Stephanie Seneff
Today on the Health and Wellness Show, we have a very special interview with brilliant researcher Dr. Stephanie Seneff.

Stephanie Seneff is a Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. She received the B.S. degree in Biophysics in 1968, the M.S. and E.E. degrees in Electrical Engineering in 1980, and the Ph.D degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1985, all from MIT. For over three decades, her research interests have always been at the intersection of biology and computation: developing a computational model for the human auditory system, understanding human language so as to develop algorithms and systems for human computer interactions, as well as applying natural language processing (NLP) techniques to gene predictions. She has published over 170 refereed articles on these subjects, and has been invited to give keynote speeches at several international conferences. She has also supervised numerous Master's and PhD theses at MIT. In 2012, Dr. Seneff was elected Fellow of the International Speech and Communication Association (ISCA).

In recent years, Dr. Seneff has focused her research interests back towards biology. She is concentrating mainly on the relationship between nutrition and health. Since 2011, she has published over two dozen papers in various medical and health-related journals on topics such as modern day diseases (e.g., Alzheimer, autism, cardiovascular diseases), analysis and search of databases of drug side effects using NLP techniques, and the impact of nutritional deficiencies and environmental toxins on human health.

Join us for a fascinating discussion with Dr. Seneff where we'll be covering a wide variety of topics on human health and nutrition.

Running Time: 01:17:33

Download: MP3


Here's the transcript of the show:

Elliot: Hello and welcome to the Health and Wellness Show. Today is March 9, 2018 and I'm your host, Elliot. Joining me today in our virtual studio from all over the planet we have Doug and Gaby. Welcome.

Gaby: Hello.

Doug: Hello.

Elliot: So today I'm pleased to announce that we have a very special guest on the show with us, Dr. Stephanie Seneff. Stephanie Seneff is a senior research scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory. She received her bachelor's degree in biophysics, her masters and EE degrees in electrical engineering and then she also got a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science. But since then she has spent a long time studying various other fields, including nutrition and health and wellness.

She's particularly known for her work in the field of autism, incardiovascular disease, environment toxicity and she has focused a lot of her research on sulphates. This interview is probably going to touch on some concepts which are not very well known and it may get quite technical in some areas but stick with us and I hope you enjoy the show. So welcome to the show Stephanie.

Stephanie: Delighted to be here. Thank you for having me.

Elliot: To start off, I'd just like to ask, since you've got such a wide variety of expertise in so many different fields, and coming from an engineering background, what was it that made you want to start studying nutrition and health and wellness and things, in more depth?

Stephanie: I've always been interested in nutrition and health and I've watched some of the interesting - but I felt incorrect - advice about things like low fat diet, which I never adopted and things like statin drugs which I hated. So I had opinions about the current medical view on food which is not healthy. So I was interested. But it was over 10 years ago when my husband was diagnosed with heart disease, quite by surprise. We didn't realize and he was put on a high dose statin. I'd already hated statins before that happened and so I started doing deep research into statin drugs.

At the same time I was noticing an exponential rise in the rates of autism. The numbers were still pretty small back then, but I could see the exponential growth and that really worried me because I understood how devastating an autism diagnosis is for the mother to have to face the fact that her child may never be able to live on their own, always going to be a challenge to take care of and the loss of that person's contribution to society. So I was interested in both autism and heart disease, really curious as to what was causing the epidemic, wanted to get to the bottom of it, frustrated that most of the research dollar s were going into genetics.

There is a genetic component but that's not the cause. The cause of the epidemic is not genetic because genetics doesn't cause epidemics. It has to be something in the environment.

So I started systematically going through all the toxic chemicals looking for correlations with specifically heart disease and autism and of course also studying those two diseases to understand them better. I really got into sulphate very early in the process because I could see a connection both to autism and to heart disease which was really exciting.

So it all kind of came together, that I kind of realized eventually that they were very different manifestations of the same underlying problem which is a system-wide sulphate deficiency.

Elliot: So just to back up a little bit, for the listeners who aren't aware, would you be able to just briefly touch upon what exactly sulphate is?

Stephanie: Yes, yes. So sulphur is one of the basic elements of the periodic table like oxygen and carbon, those sort of things. If you've had any chemistry you know about these basic elements that build up all of the materials on earth and in the universe. It's quite amazing that the periodic table characterizes all of these individual elements, which are put together to make molecules and molecules are combinations of elements.

Sulphur is right underneath oxygen in the periodic table and it has a lot of the properties of oxygen. In fact it's believed that early life was based on sulphur rather than oxygen. Today of course the oxygen is essential for us but hemoglobin which is an oxygen carrier in the red blood cells, it looks as if it was originally designed to carry sulphur which is quite interesting. So some of the really basic enzymes that do things with sulphur in the body are very, very ancient. They're very ancient enzymes so it's quite interesting to look at the early life.

There are people who believe that life first evolved in the sulphur hot springs which is really fascinating. So sulphur is very basic, very important. Sulphate is sulphur and oxygen. So those two very, very important elements in life combined to make sulphate is actually one sulphur, four oxygens and minus two charge and all of that is bound together in this tetrahedral structure that is a really unique molecule that has really interesting biophysical and biochemical properties.

Elliot: If you were to speak to someone who is typically trained in biology and you were to ask them, "Okay, what functions does sulphur have in the body?" what are some of the established functions? What does it contribute to and why do we need it?

Stephanie: Sulphur is in a small number of the amino acids. The amino acids are the building blocks of the proteins and they're also what the DNA code - famous DNA four letter code - codes for amino acids. There's about 20 of them. A few of them contain sulphur, taurine, cysteine, methionine and homocysteine. Those four are what they call sulphur-containing amino acids. Those amino acids have very special properties and they have a lot of interesting things that they do throughout the body but part of it is just being built into the protein and then doing interesting things within the proteins to make the proteins do their job.

The proteins do all kinds of things. They're enzymes. They're transporters. They're receptors. With all the different activities that are going on to manage life, proteins carry those out. So they're really kind of the work horses of the body. So there's those few that contain sulphur and then there are other amino acids that don't contain sulphur that also have very substantial roles that they play.

But the sulphate is not a protein. It's called an anion and there's a certain amount of free sulphate in the blood. People have probably heard of carbonate or citrate. There's all these anions in the blood, urate, and sulphate is one of them. But sulphate is especially interesting because it binds to other molecules and changes their properties. So sulphate is really important, for example for detoxifying certain toxic chemicals by making them more soluble which then allows access to the enzymes that can break them down or can get them exported to the urine and kicked out of the body.

So sulphate is really important for detoxification of many different toxic chemicals. Sulphate also binds to what's called the extracellular matrix which is this matrix outside the cells which is sort of their interface with the world. The sulphate is actually super, super important for the cell to be able to communicate with the world, for the cell to be able to take in the nutrition that it needs. Many of the activities that the cell does, in its interactions with its outside space, with what there is coming to it from the blood, involves a molecule called heparan sulphate which is attached outside the cell and which orchestrates the communication channels and the import and export of materials. So it's really, really important for the health of the cell.

It's also very important in the red blood cells because the red blood cells carry a molecule called cholesterol sulphate. They decorate themselves with cholesterol sulphate. They don't have a typical extracellular matrix like the other cells do. But that cholesterol sulphate provides a negative charge that makes the red blood cells repel each other so that they don't stick together. That is very important to maintain healthy blood circulation.

