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Chris Martenson: Welcome to this Peak Prosperity podcast. I am your host, Chris Martenson, and today is November 28^th, 2016. This is an important podcast about an important subject. Today, we are going to be talking about the chemical herbicide glyphosate. We are going to cut right to the issue affecting your health and that of your children and loved ones. Unfortunately, we are also probably going to undermine any remaining trust you may have in the hybrid system of corporate interest and government regulations that we all live under. According to a new report, glyphosate residues are found in, I will use this word carefully, alarmingly high levels, in a wide range of popular American foods. Luckily, my PhD was in toxicology, so I find the materially relatively straight-forward to interpret and report on, and I don’t trot out that pedigree very often, but today I will.

This report is thorough. It is careful. It is comprehensive. And today we are going to be talking with one of its lead authors. This report was put together by a group called Food Democracy Now and it is calling for renewed Federal investigation into the likely harmful effects of glyphosate on human and environmental health, as well as for a ban on certain uses of glyphosate.

So who is Food Democracy Now? Well Food Democracy Now or FDN is a grassroots community dedicated to building a sustainable food system that protects our natural – excuse me, that protects our natural environment and sustains farmers and nourishes families. Their first campaign successfully put officials endorsed by FDN members in the Obama administration, so they know how to get results. From the FDN website we read “Our food system is fundamentally broken. A few companies dominate the market prioritizing profits over people and our planet. Government policies put the interest of corporate agribusiness over the livelihoods of farm families. Farm workers toil in unsafe conditions for minimal wages. School children lack access to healthy foods, as well as millions of Americans living in poverty. From rising childhood and adult obesity to issues of food safety, air, water and pollution, workers rights and global warming, our current food system is leading our nation to an unsustainable future.” End quote. Now we here at Peak Prosperity share a lot in common with our assessments of the FDN.

Yes, our food system is broken. No, it does not have to remain that way. All of our interviews with Joel Salatin of Polyphase Farm and the Kaisers of Singing Frog Farms, among many others prove there is another way to farm that is actually in relationship to the earth, its rhythms and each other. To tell us about glyphosate and the startling new report they commissioned is Dave Murphy, the founder and executive director of Food Democracy Now. Murphy has been called the most crucial and politically savvy actor in the ongoing efforts to help move American agriculture into the 21^st Century, as a result of his Sustainable Dozen campaign, which resulted in four candidates being placed in high level positions at the USDA, and his efforts to reform food and agriculture under the Obama administration.

In 2006 Murphy moved back to Iowa to help stop a factory farm from being built near his sister’s farm. After seeing the loss of basic democratic rights of rural Iowans, Murphy decided to stay in Iowa to fight for Iowa’s farmers and rural residents and expose the flaws of industrial agriculture to help create a more sustainable future for all Americans. Previously, he has worked as an environmental and food policy lobbyist and political strategist. His writing has appeared in The Nation, The Hill, Huffington Post and the New York Times. Welcome, Dave.

Dave Murphy: Thank you very much, Chris. It is a pleasure to be here.

Chris Martenson: It is really great to have you on, because I admire and support the work that you are doing, first to reform farming as a practice and as a lifestyle; and because we at Peak Prosperity, Dave, we have been poking around the edges of this glyphosate story for some time. I’ve got your report right in front of me. People are going to hear me thumbing through it. And it is titled Glyphosate Unsafe on Any Plate. Hey clear nod to Ralph Nader’s book that shook up the auto industry, am I right?

Dave Murphy: No, absolutely. We think that, much like the automobile industry – the interesting thing, the parallels are very similar. The automobile industry in the 40s and 50s and 60s, they focused on mass producing cars and trying to produce them cheaply. They didn’t put safety first, and when critics of safety records of automobiles first became public, they were vigorously attacked. The interesting things is European auto industry starting with Volvo and then Mercedes and Audi, they took safety, you know safe vehicles and safe cars seriously. One of the things is the European auto industry is doing much better than Detroit at this point. I mean, Detroit fought regulations and they fought safety rules and regulations and people's trust in the American automobile has declined. I think the same thing is happening here in the United States. Basically, these food companies have relied on basically an outdated mode of producing cheap calories that really started under Nixon. Producing cheap calories, that policy or that belief system has not really resulted in producing the safest, healthiest food. There is a lot of cheap calories out there, but if you walk down your average street in America, you will notice one thing – most people do not look healthy and, in fact, we have an obesity academic where over 60% of adults US and American adults are overweight or have or are obese, which is kind of alarming.

