Baking old-fashioned sourdough bread can’t be hurried. First the baker has to feed the ‘starter’ with a mixture of organic flour and water on the evening before baking day, and by the morning it will have grown into a spongy mass. The starter is itself made from just flour and water exposed to the environment, which inoculates it with natural yeasts. The baker then mixes most of the starter with more organic flour, water and a little salt to make the dough, and leaves it to rise in a warm place before putting the loaf in the oven.

This is how it was done for thousands of years before high-density urban living required a speedier solution and the Chorleywood Bread Process, developed in England in the 1960s, met this need. It combined the use of commercial yeasts, various additives and efficient production-line techniques that produce the kind of cheap, uniform loaves we find in the supermarket.

An increase in grain yields also resulted from the routine use of agri-chemicals such as glyphosate, but these residues are regularly found in the flour milled from the treated grain. Authorities such as the UK Pesticides Residues Committee even publish figures for glyphosate and other herbicide residues in bread for the interested consumer. Nevertheless, most people would not be aware how integral these chemicals are now to grain production.

In fact, it has become commonplace to prepare fields for sowing with glyphosate as well as to artificially ‘ripen’ them before harvest,  which increases the residue level in the grain. This has been demonstrated following glyphosate use by subsistence farmers in places such as Mexico where it supports GM maize and soybean production. Sampling reveals its persistent presence in rural ecosystems, drinking water and the urine of farmers, meaning that animal, plant and human physiology is experiencing chronic uninterrupted exposure despite the assurance that it is inactive and biodegradable (non-residual).²

It is not just farmers who use glyphosate, and the recent case of an American school caretaker suffering from non-Hodgkin lymphoma, who successfully sued the chemical giant Monsanto (Bayer) for hundreds of millions of dollars, is an interesting example of the dangers of glyphosate. The complainant claims that his cancer was caused by routine exposure while spraying the schoolyard, just as the council does in Melbourne streets, and road crews do along country roads across the whole of Australia.

Apparently school children are everywhere playing in these chemically-tidy places and Monsanto claimed, reassuringly, that hundreds of scientific studies have shown that this chemical is harmless. So why would the United Nations International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) cause an international uproar in 2015 by considering it a ‘probable’ carcinogen in their Monographs Programme?

It sounds like a rather loose term, but if you read the report you find that it actually says that, while there is limited evidence for non-Hodgkin lymphoma in humans, there is convincing evidence for tumours in mice. The term ‘probable’ is therefore reserved for cases where there is conclusive evidence in laboratory animals but not yet for humans. In fact, such evidence in animals alarmed the United States Environmental Protection Agency as long ago as 1985, enough it seems to originally classify it as ‘possibly carcinogenic to humans.’ The IARC report also states that glyphosate causes ‘DNA and chromosomal changes in humans.’

Cancer often takes the limelight because it is the ultimate measure of toxicity that licencing agencies use to gauge safety, but a link can be hard to demonstrate in the real world. Part of the problem is that the modern environment contains many competing industrial carcinogens, as well as endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) and electro-magnetic radiation, and their individual influence on health is difficult to differentiate, let alone the effect of synergy. Nevertheless, a lot can go wrong with general metabolism and homeostatic mechanisms before any hard evidence of cancer appears.

Another problem with conventional studies is the reliance on a dose-response relationship. The assumption is that less exposure means more safety, or at least the ability of the body’s detoxification systems to adequately breakdown and excrete the residues with less harm. This may be generally true if you have a healthy liver and your channels of elimination are all functioning well, but it ignores that fact that some residues accumulate in fat cells as is the case with DDT. This chemical was banned a long time ago but we all apparently have a ‘DDT body burden’ in our fat.³

Judging by the spiralling rates of obesity, these residues may actually be a hidden promoter of this problem through the disruption of hormone signaling in fat metabolism. The term for this class of chemical is called an obesogen, and these kind of substances are consumed with every meal.⁴

An additional problem is that glyphosate is sprayed as part of a proprietary mixture called a formulation that contains several other chemicals such as surfactants and adjuvants. The manufacturer claims that these are ‘inert’ but they certainly are not, being demonstrated to potentiate the toxicity of the glyphosate when tested on human cell lines.^5,6 They may even be toxins and EDCs in their own right.⁷

While exceeding a maximum residue level (MRL) presents obvious hazards, the whole argument is fundamentally flawed: this is because agri-chemicals can be equally dangerous in minute doses, that is, at levels as low as parts-per-trillion.⁸ Significantly, the residue levels in bread and other factory foods are considered irrelevant at such levels.