So if the red blood cells don't have enough sulphate they can glom together and cause issues with blood flow, create blockages and things like that.

Elliot: So for instance when we eat dietary sulphur-containing amino acids we need to convert those to sulphate, is that correct?

Stephanie: That's right, yes. That's very, very interesting. I would like to talk a little bit about a particular amino acid, taurine, which is really, really fascinating. I've actually studied taurine quite a bit because I find it so interesting and it's also connected to autism because autistic kids tend to have a deficiency in taurine. Taurine is not a coding amino acid. So the other three that I mentioned - I mentioned four sulphur-containing amino acids - three of them go into the proteins. Taurine does not. It always stands alone and in fact it's considered to be inert. The human cells do not have the capacity to break it down which is quite interesting.

However, the liver, the heart and the brain store huge amounts of taurine. They accumulate it and they stuff it inside themselves and hang onto it. And when there is a stressful condition such as a heart attack or for example seizures, in a heart attack the heart releases taurine and in seizures the brain releases taurine into the blood, into the circulation. That taurine goes to the liver, gets taken up by the liver, gets conjugated with bioacids and shipped over to the gut. All of this is done, I believe, in order to let the gut microbes convert that taurine into sulphate. This is a theory of mine. But people are puzzled as to why these organs store so much taurine and why they dump it out. They can't figure it out.

I think it's a way to store a reserve capacity for sulphate when sulphate is severely deficient and therefore the corollary I believe that is severe sulphate deficiency is what drives a heart attack or seizures.

Elliot: In the past I've heard you speak about how the body will preferentially replenish sulphate at the detriment of other functions. So sulphate is in some way really important for our short-term survival, yes? So I guess what I'm trying to say is, would you be able to explain why sulphate is so fundamentally important for the blood flow? What is the exact mechanism there?

Stephanie: Yes well it's quite interesting because sulphate has a unique property. There are a few other molecules that share that property but sulphate is especially good at something called a kosmotrope and this is a particular kind of molecule that is able to turn water into Jello.

So when you make Jello, you get that little package of gelatin and you pour it into the boiling water then you add the cold water and you let it sit in the refrigerator and it turns into something hard, and yet you know it's mostly water but it feels like a substance that's got much more in it than water. It just has that little bit of powder and yet the whole thing becomes this big solid mass of Jello. That is structured water.

This is the thing that Gerald Pollack talks so much about, structured water. Most of the water in your body is structured water and in order for it to maintain that structure it needs molecules like sulphate to support that structured form of the water. I call it liquid ice because it has the same physical organization of the water molecules as what you see in crystals of ice. And that structured water is also called an exclusion zone which is something that Gerald Pollack talks about, that when the water structures like that, it pushes everything out so it becomes really pure water.

This is what happens along the edges of all the walls of the blood vessels. The endothelial cells lining the blood vessels have this extracellular matrix that has these sulphates attached to it. They create this Jello that then lubricates it. It surrounds the internal face of the blood vessel and makes the blood vessel very, very slick. If you think of a gelatin, the surface of Jello is very, very slick and frictionless, so that the red blood cells can just slide right through the capillaries without having a great deal of resistance. It's really important to allow the red blood cells to flow smoothly through the circulation.

The body has an interesting challenge to keep the blood liquid but to maintain this Jello surface at the edge of the blood. So there's a boundary between the structured water and the unstructured water which is just the liquid blood and it's at that boundary that you actually end up having the battery. This is another thing that Gerald Pollack talks about. The structured water not only excludes things but it also is negatively charged. It pushes out protons and then it creates essentially a battery because the protons are attracted to that negative charge so they hang out along the surface of that boundary between the structured water which is the Jello and the liquid water which is the flowing blood. There's a battery that's created along the edge of the artery wall and those batteries are then fuelling all of our cells with electricity.

So that is most, most remarkable, that if you don't have enough sulphate, you don't have enough electricity. You don't have adequate electrical supply to your body.

Elliot: So that electrical supply, does that enter the cell? How does that exactly enter the cell? Is that through the cytoskeleton?

Stephanie: That's what I believe, yes. I believe that the cytoskeleton actually transfers protons. The protons gather at the surface, at the boundary, and then they're gathered up into these interesting little caves called caveolae that are formed in the membrane of the cell and the protons go into there and then they hook up to the cytoskeleton which is this big mesh which is considered to be the structural support for the cell but it doubles also as electrical wires. And then the mitochondria and the lysosomes hang out, they attach themselves to the cytoskeleton. Both of them need to have a charge separation but they need to have a lot of protons. They both require a confined space that's highly acidic. Lysosomes have to be very acidic in order to be able to digest cellular debris and they can pull in those protons from the cytoskeleton which are created through the battery that's provided by the sulphates. So that's how you get back to the sulphate being essential in order for the cell to be able to digest cellular debris. That's the lysosomes.

But also in order for the cell to be able to generate ATP which is the energy-carrying molecule of the cell, the mitochondria generates ATP and they depend upon also the supply of those protons. They have a very negatively charged internal space and then they have an intermembrane space that has all the protons in it. So you create a very strong charge battery in the mitochondria that drives the electron transport chain that produces the ATP.

Elliot: So what you're basically saying here is completely at odds with the current ideas of...

Doug: Yeah.

Elliot: ...I'll say the old fashioned ideas of biology in that the body is made up a bunch of salty bags of fluid...

Stephanie: Yes.

Elliot: ...and all of our organelles are floating around in all of this stuff, whereas actually it seems that the more modern research is actually showing that it's not so much like that.

Stephanie: Right.

Elliot: That there is this cytoskeleton and that many of the interactions between cells and within cells are fundamentally biophysical in nature.

Stephanie: Yes.

Elliot: And I think that's what you're touching upon. Thank you for explaining that Dr. Seneff.

Stephanie: Then of course the main thing is that the cytoplasm is gel and that gel actually holds the ions so that the cell does not have so much trouble maintaining the ion gradients that it maintains, which are also of course critical for the energy for all the things that it does. It needs to have different concentrations of ions between the inside and the outside and it does this of course with pumps which require energy. But if it can actually hold those ions in place because of the structured water, it helps to lessen its burden. It's not as hard for it to keep that ion gradient if its water is not liquid. That's what I'm trying to say.

Elliot: Dr. Seneff, could I just quickly ask, are you familiar with Ling's association-induction hypothesis?

Stephanie: Yes.

Elliot: Okay.

Stephanie: That's what I was thinking of when I was saying that. Absolutely.

Elliot: Okay. Just to clarify, the capillaries and the blood vessels, in order to facilitate healthy blood flow, there needs to be this layer of gel-like water on edge of the vessel layer and that is what helps us to essentially transport things and that also provides electricity for the cell. So what are the factors that can affect that? You touched upon Gerald Pollack's work. His experiments showed that there was an interaction between light and this exclusion zone water. Would you be able to touch on that briefly?