Chris Martenson: Indeed. The health epidemic that we are facing is pretty serious. There is clearly something that has gone wrong. Epidemiologically, we have all the data that we need. I like how you are framing this, saying look, when industries come along, they of course want to do things as cheaply as they can, because we have a profit motive and they do that, and then eventually people start to get more sophisticated and they say hey, we would like cars that don’t kill us when we bump into a brick wall at 10 miles an hour. That would be fantastic. Can we do anything about that? And the first response of any industry, of course, is to defend itself and defend not itself, but its profits. And so, I think that is a great way to frame this; that here is an industry. It is time for it to mature – let’s look at the data. And that is why I want to tell you, Dave, how impressed I am at this report. I’ve got it in front of me, Dave. 29 pages cover to cover. It is packed with science. It has got the latest research. Knowns, the unknowns, lots of citations. It is hard hitting, but not sensationalist. I think it is just a great example of how such a report should be done. So, first question – what led your group to put what is clearly a lot of time and effort into producing this report? Why glyphosate?

Dave Murphy: There’s two reasons. You know, one I am from a small town in Iowa. You said earlier in the introduction I moved back to fight a factory farm away from my sister’s farm. And what I really learned is that the rules of democracy are rigged against us. Especially if you are a family farmer, you are someone living in rural America and you support clean water and clean air. You know these industries have figured out a way to kind of lobby and use their political donations or lobby in influence to always rig the rules against the citizens and clean water and clean air and clean food. I will just say Roundup — one of the things is being from Iowa you are always aware of what the biggest industry in your state is, or at least you should be. And for Iowa that is agriculture. And I moved back initially to fight factory farms, but it was very clear there was a real problem with Monsanto bullying farmers in the Midwest, threatening them over, you know, what they claim would be patent violations and making up claims that were illegally saving seeds. That is really how Monsanto first got on our radar. They are bullying farmers in the Midwest and then I started looking into it further. One of the interesting things is Iowa produces 97% GMO soybeans and 94% Roundup ready corn. So Roundup is the main chemical sprayed in our state. The more I learned about it and the more I kept reading about new studies coming out, the more concerns we had.

And then we helped lead these GMO labeling ballot initiatives. We kind of dug into the history of Monsanto. And I studied history in college, so I always like to look if I am analyzing a company, I always like to go back to their long-term history, not just the product that they are producing now. One of the alarming things in Monsanto’s history they produce some of the most toxic chemicals on the planet, including Agent Orange, PCBs, dioxin and DDT. And one of the things about them is that each – in each case of these chemicals that they produced, they were illegal, they were approved by the FDA or EPA and you know I mean the proper agencies the problem is just like the tobacco industry, Monsanto knew that these products were causing harm even to their own workers and they still hid the fact of harm. Even from their – I will just say like if you read the transcripts from the trial of US veterans, you know — Vietnam veterans on Agent Orange, it would really give you pause when you learn that these are the people responsible for producing the seeds, and then the chemicals that go on your food.

So, we chose to do this report because, in the process of our investigation in looking into this, we found out that the USDA had never really even released pesticide residue results for glyphosate. I find that really shocking that it is the mostly widely used weed killer or herbicide in America and also the world, and the US government won’t release basic pesticide residue data to the American public. Those are the things that, as a citizen and a resident of Iowa, I find it kind of shocking. So we looked into these. We did a year and a half investigation behind the science and the regulatory, what I would say, collusion or manipulation by the industry. We looked into it, and then we were able to find a lab that did this testing. We had no idea what we are going to find, meaning we had an idea where it may be, but we had no idea what the levels actually were. I think that the reason we took our time with this report and the reason we made it so detailed is because the highest level was in Cheerios, which is the first, like, whole food that a mother will feed their child as they are transitioning from breast milk to formula. Cheerios is kind of an iconic brand and all the mothers I talk to, the babies love to grab onto them. They are like perfect finger food, because they have that hole in the center. And so it is a perfect food for a mother to automatically give their child. The only problem is a single serving with this level of glyphosate residue is twice as harmful to health, as new research is showing that like the levels we found in Cheerios with glyphosate it was 1,125.3 parts per billion. One serving of Cheerios to a one year old child is twice as evident – current research and scientific evidence shows just that one serving that child would be exposed to a harmful dose of glyphosate.

