Your plate should look like a rainbow. Doesn’t that just sound so enticing? Imagine having a plate filled with red tomatoes, orange carrots, yellow bell peppers on a bed of green lettuce, you get the idea.
This is something I’ve been hearing echo again and again across Podcasts, Youtube videos, and even on my Instagram feed, mostly aimed at promoting a healthier form.
Even more importantly however, incorporating a healthy balance fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, proteins and carbohydrates in to our diets is essential to the proper functioning of all the systems of the human body, not just for aesthetic motivations.
But what if you found out that the amount of nutrients you believed you were getting from these sources of vitamins and minerals was reduced to almost a tenth of their natural nutrient content?
That is exactly the case we face with all pesticide-treated food, particularly that which is grown on soil that has been sprayed with Glyphosate, a weedkiller commonly referred to as Roundup. The prevalence of its use and consequences to our health has been well hidden, but instead of focusing on the history behind it’s use, let’s focus on the biology instead.
Ideally the food we eat is grown on healthy soil rich in bacteria and fungi that is absorbed through our green leafy vegetables. These bacteria and fungi are integral to our digestion, our hormonal balance, and to every system that supports our day-to-day functions. Proper communication within these systems is what dictates our mood, our immunity, our quality of life, and so much more.
Glyphosate’s mechanism of action as a weedkiller is to block enzymes in the soil bacteria and fungi to prevent the growth of weeds. The path being blocked is called the Shikimate pathway used by bacteria, fungi, algae, some protozoa, and plants, for the biosynthesis of folates and amino acids. This process of biosynthesis cannot be performed by anything other than plants, and this pathway is not found in any other being—not by animals, and not by humans.
Similar to the English alphabet that with 28 letters is able to make up our vocabulary—producing poetry, music, literature, and conversation—if you take out the five (5)vowels, you leave your vocabulary essentially handicapped. You subtract these vowels, and you compromise hundreds of thousands of words.
In much the same way, our bodies are comprised of 200,000 proteins, built from 26 amino acids. The vowels in the amino acid vocabulary are equivalent to the nine (9) essential amino acids. Once you begin to cut off any of those 9, tens of thousands of protein structures are lost in their functionality and in their unique form.
Not only are they important like the vowels, they also cannot be made by the human body thus, these folates and amino acids may only be obtained through direct consumption of plants, or indirect consumption via animals.
This entire process of biosynthesis of essential amino acids is effectively what is blocked through the Shikimate pathway by roundup.
Imagine treating our food chain with a chemical that blocks these plants’ capability to make the building blocks for life body, or any mammal with a complex multicellular biology for that matter, who depends on these essential amino acids.
Imagine removing in the last nineteen (19) years alone, our ability to build the human body because we changed the twenty six (26) letters.
A water soluble toxin can't be sequestered out of the system because everything on earth, including the human body, has water. This antibiotic has seeped into our water systems and evaporated to become clouds, eventually becoming our rainwater and flushing our ecosystems with its runoff.
Fortunately, there are bacteria and fungi that can eventually digest glyphosate. The downside: we need to stop spraying it so that the bacteria can return. Current estimates are that if we stop spraying this tomorrow, it’ll be fifty (50) years before our ecosystems start to see a drop in roundup below our toxic levels.
There is hope yet, and with concerted efforts, we can collectively drive demand for organically grown produce for our health, the future of our generation, as well as the generations to come. Even today, we see promise through our independent farmers striving to give us the nutrient dense crop grown with not a drop of chemical antibiotic.
I can’t wait to see the day when it becomes common knowledge that food is our medicine, and on an individual level, we play a role keeping it that way. I hope you do to.
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