Stephanie: That's so fascinating. I've read some of his papers and I've read a couple of his books. His books are great because they are more accessible to the lay public because his field is extremely difficult and most of the papers that are written in that field are unintelligible. I have trouble understanding them. His papers are more accessible and his books especially. He has a really good way of presenting the information in a descriptive fashion that a naรฏve person can understand. But he showed very brilliantly that when you shine infrared light on this exclusion zone - he sets up these artificial arteries you might call them, using these special materials that are simulating the extracellular matrix - and he can show that when you shine light, particularly infrared light, it causes this exclusion zone water to expand by a factor of four in his experiments.

So when that exclusion zone water expands that's also expanding the capacity of the battery. It's taking the sunlight's energy and turning it into a battery. So it's basically like a solar panel. I consider the skin to be like a solar panel. And the red blood cells are doing this too, I believe. They're making this sulphate. I believe they're using the energy in the sunlight to make the sulphate. This is the thing that is another part of my theory, is having to do with this enzyme call endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS) which is a very highly regulated enzymes with very intricate control that turns it on, turns it off. It makes nitric oxide but what I believe is that it also makes sulphur dioxide when it's attached to the membrane.

So it basically goes from the membrane to the cytoplasm, back to the membrane, under very careful control some signalling is going on to the cells to tell it at any given moment 'should I be making sulphate or should I be making nitrate?' Because those two will oxidize to other enzymes, to either sulphate or nitrate. Sulphate gels water and nitrate ungels it. So what's happening is that there's all this signalling that's going on in the blood to carefully control the blood so that you've got this ability to maintain flow through the nitrate and to maintain gel through the sulphate and to do this with intricate control from the communication channel from whatever else is going on in the rest of the cells in the vicinity. Very interesting communication going on among the cells to maintain the water in the proper state at all times, collectively. Do you see what I'm saying?

Doug: Yeah.

Stephanie: It's really fascinating. eNOS can go back and forth between the membrane depending upon what kind of signalling is being delivered to the cell.

Doug: That's really fascinating.

Elliot: What specifically is it contained within the light source or what frequency of light do you think it is, that has that effect? Do you think it's UV light or do you think it can be applicable for infrared light as well?

Stephanie: I think that eNOS uses blue light, infrared light and UV light for various different purposes to orchestrate this whole sulphate synthesis process. eNOS has attached to it two flavins called FMN and FAD that respond to blue light. And they respond to blue light and emit protons as a consequence of response to blue light and they change the blue light into green light and then it sort of emits energy photons that produce superoxide from oxygen. So this is how you get a source of a reactive molecule that can then react in the eNOS. eNOS has a sulphur, I suspect attached to glutathione, that becomes sulphate by reacting with superoxide that's created by the blue light. So the blue light actually turns out to be very important I suspect.

And then the UV light also energizes the extracellular water, energizes the structured water to make it all more likely to cause reactions. It's trying to energize a reaction to make the cell safe.

Elliot: Okay. So when you do make the sulphate - what was the question? Sorry. When you make the cholesterol sulphate, is there anything that stops your body from being able to use it? In other words, is there anything that stops your body's ability to make the cholesterol sulphate?

Stephanie: Yeah, well this is where I think glyphosate comes in and plays an important role because I think glyphosate messes up eNOS in multiple ways. Glyphosate is the active ingredient in the pervasive herbicide Round-Up. It's supposed to be non-toxic to humans. It's supposed to be a wonderful chemical that we use to kill weeds and it makes our food production much cheaper and more efficient is the claim, and that it's harmless to humans and therefore it's great.

I beg to differ. I think that glyphosate is probably the most important toxic chemical in our environment today. I believe it is the source of the epidemic that we're seeing in autism. It's also actually the source of the high serum LDL problem that we have which puts people on statin drugs and the source of many, many other problems, both cancers and Alzheimer's disease and various gut problems, kidney failure; all kinds of different problems that we're seeing. Rheumatoid arthritis. I connect all of them to glyphosate. I think it's an insidious, cumulative toxin that is pervasive in our environment.

In America we are completely overwhelmed in the health care system right now by all the diseases that people are experiencing, all these chronic diseases, diabetes, obesity, autism. It's just very, very challenging in this country right now to be able to afford health care because so many people are so sick. I blame the epidemic - it's not that glyphosate's the only thing that causes these diseases, but it is causing the epidemic in all of these diseases and it's doing so through a remarkable toxic mechanism which involves its insidious ability to get into proteins by mistake in place of the coding amino acid glycine.

So glyphosate is a glycine molecule with extra material stuck onto its nitrogen atom. I believe it is infiltrating the proteins and messing them up. And so you can go and find all the different proteins that have this natural glycine. One of them is eNOS. eNOS has terminal glycines that are essential for it to be able to attach to the membranes. eNOS also has additional highly conserved glycines that are necessary for it to form a dimer. Normally eNOS has two molecules that go together and they form a cavity in the middle and that cavity contains a zinc atom and that zinc atom is, I think, attracting the sulphur. It's the place where the sulphate happens, where the sulphate is made.

So both the dimer formation and the attachment to the membrane depend on glycine. Glyphosate I believe is substituting for that glycine, messing up the molecules, preventing it from going to the membrane, preventing it from making sulphate and causing therefore a crisis with sulphate insufficiency.

Elliot: Would that help to explain why they're finding glyphosate embedded within muscle meat of animals?

Stephanie: Absolutely!

Elliot: It's actually being incorporated into the collagen.

Stephanie: Yes. Collagen is...

Elliot: You think that's the case?

Stephanie: Yes! Collagen is the most common protein in the body. Twenty-five percent of the body's protein are collagen molecules. Collagen contains a huge amount of glycine. Twenty-to 25% of the amino acids within collagen are glycines. It is really, really unusual in that respect. So it has a huge opportunity to be destroyed by glyhposate and it depends upon those glycines to form its helical structure. It has this triple helix structure that it forms and it has a glycine at every third residue to make that structure work. If you replace those glycines with glyphosate randomly you're going to mess up the structure of the collagen. You're going to mess up its tensile strength, it's flexibility. You're going to mess up its ability to hold water and you're going to cause things like rheumatoid arthritis and all kinds of bone pain, joint pain, that we're seeing. You're going to cause things like an epidemic in opioid drug overdoses. I think it's directly connected to that.

Elliot: So it replaces the glycine but it doesn't have the same effect as the glycine.

Stephanie: It's very different.

Elliot: The protein doesn't work properly, yeah?

Stephanie: Right. Because it has this extra thing attached to the nitrogen which is this methylphosponyl group and that thing is negatively charged and bulky so it totally messes up. Glycine is the smallest amino acid. It has no side chain and it's chosen in certain places in proteins because of that. It has a central role that it plays in many proteins. This is what I'm finding. I'm still finding new proteins every day that have essential glycines that would cause the disease if those glycines are replaced and it's just astonishing that you can actually explain very easily all these diseases that are highly correlated with glyphosate usage.

We've had exponential growth of glyphosate usage on core crops in the United States over the past two decades in step with the exponential growth in autism and Alzheimer's disease and kidney failure, all these different problems, diabetes, are connected. I think they're directly linked to the glyphosate which is accumulating in our tissues.

I'll tell you, Monsanto has a study that Monsanto researchers did in 1989 with something called a blue gill sunfish. They exposed this fish to radio-labelled glyphosate. They had carbon 14 put into the glyphosate so they could track it and then they looked at the tissues of the fish and they found measurable levels of this radio-label in the tissues and when they tried to detect the glyphosate. They found that the method that they used to detect glyphosate depended upon it being an independent molecule and they found only 17% of the radio-label could be accounted for explicitly as glyphosate.