Chris Martenson: So, let’s start at the beginning. I love starting at the beginning with this then. Glyphosate — so from your report I learned a couple of things. I learned that it was originally patented as a chemical. So glyphosate is a compound. It is a molecule. It was originally patented to clean pipes in 1964. Somebody invented a — Stauffer Chemical — and they are using it to remove unwanted mineral deposits from metal. Pipes, that is what they started with. It does that because it is a chelating agent. That means it binds things. So, anybody that does any or heard about so-called chelating therapies, where you have to take toxic metals out from your body. You have been acutely poisoned or chronically — a chelating agent simply binds things. Vital nutrients such as iron, manganese, boron, in the soil, they get bound up by glyphosate. It wasn't until later; it was 1974, it was discovered — hey, this compound also metabolically poisons plants. So, take us through the beginning of where really glyphosate came from and, beyond that, how did this really come to be such a dominant position in the Iowa landscape?

Dave Murphy: Well, listen, that is a great question. The interesting thing is, you know, Montana likes to claim that and they have claimed this for 40 years — glyphosate is perfectly safe. It is safer than table salt. We even have Monsanto propagandists. They have PhDs, but they still – they are so zealous in their defense of Monsanto’s product. We had a guy, last year, say he would drink a pint of Roundup glyphosate on air and as soon as the interviewer offered him a glass he said oh no, no. I’m not stupid. So clearly, in you know, in theoretical world they claim it's safe, but in reality when they are exposed to it, they say no.

And here are the things, so we you look at the chemical and what actually it does. Not just one, the patent they have for herbicidal or weed killing action, and the interesting thing is glyphosate has three patents and as you mentioned the first one was in 1964 Stauffer Chemical Company in Westport, Connecticut. One of my best friends from college lives in Westport, Connecticut. I found it very interesting it was originally used to clean pipes. It’s like Drano. Like you said it basically strips minerals out of and heavy metals out of a pipe. The fact is, scientists have found with some studies that it actually chelates those same minerals in soil and makes them unavailable into the plant. Apparently, it wasn’t the best you know, it wasn’t the best pipe cleaner or they couldn’t bring it to market at scale at that time. So, at some point in the 60s a Monsanto chemist discovers that this would kill weeds. I think they applied for a patent in ‘68 or ‘69, Monsanto did. They were awarded that patent in 1974, and that is when it first went on the market.

You know, it was used, you know, in forests and to kill weeds on you know, road sides and that kind of thing. It was used in forest management for a long time and in public parks. The other thing is, interestingly though, in the 1980s Monsanto was looking for a way to diversify their portfolio. They didn’t just want to be a chemical company and biotechnology was coming along. And so, several of their scientists cleverly figured out that they could take a gene – they found some weeds that became resistant to Roundup on their property somewhere, and then there are scientists that analyze those plants, and they found a gene in there that made them resistant to Roundup and then they inserted it into corn. They made genetically engineered Roundup ready corn and soybeans. And so, in 1996 glyphosate use really started to explode across the country and had been pretty minimally, I should say, minimally used compared to what it is now. In the last 20 years since 1996 Roundup ready crops they have GMO corn that is Roundup ready, soybeans, cotton, sugar beets and canola. So, Monsanto always says, biotech industry always says, that they are here to feed the world, but these — we need biotechnology and genetic engineering to feed the world. In reality, when you look at the business model and you look at the system of what GMOs or genetically engineered crops have created, it is really a toxic chemical delivery device. They created food crops that allow them to survive being sprayed with Roundup. Everything else in the field dies, but glyphosate and Roundup does not kill those plants that contain those genes.