Unfortunately, a recent article in the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology showed that glyphosate is a xenoestrogen (EDC) only slightly weaker than human oestradiol. Importantly, the scientists found that glyphosate exerted proliferative effects in human hormone-dependent breast cancer cells at levels considered ‘environmentally relevant.’ This means at residue levels found in common food products; moreover, the researchers also found that there was an additive effect with genistein derived from soybean, which is also oestrogenic. The reader can assume an additive effect is also the case with the myriad of other EDCs present in the environment and the food chain.⁹

Any xenoestrogen is certainly of concern in the case of obesity, oestrogen-dependent cancer, and of course the development of the male embryo and male fertility,¹⁰ but what of gut health? The scientific evidence in fact implicates glyphosate in the increasing rates of coeliac disease, non-coeliac gluten sensitivity and dysbiosis which have risen in step with the use of glyphosate in grain production.¹¹

The well-established mechanisms for this effect are varied and indicate a broad impact on physiology:

• Glyphosate inhibits an important enzyme in the shikimate pathway of gut bacteria called 5-enolpyruvylshikimic acid-3-phosphate synthase. The result can be dysbiosis, chronic inflammation and leaky gut, a chain of events that leads to immune system dysregulation and lowered gluten tolerance. Beneficial bacteria such as Lactobacilli and Bifidobacteria which support gluten tolerance are killed by glyphosate.
• The shikimate pathway is critical for the synthesis of the amino acids tryptophan, tyrosine, and phenylalanine and the synthesis of these amino acids is inhibited by glyphosate.
• Glyphosate impairs key enzymes involved in detoxification (P450), vitamin D synthesis, vitamin A catabolism, and bile acid synthesis.
• Key minerals are chelated by glyphosate which makes them unavailable for absorption, including iron, cobalt, molybdenum, and copper.
• Glyphosate causes reduced sulphate supplies to tissues through the impairment of the enzyme sulphite oxidase.
• Glyphosate is cytotoxic and damages DNA.

Glyphosate residue is only one of many possible agri-chemical residues present in bread and was highlighted in this article because of its assumed safety. Its synergistic action with other herbicides and pesticides,³ let alone preservatives and other additives commonly found in bread, can be left to the imagination as little work is done on this hidden problem. It should be understood that the idea of a safe MRL belongs to the licencing authorities who work hand-in-hand with industry to release chemicals for commercial use, and not health authorities. This is why a case for adverse health effects can take decades to build; nevertheless, in any assessment of an adverse impact on health, no allowance is made for individual susceptibility, that is, those more sensitive individuals in the population who appear in naturopathic clinic. The only solution for these patients is to buy organic produce, something also increasingly found in the supermarket.

The topic of adulterants and residues in bread is discussed in more detail in the ebook Bread, Grain And Gluten.

References:

1.         Thompson B. Weeding out the problems with glyphosate. Financ. Rev. 2018; https://www.afr.com/business/agriculture/roundup-worries-weeding-out-the-problems-with-glyphosate-20180820-h148rd

2.         Rendón-von Osten J, Dzul-Caamal R. Glyphosate Residues in Groundwater, Drinking Water and Urine of Subsistence Farmers from Intensive Agriculture Localities: A Survey in Hopelchén, Campeche, Mexico. Int J Environ Res Public Health 2017;14. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5486281/

3.         Nicolopoulou-Stamati P, Maipas S, Kotampasi C, Stamatis P, Hens L. Chemical Pesticides and Human Health: The Urgent Need for a New Concept in Agriculture. Front Public Health 2016;4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4947579/

4.         Legler J, Fletcher T, Govarts E, et al. Obesity, diabetes, and associated costs of exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the European Union. J Clin Endocrinol Metab 2015;100:1278–88.

5.         Vanlaeys A, Dubuisson F, Seralini G-E, Travert C. Formulants of glyphosate-based herbicides have more deleterious impact than glyphosate on TM4 Sertoli cells. Toxicol Vitro Int J Publ Assoc BIBRA 2018;52:14–22.

6.         Mesnage R, Defarge N, Spiroux de Vendômois J, Séralini G-E. Major pesticides are more toxic to human cells than their declared active principles. BioMed Res Int 2014;2014:179691.

7.         Defarge N, Spiroux de Vendômois J, Séralini GE. Toxicity of formulants and heavy metals in glyphosate-based herbicides and other pesticides. Toxicol Rep 2018;5:156–63.

8.         Leu A. The Myths Of Safe Pesticides. US: Acres; 2014.

9.         Thongprakaisang S, Thiantanawat A, Rangkadilok N, Suriyo T, Satayavivad J. Glyphosate induces human breast cancer cells growth via estrogen receptors. Food Chem Toxicol Int J Publ Br Ind Biol Res Assoc 2013;59:129–36.

10.       Clair E, Mesnage R, Travert C, Séralini G-É. A glyphosate-based herbicide induces necrosis and apoptosis in mature rat testicular cells in vitro, and testosterone decrease at lower levels. Toxicol Vitro Int J Publ Assoc BIBRA 2012;26:269–79. 11.       Samsel A, Seneff S. Glyphosate, pathways to modern diseases II: Celiac sprue and gluten intolerance. Interdiscip Toxicol 2013;6:159–84.