So they were confused. What happened to the glyphosate?

Doug: Wow!

Stephanie: Once they added a digestive enzyme that breaks proteins down into individual amino acids they increased the yield up to something like 57%, still missing quite a bit of the radio-label, which means they were able to break the protein down but not completely. So I think glyphosate makes the protein difficult to break down as well as messing up its ability to do its job, it makes it difficult to break it down. So you end up with a slow accumulation of glyphosate-contaminated proteins that your body can't clear.

And of course it also messes up the sulphate which is needed to break down cellular debris. So you've got these busted proteins that you can't get rid of because you don't have enough sulphate to create the acidic environment that you need to digest and to break down those broken proteins.

Elliot: I'm just going to go over that to make sure that I understand. So the lysosomes are cellular organelles.

Stephanie: Mm-hm.

Elliot: They're basically machines that you use in your cells to break down and recycle tissue.

Stephanie: Yes.

Elliot: Recycle cellular components. So as you were talking about before, how the sulphate is so fundamentally important for that process and the fact that glyphostate not only disrupts this eNOS enzyme but there are several other ways in which it disrupts sulphate metabolism. So if there is an accumulation of glyphosate and then there is a subsequent or simultaneous decrease in the sulphate availability, it's not going to spell out very good things, is it?

Stephanie: No. In fact what will happen is, for example, you will accumulate amyloid beta plaque and get Alzheimer's disease.

Doug: Ah! We actually just had a question in our chat about that. They were asking if there was a connection between the broken proteins and amyloid plaques.

Stephanie: I absolutely think there is. And in fact it's very fascinating. I've been reading and recently got more recent material that I've just been finding on a particular motif. They have these things called motifs which are patterns that show up in certain proteins that are essential for their function and there's a motif that shows up in the Alzheimer's plaque which is called a GXXXG motif. The two g's stand for glycine and the x's stand for wildcards. So you have a glycine amino acid and then three other amino acids and then another glycine in that pattern, GXXXG motif. The amyloid beta plaque has three of these that are highly conserved. There are other molecules that also have this GXXXG motif that are trans-membrane proteins.

The Alzheimer's plaque comes from a trans-membrane protein that becomes disrupted and ends up as a soluble protein in the cytoplasm instead of its proper position in the membrane and it does this under strange conditions that they don't understand but they are targeting that GXXXG motif as being central to the problem because they can find that piece that has that in it, causes the plaque to form. So they're suspecting that those glycines are somehow connected to Alzheimer's. But what they don't understand is that it's because they're not glycine, they're glyphosates that that's happening.

The glyphosate creates a negative charge. That causes it to bind to aluminum and the aluminum causes these molecules to hook together, the aluminum ties them together because you have the +3 aluminium charge and then the two negatively charged glyphosate molecules in two separate instances of this protein that then stick to the aluminum and stick together so you form this kind of complex of these molecules in the cytoplasm which is not where they're supposed to be and which is the source of trouble for the neuron that causes it to die.

Doug: There's this common thought that aluminum is actually what causes Alzheimer's disease but it sounds like from what you're explaining...

Stephanie: Christopher Exley has been doing a lot of research on aluminum. He has recently found high levels of aluminum in autism brains which is quite exciting to me because I've written about aluminum and autism. I think it is a major player in the autism problem. I've written about the glyphosate making the aluminum much more toxic than it would otherwise because the glyphosate binds to the aluminum and neutralizes its positive charge, which makes it much easier for it to get across the gut barrier. And glyphosate also opens up the gut barrier, it opens up the brain barrier and allows aluminum to gain access to the brain and both Alzheimer's and autism are going up dramatically in step with glyphosate usage and both of those have been found to have high levels of aluminum in the brain in association with them. Post-mortem when they examine the brain they find high levels of aluminum.

Elliot: Just back onto glyphosate, if we could, just go over some of the ways in which it does disrupt sulphate metabolism. You've explained how it inhibits eNOS or stops eNOS from working, but it also has lots of other ways in which it disrupts it, doesn't it?

Stephanie: Yes.

Elliot: And it's crazy because when I started reading your work it seemed that glyphosate was just sulphate's worst enemy in every single way! In every single way! Because there's so many ways.

Stephanie: It's truly amazing, yes. And I should mention with eNOS, eNOS is a cytochrome P450 enzyme and glyphosate has been demonstrated to really suppress CYPP450 enzymes in the liver and those are also essential for bioacid formation and also for detoxing many toxic chemicals. So glyphosate makes everything else more toxic than it would otherwise be by disrupting the CYPP enzymes. Starting with the main effect of glyphosate that Monsanto talks about is the shikimate pathway. They'd proudl say that our cells don't have that pathway and that's why glyphosate is safe. However our gut microbes do have that pathway and they use it to make the aromatic amino acids, which are three of the essential coding amino acids I mentioned earlier, tryptophan, tyrosine and phenylalanine.

Tryptophan is a precursor to serotonin and serotonin is produced in largest amounts in the gut and it's actually shipped to the brain attached to sulphate. So serotonin is produced, sulphated and shipped to the brain and I believe it's delivering sulphate to the brain. That's one of its important roles, is to deliver sulphate to the brain. So because of the deficiency in tryptophan which will be deficient in the food because the food is exposed to glyphosate, the plants will not be able to make adequate amounts of tryptophan, so we get a deficiency in our diet and then our gut microbes are supposed to make tryptophan for us as well. They can't do it because of the glyphosate. Tryptophan is deficient, therefore serotonin is deficient. And of course serotonin is also a really important neurotransmitter, precursor to melatonin. That means melatonin's deficient and melatonin delivers sulphate to the brain while you sleep. Melatonin is actually produced by the pineal gland, released when you sleep attached to sulphate.

The pineal gland produces sulphate by day. It's sitting behind the eyes so when the eyes are receiving light the pineal gland produces sulphate and then it's stored during the day and uses that sulphate at night to attach it to the melatonin molecules. So when the sulphate's deficient and the melatonin is deficient, then you get a deficiency in both of those in the brain and you can't sleep and we have an epidemic in sleep disorder in the United States as a consequence.

Elliot: And it also chelates certain minerals, doesn't it, so molybdenum?

Stephanie: It chelates sulphur. So it prevents sulphur itself from being taken up by the cells so you're going to have a deficiency of sulphur in your foods. There's a whole other thing which has to do with methionine synthesis. It's been shown in e-coli that glyphosate suppresses critical enzymes involved in the synthesis of methionine from inorganic sulphur. So when you eat sulphur, you need to produce - again - the microbes. You depend on the microbes to make the methionine which is an essential amino acid, and they make it using enzymes that are disrupted by glyphosate. So, you cannot turn inorganic sulphur into methionine which then results in the overgrowth of bacteria that reduce sulphur to hydrogen sulphide gas which can be toxic in excess amounts.

So, under glyphosate exposure people get an excess of species called desulfovibrio and biophila wadsworthia. These are two species that reduce sulphur containing things like in garlic and onion and in cruciferous vegetables or the sulphides that's in wine or dried fruits - all of those things are going to get turned into hydrogen sulphide gas if your system that produces methionine is not working. And also the protein that oxidizes sulphur to sulphate is called sulphide oxide, that one also depends on haem, eNOS depends on haem. Haems synthesis is disrupted by glyphosate. So there's just a million ways in which glyphosate disrupts sulphur.