The interesting thing is today 300 million pounds of glyphosate is used Roundup ready and glyphosate based herbicides are used here in the United States; and in the report we have, this one graph, this one chart on it is on page three, that kind of shows from 1992 prior to this is four years prior to Roundup ready crops being introduced to 2014. I mean, it is just like the states of Minnesota is three quarters covered in all black. Iowa is fully blotted out. Illinois is fully blotted out. North Dakota is mostly blotted out, and so is South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas. And this is just showing you how widespread glyphosate use is. The interesting thing is, the US Geological survey did tests. I think they started in 2007, and they followed up in 2011, when they showed that rainwater and river and stream samples, 75% of them in the Midwest contained glyphosate, which is pretty alarming. It is the chemical that is being sprayed on our food and then it is evaporating into the air and going down wind and you know, being taken up into clouds. It can fall hundreds of miles away from where it is originally applied.

Chris Martenson: Dave, you mentioned a third patent. I think we missed it. What was that third patent one?

Dave Murphy: Yea it – Monsanto’s patent on Roundup expired in 2000, so they went off patent and it is a generic chemical. Other chemical companies can create it. But it is still a third of their – it is still worth over $5 billion for them annually. Interestingly, in the early 2000s they applied for a patent at the patent office for an anti microbial. Not only does glyphosate work as a metal chelator, a mineral chelator and a weed killer, it also has an anti microbial aspect to it. This is where scientists really need to look into that mode of action by which glyphosate operates.

Monsanto has always gotten away, and the regulatory agencies have always gotten away, with saying that glyphosate doesn’t harm humans or mammals because we don’t have what is called a schechemic pathway. Plants have what is called a schechemic pathway, and that is where they produce three essential aromatic essential – I’m sorry, amino acids. And those amino acids produced in that plant, they help that plant grow through photosynthesis, though it also helps with its immune system.

The thing is, glyphosate shuts down that – the schechemic pathway. They are claiming that humans and mammals don’t have it, so there should be no impact on human health. The fact is, humans are interestingly enough, we are an animal. We are a species, but we have trillions of bacteria on our body and in our stomach. The last five or 10 years scientists have really discovered the major importance of the autoimmune is with your stomach bacteria. So, your gut microflora and in fact your gut microflora do have shechemic pathways. So, any level of residue on food has a possibility of going into your stomach and disrupting that essential microflora in your stomach. Just like if you take an antibiotic, it will kill beneficial microorganisms. The thing is, glyphosate does the same thing. It will kill beneficial micro organisms in your stomach and, interestingly, even USDA scientists have shown, Bob Kremer, used to work at the University of Missouri, famously showed research on his brother’s farm that glyphosate was killing beneficial micro organisms in the soil, and as a result harmful ones were coming to the surface. Famously, in agriculture production, when glyphosate is sprayed the usarium fungus is the one that comes up. I would just say it may not sound interesting, it may sound scary, but that is – the rise of usarium fungus in farmer’s fields, it leads to crop diseases. And two of the most prominent crop diseases in Iowa are sudden death syndromes of soybeans and also Gosses wilt in corn. Basically, it happens because there is a real massive imbalance in the soil bacteria and these harmful ones come to the surface.

So, Monsanto basically has a chemical that they are spraying on their food that they have only gotten approval for based on one criteria. And that is the herbicidal criteria. They think of doctors and toxicologists and they start looking at these multiple patents in these multiple mode of actions, they are really going to find in the long run glyphosate is probably even more harmful than DDT to human health and the environment.

