsanto, glyphosate cannot affect human health because humans do not have the shikimate pathway. However, human gut bacteria do, as do soil bacteria and plants. Moreover, the human body cannot make its own alkaloids and essential amino acids. You must get these compounds from plant foods that feed off bacteria in the soil.