Elliot: Yeah, so when you eat something containing sulphur, it has to go through loads of conversions to be able to be made into this inorganic sulphate, which is the usable form, you activate it and then it can be put to use. I swear practically every single one of those pathways is blocked off by glyphosate, which is absolutely amazing. However Monsanto managed to come up with something so, so bad, it boggles my mind completely.

What you just touched upon, this is one of the things that really stood out for me and really made me want to delve into your work quite a lot more, was this idea that there is some sort of adaptation to the body's inability to gain access to sulphate. So what you were just saying, if I'm correct, just to briefly give an overview, when someone eats sulphur containing foods and their body has a problem with converting those because the conversion pathways are blocked by glyphosate, then what might happen is that their body may actually facilitate an overgrowth in certain bacteria in the gut, what we know as gut dysbiosis. It facilitates this growth of bacteria, and this growth of bacteria actually find another pathway to provide the body with sulphate by producing hydrogen sulphide gas. Correct?

Stephanie: Absolutely. Absolutely. It's really fascinating because the hydrogen sulphide gas is very, very mobile. It's like a ghost. It can go through all tissues. It can go through the cell membranes. It doesn't have to be transported in the blood, it just wanders through the body, like a gas. It is a gas and it just wanders everywhere. So the gut microbes produce it and then it migrates in this fashion over to the liver, over to the pancreas, over to the spinal cord, and when it arrives at its destination it can then be oxidised to sulphate by the cells that are in that environment, by those tissues.

But in order to do that you have to have super oxide, so you have to have oxidative damage. So what we're seeing, with a lot of these diseases driven by inflammation, the goal, I think, the main purpose of the inflammation, is to generate the super oxide in order to be able to make the sulphate on the fly from the hydrogen sulphide gas. That's because you couldn't deliver the sulphate, you do not have enough sulphate carriers available to deliver the sulphate to the organ and therefore the organ had to make its own sulphate from the gas that was produced by those reducing bacteria. So, it's an amazing system as an alternative way to transport sulphate by first converting it to this gas and then delivering it to a destination which will then oxidize it back to sulphate, but suffer from collateral damage because of it.

Elliot: The hydrogen sulphide gas produced in the gut can also produce some really unpleasant symptoms as well, can't it?

Stephanie: Absolutely.

Elliot: So, it can produce diarrhoea and inflammation and things like that.

Stephanie: Exactly and that's why people have sulphur sensitivities. When I first started talking about sulphur and sulphate I got a lot of people sending me emails saying 'But I can't eat sulphur', 'I can't eat garlic, it makes me sick.' And that's what caused me to puzzle over that for quite some time before I finally feel like I understood what was going on.

But it's because of the mechanisms that the body has in place, which depend on the gut microbes, but those microbes are being broken, they're being killed by glyphosate, so they're not able to do their job. So, then you have these other microbes that grow instead and that are able to do the same, they're aiming to provide the same solution, to be able to solve the problem of sulphate deficiency through a completely different strategy, which unfortunately involves side effects. And this is what you see I think.

For example gout. We wrote a whole paper about gout which is also going up by the way in step with glyphosate usage. Gout is like an inflammation usually in the big toe, very, very painful, gets red and swollen and comes periodically, usually in the middle of the night. But it's very fascinating when you look at exactly what goes on biochemically in the gouty toe. It's all about making sulphate. In fact hydrogen sulphide gas is produced, then it's oxidized, then you get the oxidative damage, all those same thing; all of this pattern of pain in that joint because that joint is taking on the responsibility of making cholesterol sulphate and delivering it to the blood.

Elliot: This is a completely radical idea because it kind of flies in the face of everything that we think that we know about disease. What you're suggesting is that perhaps what is seen as a disease is actually a way of protecting the body, is actually like a backup mechanism. So there's quite a few other theories that you've come up with which I feel make so much sense. So, you spoke about dysbiosis in the gut and then you wrote an amazing paper with your colleagues and it was about atherosclerosis. So, would you be able to explain what you think the cardiovascular disease or the atherosclerosis actually might be?

Stephanie: Absolutely, yes. I find that very fascinating and of course that is also close to my heart because of my husband's issues. It's interesting that the cardiovascular plaque builds up in the arteries that are feeding the most important organ in the body. People say it's just sort of passively getting stuck there by mistake, got too much cholesterol in your blood, it's just getting piled in your arteries. That's not true at all. It's being actively recruited into those vessels that are supplying the heart in order to have that cholesterol ready to go as soon as sulphate becomes available. So, whenever sulphate's available that cholesterol gets shipped out as cholesterol sulphate as quickly as possible. Whereas if that cholesterol's not there in reserve, you won't be able to take advantage of that sulphate that's now available. The cholesterol in the artery walls supplying the heart is there to keep away heart failure, which is what you will have if you don't have enough cholesterol sulphate supplied to the heart.

Gaby: Can you explain the role of chlamydia pneumoniae, this bacteria that is often found in the plaque?

Stephanie: Yes, it's actually found in the cardiovascular plaque. It's found in the Alzheimer's plaque. Very, very interesting because chlamydia pneumoniae uniquely, and I believe they're the only species that has a unique set of enzymes that produces a molecule that is very, very similar to heparin sulphate. And heparin sulphate is a super, super important molecule in the body. Our body has trouble making it because of the poisons that we're exposed to.

So, these chlamydia pneumoniae can actually help us out by incorporating into the artery wall at the site where the cholesterol is being stored and make the heparin sulphate, which is critically needed to keep the blood healthy that's supplying the heart, to keep the vessels healthy. Heparin sulphate deficiency, by the way, in the ventricles in the brain is directly linked to autism, not only in humans, but also in multiple mouse studies. In fact, a very interesting paper that I read talked about a very specific defect that they introduced into these mice at birth where they interfered with their ability to make heparin sulphate in the brain and these mice demonstrated all of the features of mouse autism.

They have another mouse model that they got by multiple generations of inbreeding in lab mice being fed probably high doses of glyphosate in their feed. So I suspect the glyphosate created the autism in these mice. These mice had a severe deficiency in heparin sulphate in the ventricles along with a missing corpus callosum, which is this bridge across the top of the ventricles that hooks the left and right hemispheres together. So this is two different mouse models that showed this heparin sulphate deficiency in the brain connected to autism that we also see in humans.

Elliot: And what this kind of suggests is that there's some sort of communication, on whatever level it is, that the bacteria that we might allow into our bodies and which supposedly cause infection and are pathological, may not always be pathological. There may actually be some co-operation. Yeah? It reminds me of the various traditional philosophies like Ayurveda or Chinese medicine or naturopathy - talking about the body having this innate sort of sense of intelligence and knowing what it needs at what time. With the different things that you're showing , especially with the chlamydia pneumoniae stuff, that was just fascinating because it seems like that is completely in line with what they've been saying for thousands of years.