Chris Martenson: This is really shocking and I guess it shouldn’t be, but the story here is that I think a lot of people assume that for a chemical that we are going to apply 300 million pounds of to ourselves, that would pretty thoroughly studied. That there would be a variety of studies conducted. In animal studies you would have acute and chronic studies, meaning we find out what the lethal dose is, but then we are interested more long-term. What happens? What happens when we are using this compound and you know what happens to things like cancer formation to embryo formation a long – term reproductive health effects, endocrine system functions. You would think all of that would be studied and, in particular, it wouldn’t just be the stripped out compound, it would be the actual formulation that is used; something that you point out very well in this report, which is that glyphosate is a specific molecule that is called the active ingredient in something like Roundup. But Roundup consists of both glyphosate, plus what they call, insert air quotes, “inert” ingredients which are other things that have their own effects which we should probably study the thing that is being applied as the entire compound rather than just the soul part. How much of those studies have actually been done that we just described? Acute, chronic, long-term as well as multiple species studies?

Dave Murphy: Well, listen. You obviously have a full scope of understanding of the type of what we would think would be rigorous kind of studies that are conducted or reviewed by the FDA or the EPA and the US regulatory agencies. The interesting thing is none of these agencies conduct their own studies to show if this is safe. They rely on the industry to provide them with studies.

Chris Martenson: So Monsanto conducts a study. So, who specifically in the industry has conducted any glyphosate studies that have been reviewed by the USDA and the FDA?

Dave Murphy: Every chemical that is being sought for approval the only science that the agencies will review is corporate sponsored science supplied by that corporation. So, in the case of glyphosate, it was that research, independent research, I shouldn’t say it is independent, because it is not. It is corporate sponsored. That is supplied by Monsanto in the bio tech industry. And the other data, as you mentioned here, is the thing – glyphosate is the main chemical ingredient, but it only makes up 41% of the formula of the weed killer Roundup. And glyphosate by itself does not kill weeds. It does not kill plants. It actually needs that 59% of the other formulation, which is not tested, so that you’re right. They never test the complete formulation for safety. They only test the single active ingredient. The interesting thing is other scientists around the world and even the US have done independent studies and they always show glyphosate is more harmful than Monsanto admits. But even more importantly, Roundup, the entire Roundup formula, is basically 125 times more toxic than glyphosate alone. The US government has kind of rigged the rules against us. The chemical industry helped lobby for that by only requiring the main chemical ingredient to be tested. The interesting things is yes, trade secrets. Monsanto submits trade research and the EPA reviews it.

The interesting thing is I read the old historical documents, which is the EPA and Monsanto going back and forth, and they did studies on rats, they did studies on mice, with dogs, all various animals to get this approved. But the interesting thing was the EPA’s own scientists, when they reviewed some of these studies, were alarmed. In fact, in the 1980s there was a time for several years where glyphosate was considered a probable carcinogen, but Monsanto kept submitting additional studies and additional, what they call, historical data. So eventually, the study that showed it was probably carcinogenic just became noise. They were successful in submitting an avalanche of data, new research from third party labs, that they claimed showed safety and there was no reason for concern.

Chris Martenson: Now this is – so, as a toxicologist, if I wanted to go and read these studies that have been – that were submitted to a public agency so that a compound could be regulated for a public good, where would I go to read these studies?

Dave Murphy: Well, these studies are not publicly available.

Chris Martenson: What?

Dave Murphy: You would have to do a freedom of information act request to get all the original submissions from the EPA. The EPA is the agency that governs approval for a new chemical, new weed killer, and they would submit this research. The interesting thing is, it is not publicly available. It is not listed on the EPA’s website. You can’t find it on any public or federal government website. And even worse is when you FOIA it — I talk to other people who have tried to FOIA this. They send you back a lot of blacked out documents, meaning that they send you some information. But then they black out all this background data, which you can’t in the real scientific community; how can a chemical claim that it is perfectly safe when they only did safety assessments for 41% of that product’s formula? Even worse is when the scientific community can’t review that data independently of the federal government or independently of this company. The scientific community really has no idea if this product is safe. We just have to take the word of Monsanto scientists again, which from my review of history they are most like – they are probably one of the biggest corporate criminals on the planet, just when you review all of the chemicals that they released into the public domain and knowing and even after years of using them they find out they are harmful, they don’t try to get that product off the market. They use tobacco tactics to delay any concern. Ultimately, they are usually defeated in a court situation.

So, the good news is there is about 10 lawsuits right now linking Monsanto’s Roundup to cancer. So there is basically 10 civil suits out there. I think really fundamentally all the data needs to be released by the EPA. It is basically criminal malfeasance on the part of our government and these corporations to continue this.

Chris Martenson: Absolutely. So, I want to get into some of the data here; and for anybody listening, trust me we are going to get to very actionable things. There is a way for you to personally carve your way through this and keep yourself safe. We will get to that in just a minute. But let’s just talk very quickly. I got a little confused and I am a toxicologist, so I got a little confused going through the data. I was unfamiliar with where you talked about the acceptable daily limits have been. There is a term here, which is when we set a dose of something, we set it in terms of how much you weigh and how much of this thing you are allowed to have over some period of time. So, we might express it in milligrams, the amount, per kilogram, per day. So, reading through this, I found that in the US the daily acceptable limit is 1.75mg of glyphosate per kg per day. Did I get that right?

Dave Murphy: Absolutely.

Chris Martenson: That’s an interesting number. 1.75mg per kg per day. That means if you are an 80kg person they are basically saying hey 140mg of glyphosate ending up in you incidentally as you wander about eating things or being rained upon, I’ve just learned, is fine. We are cool with that. Let’s start with that number first. How does, first off, 1.75mg per kg per day, that is a pretty high amount to me, based on – that is, we are saying that is a fairly safe compound. First, how does that compare to what the original number was that was set in the United States that the EPA, I assume, set based on the original data that they had gotten? Let’s start there. What was the original amount?

Dave Murphy: You nailed that perfectly. You mentioned it. The current acceptable daily intake level from the US EPA of glyphosate is 1.75 mg per kg of bodyweight per day. Originally, this was set by the EPA, again based on the research that Monsanto had submitted to them it was at .1 parts per billion. So they increased it quite a bit originally. And the reason they applied for 1.75 mg per kg is because they knew that in – they were already doing research on genetically engineered crops Roundup ready crops. They raised the level as soon as they created a viable plant. The interesting thing is Europe’s assessment of glyphosate’s toxicity or safety they came in, they reviewed the same data and it was the German consumer safety agency or BBL. They set the European Union limit at almost six times lower. It is .3 mg per kg and that is basically after reviewing all the same data. In the process of this investigation, I will just say I had to go through a lot of historical documents that were neither interesting, but they did provide a lot o f fascinating information. And so I looked at the German government; this agency’s original review of glyphosate. It was 1998 when they reviewed this and they looked at the same data and they actually in their report, I think it was a couple hundred page report, they had a fascinating chart. This chart is on page 16, if you want to take a quick look at it. It says multi generational rat studies on glyphosate with recommended ADI levels. So this is a chart and it lists eight different companies applying for the allowable daily intake. They want to set a level, so that way it becomes the industry standard. So all of these other chemical companies are asking for ADI levels at, I mean .1 mg per kg .06 mg per kg .3mg per kg, .05 mg per kg and the US, you know, basically the chemical company in the United States responsible for this chemical, Monsanto, they asked for one that was at 1.75 mg per kg.

And this was so unique that the reviewers actually put this chart in there to show you the differences. More importantly, they said this – this is what they said in their food safety report. They said a very high ADI of 1.75 mg per kg of body weight was proposed in the joint dossier of Monsanto and Caminoba (that is a Dutch chemical company) based on the no, or no observable effect level for maternal toxicity in a teratogenicity study in rabbits. Basically, there is this famous study, Tasker 1980, and basically the European reviewer said it is discussed here, since it is far outside the range of all the other suggested values. So, they were shocked. They looked at the level requests by Monsanto and they just said this doesn’t make any sense, especially based on all of the studies that you have submitted. Rather than expose their citizens to a level of what may be considered harmful, they chose to pick a level that was five and a half times lower.

Again, this is all in retrospect, looking back at this, seeing how the American public has been exposed to very high levels. The interesting thing is as we are trying to get this report covered in the media and the press I had a reporter ask me, going “well, is this an illegal level?” I said “no, it is not illegal.” More importantly, you should