Stephanie: Yes, that's very interesting. I also looked into the flu virus which is also quite fascinating because the flu virus goes into the muscle cells, infects them and then reprograms them to basically put little coats of extra cellular matrix around each flu virus particle that's being made. It repurposes the muscle cells. So instead of putting that heparin sulphate outside the door where it would normally do it, it redirects its energies towards coating each of those little virus particles with heparin sulphate and then the cell bursts and it sends all those flu particles on their way, they get taken by the macrophages and the macrophages say 'thank you very much for the heparin sulphate that you just gave me.' In other words, the flu virus is a mechanism to supply the immune cells with heparin sulphate by stealing it from the muscles. The immune cells desperately need heparin sulphate in order to be able to support the immune function.

Doug: That is mind blowing!

Stephanie: Severe immune deficiency is what causes you to get the flu and then flu actually helps to improve your immunity if you survive it.

Gaby: Wow, that's fascinating!

Doug: God!

Gaby: Have you come across another virus with similar properties?

Stephanie: I suspect many of them have that property. I'm trying to figure out Lyme. Lyme really fascinates me because that's a manganese-dependent microbe and I know manganese is severely disrupted by glyphosate. I've written a paper about that. Manganese is a really interesting metal because it has properties that will respond to electromagnetic fields. It's magnetic, it's paramagnetic it's called and I suspect that manganese plays an important role in the electromagnetic communications in the body.

But manganese is the only mineral I know of that can actually travel along nerve fibres and what happens with glyphosate, I believe, is that the manganese ends up accumulating in the liver because normally it would be sent out through the bio acids but the bio acids are broken because of the CYPP enzyme problem. So, the manganese builds up to toxic levels in the liver and in the gall bladder and then it gets shipped out along the vagus nerve over to the brain stem and becomes hyper concentrated in the brainstem nuclei causing things like Parkinson's disease and I suspect ADHD.

Meanwhile, the manganese is not getting delivered to the rest of the body so you have this severe manganese deficiency in the blood which you see. You see manganese deficiency in the hair, in the teeth and in the urine in autism. I think manganese deficiency is a feature of autism but I think it's coincident with manganese excess in the brainstem which is a feature of ADHD. So, the manganese is not getting properly distributed throughout the body because of the effects of glyphosate.

Doug: Do you think that relates to Lyme in some way?

Stephanie: And then Lyme I suspect is able to redistribute the manganese to where it needs to go, just like the flu virus is redistributing the sulphate. That's what I'm suspecting.

Elliot: I recall you saying something about - was it mycoplasma?

Stephanie: Yes, mycoplasmas are fascinating. Oh yes, they hang out just inside the cell membrane and I suspect that they infect cells that have defective mitochondria which is easily the case with glyphosate because there's cytochrome. The oxidaze is crucially and dependent upon glycine. So glyphosate can mess it up and cause oxidative damage to the cell and kill the mitochondria so the cell becomes energy deficient. But the mycoplasmas can hang out just inside the membrane and they can actually convert arginine to ATP. So they can take up arginine, another amino acid, to make ATP, a unique facility that they have that our own cells don't have. They can't do that. So, they are supplying ATP to those dead, to those cells that are severely energy deficient because their own mitochondria are defective.

Elliot: And then do you think the glyphosate stops the body from being able to recycle those defective mitochondria?

Stephanie: Oh yes, of course, because that's all depending upon functioning lysosomes and the lysosomes are destroyed by the glyphosate.

Elliot: Right.

Stephanie: There's a chloride channel problem as well by the way. The chloride channel is really fascinating. The chloride channel has an essential glycine residue at its squeeze point. It's sort of like an hour glass and it has a glycine residue at the squeeze point and if you change that glycine into a negatively charged amino acid, which is what a glyphosate is, you completely block the ability of chloride to get past the channel. That's how you can get problems with the stomach not producing enough hydrochloric acid. So you have insufficient acidity in the stomach which will lead to SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, which we have an epidemic in that today as well. Also, the chloride channel is crucial for the lysosome. The lysosome needs both hydrochloric acid and sulphuric acid to produce the acidic environment that it needs to digest the foods. Both of those are screwed up by the glyphosate.

Elliot: Yeah, low stomach acid just seems to be such a common thing these days. As you said it's epidemic and no one seems to be able to explain it other than stress. People will supplement with tons of betaine hydrochloric acid, but it never gets better. So there has to be an answer as to why the body is not producing enough pancreatic enzymes, why the body is not producing enough bile and stomach acid. Sorry go ahead.

Stephanie: I didn't want to interrupt you because I don't want to lose my thought because this is great. The parietal cells in the stomach and the acinar cells in the pancreas, they are both types of cells that produce a lot of proteins that they excrete. Of course, the acinar cells produce all the pancreatic juices. The enzymes, the trypsin, the pepsin, the lipase are all produced by those. So they have to produce a lot of protein and ship it out, which means they have to take up a lot of amino acids. The same thing for the intrinsic factor that's produced by these same cells that make the hydrochloric acid, the parietal cells in the stomach.

So, both of those two cell types, because they need to make a lot of protein, that means they need to take up a lot of amino acids, glyphosate is taken up along the amino acid channels because it's an amino acid. That's been shown in studies. So, what happens is those cells get much higher doses of glyphosate than other types of cells for that reason, because they need a lot of amino acids. So, they get especially clobbered and then they end up putting the glyphosate into those proteins that they make so that the intrinsic factor becomes defective, the trypsin becomes defective.

Trypsin has four separate regions that are glycine-rich and each of them has a different role that it plays but the molecule is going to be really disturbed if it's got glyphosate thrown in at various places in place of glycine. Trypsin won't work. Digestive enzymes won't work. Proteins won't get digested. That sets up a leaky gut barrier, those undigested proteins get out into the circulation. The immune cells respond with autoimmune disease. Basically, you get antibodies to these foreign proteins which then become auto-antibodies to your own proteins through a process called molecular mimicry.

Elliot: Stephanie, we have a question from someone in the chat. What they've asked is should people with a hydrogen sulphide SIBO, so an overgrowth of say desulfodevibrio, should they try to kill that bacteria off like they typically would with antibiotics, or should they try to address the issue of sulphate deficiency or glyphosate toxicity first?

Stephanie: I know, and that's a hard question to answer. I don't like antibiotics. I would much prefer probiotics as a solution, I would prefer natural probiotics such as eating sauerkraut. My husband actually makes his own sort of pickled vegetables which is really fun. You just start with wine and you know, you just let it sit in a tight jar for a while. It's really great. You can make your own pickled vegetables, but the acetobacter is a common microbe in vinegar. We like to use Bragg's organic apple cider vinegar. Acetobacter is among the very few microbes that can actually metabolise glyphosate.

So one thing you can do is eat probiotics, eat natural probiotic foods in order to get microbes in your gut that can actually clear the glyphosate, very, very important. So I recommend that. I think antibiotics are really tricky. One of the things - and I'm almost afraid to recommend this because there's so much controversy - but there's a woman named Kerri Rivera who lives in Germany and she claims she has reversed autism in something like 360 kids have had their autism reversed. She uses an organic diet and probiotics, and humic acid and fulvic acid which are organic matter from the soil. And she uses hyperbaric oxygen therapy and also she really likes chlorine dioxide which is the controversial thing that she uses. She has told me that without the chlorine dioxide she has not been successful in reversing the autism so I find this really, really interesting. I want to understand what it is that the chlorine dioxide is doing.

Well that going to actually provide chloride to the immune cells in the gut which will allow them to then produce hypochlorite, which is a very powerful antimicrobial agent that the body naturally produces to fight the microbes. People say the chlorine dioxide is like eating bleach, and therefor they say that it's really bad, although they let their kids swim in water that's been treated with chloride. So, it's basically like Clorox. The American medical establishment have been really down on Kerri for this chlorine dioxide. She gives it to them in very small amounts and she has not had any bad reactions. She's treated thousands of kids around the world. She treats very few children in America because America has basically put her on a black list essentially. So Americans are very shy about taking this chlorine dioxide. But people in India, in South America, in Europe have all had success with reversing autism through chlorine dioxide.

I think it's because it's providing the chloride. The chloride channel is wrecked by glyphosate. The chloride is actually disturbed in the brain which causes GABA to go in the wrong direction. It's a very interesting process that happens at birth that turns GABA into an inhibitory neurotransmitter instead of an excitatory one. And that all depends on chloride channels that can get destroyed by glyphosate. So I think GABA ends up in the wrong direction in the brain and that's part of the issue in autism that can be fixed.

You also have a lot of diarrhoea which causes you to lose sodium chloride, so you end up with a chloride deficiency problem. It's kind of interesting because chloride is a bit like sulphate. Both of them are so common that people don't realise that they could be deficient. But I think both of them are deficient in the context of glyphosate.

Gaby: Then we have the problem of hidden sources of glyphosate. I can eat organic, but if I take supplements with enzymes that contain glyphosate then it's not really good for you.

Stephanie: Absolutely and in fact Anthony Samsel ordered porcine trypsin and pepsin and lipase, he ordered them from a lab, he had them tested and all three of them tested high levels of glyphosate in them.

Doug: No way!

Stephanie: People forget to worry about glyphosate in supplements. Yes, very scary.

Elliot: That's insane.

Stephanie: Which makes me believe that that's what's happening with the pancreas. The pancreatic acinar cells are taking up the glyphosate and putting it into those molecules that they're producing.

Elliot: That would make perfect sense. So, I'm conscious that we're coming up on our time Stephanie. Before we finish I'd really like you to touch upon what are some of the things we can do? First of all, is it the idea for everyone to increase their sulphur intake or are there some things that they should keep in mind while they're increasing sulphur intake?

Stephanie: Yes, obviously you need to get your gut microbes healthy. That's really number one, and certainly organic. My husband and I only buy certified organic when we shop. We always buy the highest quality food we can find. We feel it's worth the extra money because you're going to get your money back in all the health care costs that you don't incur by virtue of staying healthy and not getting Alzheimer's disease which is a very clear threat these days.

I really believe in sunlight so I work hard at a getting outside in the sun, without sunscreen, without sunglasses. I even don't wear my glasses when I'm outside in order to be able to optimize the sun receiving into the eyes to help the pineal gland to produce the sulphate which I think is crucial to protect from Alzheimer's disease and autism.

I see sunglasses on two year olds and I just want to rip them off. I have a very hard time not saying something to the mother because we've been trained to protect from the sun and the sunscreen is toxic. It has aluminium in it. The aluminium can work synergistically with the glyphosate to destroy the eNOS, so aluminium will actually actively mess up your skin's ability to make sulphate. Melanin is derived from the shikimate pathway so you have a problem too with tanning. If you're getting a lot of exposure to glyphosate you won't be able to tan because you don't have enough melanin in your skin.

So, organic diet, getting out in the sun. If you live near the beach, make it a habit to take a walk on the beach as frequently as you can - bare foot in the water, along the shore - very, very healthy. You're getting very good grounding in the salt water and of course you're getting the sunlight and the healthy sulphur air over the ocean. Very, very, healthy activity. And of course, the exercise is always good. Eating is basically high sulphur foods. If you have a sulphur sensitivity then you have to fix the gut first. Again, I don't really like antibiotics. You'd have to do it under doctor's supervision. It might be that there'd be a way to do antibiotics, probiotics, you know. There's faecal transplants which is interesting, faecal transplants. People have had tremendous success with that. It sounds a little odd, but that's a way to jump start your microbiome if you've got a healthy source.

And then there's these chelating and detox enemas and things like that may be helpful to help get rid of some of the toxicity. Toxic metals are of course an issue. The metals are all messed up by glyphosate and all of the toxic metals are made more toxic. And even the non-toxic metals are made toxic, so iron becomes a problem, manganese becomes a problem with glyphosate. You absolutely need to get rid of the glyphosate and it's very difficult to get the glyphosate out of the proteins that are already damaged by the glyphosate sitting in your brain, unable to be cleared. That is just really, really difficult and you have to work on getting enough sulphate into your brain in order to activate the lysosomes that can help to clear that debris that's building up in your brain and it's eventually going to give you Alzheimer's disease.

Elliot: Yeah, it's got to be that two-pronged approach, doesn't it? Not only avoiding the glyphosate, but really trying to increase that sulphate as well. And also the sulphate utilization. I know that one of your colleagues has found that some of his clients have benefited from taking molybdenum supplementation, is that correct?

Stephanie: That's right, yes. All of the minerals. I really recommend using Mediterranean sea salt instead of using table salt. I hope people know that but table salt is just sodium chloride, whereas these salts that are dried from the sea have all of the minerals in the appropriate balance typically that you would want to have. It's dangerous I think to take just mineral salts like just plain zinc or something like that because you can easily get them out of balance. If you get one too much it will compete with another because it will end up being deficient because of an excess in one.

There are also a lot of sulphur containing supplements that you might want to try, and my husband actually takes one that's methylsulfonylmethane, chondroitin sulphate and glucosamine sulphate all packaged into one. He takes that on a regular basis and we also both of us take organic turmeric. Turmeric is an amazing molecule. There are so many papers written about its benefits. I think it's main benefit is that it's transporting sulphate from the gut to the liver and there's a lot of those polyphenols and flavonoids that are found in fresh fruits and vegetables. I believe that one of their main purposes is to get the sulphate delivered to the liver to maintain a healthy liver which is of course very crucial.

Doug: That's very interesting because the mainstream media has been bashing turmeric lately. Really going off the charts.

Stephanie: That's really sad. I've seen so many papers showing the benefits of turmeric. I've seen papers also that talk about where they have done studies. Resveratrol is another one which is found in grapes and wine. It also transports sulphates. So all of these that I'm seeing, these interesting molecules that are complicated molecules made by plants, almost all of them transport sulphate. It's very, very interesting. I think that's one of their main purposes.

Gaby: Maybe that's why sulphoraphane is so popular, broccoli sprouts?

Stephanie: Yes, absolutely. I really recommend cruciferous vegetables. We eat a lot of them. We just had Brussels sprouts last night. We have cabbage. We're eating those all of the time. Really, really healthy foods. And of course garlic. We eat huge amounts of garlic. We also eat ginger. Fresh ginger, fresh garlic. So herbs and spices also, like - oh, I'm blanking...

Elliot: Coriander?

Stephanie: Yes! Coriander. That's amazing. I love coriander but I lost the word there for a moment. I love it.

Elliot: Tastes so good.

Gaby: It's my favourite herb.

Stephanie: Yes, and all organic, you know it has to be organic. There are other supplements that contain sulphur and of course glutathione. Glutathione is three amino acids and one of them is glycine. So I've often wondered whether the issues with glutathione have to do with glyphosate substituting for glycine in the glutathione.

Gaby: Yeah, that's what I was going to ask. Will supplemental glycine help?

Stephanie: Right, and people ask me that and it makes sense that it would because if you have more glycine then it's less likely to get the glyphosate to substitute. However, glycine itself can become toxic in excessive amounts because it will substitutes for alanine during protein synthesis if there's too much of it.

Elliot: Okay, how much is too much?

Stephanie: I don't know. I generally like to try to eat foods rather than supplements. First of all because I'm never quite sure of the processing that went into the supplement and whether it's going to be glyphosate-free or not whereas I can buy organic food. You can get organic supplements, which is what I do with the turmeric. And of course the gel cap itself can be problematic especially gel caps that's derived from gelatin that's derived from cows and pigs that is fed heavy doses of glyphosate, you're going to have contamination in your gel cap. So that's worrisome.

So I just like to eat whole foods. Most of what we eat is fruits and vegetables and healthy meats and fish. We like chicken liver. Organic chicken liver I think is one of the healthiest things you can eat. Loaded with vitamins, minerals and cholesterol. My husband who has heart disease eats a high cholesterol diet which kind of blows the mind of his doctor.

Elliot: Yeah. Well is there anything else that you would like to share with us Stephanie? Is there anything you're working on now or anything you'd like to promote or anything?

Stephanie: I'm just absolutely fascinated by this idea of glyphosate substituting for glycine during protein synthesis. I have two papers that are now on the web but are not yet available from the journal, but they've got the links there so they're coming up soon from an open access journal - two papers that are companion papers on glyphosate as the critical factor in kidney failure among the sugar cane workers in Central America. It's really been a catastrophe there for the young men. Fathers of young children are dying in record numbers of kidney failure. a bizarre form of kidney failure among the people who work in the sugar cane fields.

There have been a lot of papers written about it but it seems very, very clear to me that glyphosate is the key factor in that disease. What was fascinating was, when you look at the particular unique symptoms that they have, you can find specific proteins that have essential glycines that if they were disrupted by glyphosate, would cause exactly those symptoms, so it's really quite a beautiful story.

And that's what I'm finding with every paper that I write. I go deep into one particular topic such as anencephaly. I mentioned gout earlier. I've done one on ALS which is quite amazing, various proteins that have been linked to ALS, to the familial ALS that's with the genetic mutations. Those mutations are often glycine residues within certain proteins that are causing the ALS. So you're seeing familial ALS showing up earlier in life due to the fact that a protein has a misplaced glycine. There's no longer a glycine at that place but now you're seeing the person who gets ALS without the gene is getting it because glyphosate is substituting for that same glycine residue. That's what I think.

So, it's just amazing what I am finding. I don't have enough time to dig through all the research. But the research is already done. This is what is fascinating to me, the research is already done that shows all of this evidence which to me overwhelmingly supports the concept that glyphosate is substituting by mistake for glycine during protein synthesis and I think that is how you can explain why one single chemical could be causing so many diseases as we're seeing in all those correlations. It's very, very strong temporal correlations between glyphosate usage and all these different diseases. It can be explained through this one mechanism.

Gaby: You also spoke about gluten intolerance.

Stephanie: Yes, gluten intolerance is easily explained by glyphosate because the wheat is sprayed with glyphosate right before the harvest and it's been shown that glyphosate is present in high levels in wheat based products.

Doug: Wow.

Stephanie: And it's going to get into the gluten and make it difficult to break down, but it's also going to get into the trypsin which makes it difficult for the enzyme to work and so you get those undigested peptides causing auto immune disease.

Gaby: This is very shocking. Knowledge protects. That's our motto.

Stephanie: I see that there's a question here about the sugar cane fields and it's not that it's GMO sugar cane, it's that the sugar cane is treated with glyphosate shortly before the harvest as a ripener because it increases the yield of sugar. It causes it to produce extra sugar.

Doug: Same with wheat.

Stephanie: Yes, well wheat yes that's right. It's a ripener also by the way, on chick peas and garbanzo beans, lentils, all of those legumes. High, high levels of glyphosate in those.

Doug: Jeez.

Elliot: It really does paint a disturbing picture doesn't it?

Stephanie: Yes, it's terrible...

Elliot: It really does..

Stephanie: ...and I think we have to do something quick or else we're just going to pretty much destroy the earth, you know? It doesn't look good.

Gaby: Speaking about infertility problems, it's also related.

Stephanie: Absolutely, absolutely! In fact the sperm contain a motility protein, a protein that allows them to move, that is critically dependant on glycine. So, if you start throwing glyphosate into the protein that is a contractile protein for the sperm to be able to move then you're going to be able to have sperm motility problems which is certainly connected to infertility. It's called dynein.

Doug: Jeez.

Elliot: Alright. Does anyone else have any questions?

Doug: I think we've covered a lot, everything I wanted to cover.

Stephanie: That was a lot! A little bit more than glyphosate.

Elliot: Yeah.

Gaby: We could keep going.

Elliot: We could probably go for like seven more hours but we are conscious of your time Stephanie.

Stephanie: Okay, thank-you.

Elliot: I want to thank you again for coming on the show.

Stephanie: Thank you. It was great.

Elliot: You've covered so many topics today and it's impossible just to listen to this interview and try and understand even a portion of what you said because there's so much information behind it. This is why I would recommend all of the listeners - we'll post a link to Stephanie Seneff's website. in fact I'll read that out right now. Sorry, would you be able to read out your website, Stephanie?

Stephanie: Yes, yes http://people.mit.edu/seneff that's my last name. And I also by the way have a novel that I published recently, I wrote the novel probably eight years ago when I was first discovering all of this stuff and it's about two mothers who are friends and who discover all the problems with the food and the vaccines and things like that and it's called Cindy and Erica's Obsession to Solve America's Health Care Crisis. It talks about a lot of this stuff. They're on a mission to understand things and then Cindy writes blog posts and it gets into a lot of science even though it's a novel.

Elliot: Fantastic, yeah. Is that available on Amazon?

Stephanie: It's available on Amazon, yes.

Elliot: Oh, Ok. Fantastic.

Stephanie: 'Cindy and Erica's Obsession' if you can remember that much.

Elliot: I'd just like to recommend everyone who's listening if they want to find out more about her work, go to that website and there are tons, I mean there are basically lots and lots and lots of different resources, There's lectures, there's videos, there's audios, there's papers, there's everything you can think of. But it's all about sulphate and it's all about this really interesting information and I think it's really important and it's quite hard to understand, but when you start to get your head around it, it makes a lot more sense.

Stephanie: There's also a lot of slides there, I post a lot of slides for my talks and people should feel free to repurpose those in any way they want because I'm very eager to get this message out to the world.

Doug: That's great.

Elliot: Right, well thank you for coming on Stephanie and just carry on doing what you are doing.

Stephanie: Thank you.

Elliot: It's a great service to humanity.

Doug: Yes.

Stephanie: Thank-you. I'm trying. Spread the world. Thank-you.

Elliot: Thank you for joining us everyone today. It was the Health & Wellness Show and see you next week.

Doug: Bye everybody.

Gaby: Bye.