Canary

I had a few ideas for naming this blog, including “Defensive Living” and “Eye of Sauron,” but ultimately settled on the Cancer Canary. Because, like a bird in a mineshaft, my health indicates a much larger picture.

Finding out that my cancer (CLL) was linked to glyphosate (Roundup) caused me to look much closer at this situation, not just in how it affects me but how it affects us all.

Dr. Zach Bush explains it better than I can:

… this march of metabolic collapse, we now can map this back to this ever-increasing amount of herbicide, which was disrupting our metabolic function of the microbiome within soils, and ultimately, our gut, as we consumed the residues of those herbicides.

In the late 1980s, Monsanto and other chemical companies started to recognize the carcinogenic effect of these chemical compounds, and they published that — they showed that — with enough Roundup or glyphosate, you could induce cancer changes in cells. But they couldn’t imagine, at that time, in the late 1980s, that we would ever be able to apply that much chemical to the environment, because it would kill the crops themselves.

Because, in the late 1980s, we could not imagine that, within just a few short years, we would learn to genetically modify wheat, corn, soybeans, legumes of all kinds — even roses and petunias and everything else — genetically modify them to handle being sprayed directly with this glyphosate toxin.

The herbicide glyphosate would take off in 1996 as a direct crop treatment. Before that moment, you had to spray weeds directly and you had to keep the residues very low or else the corn crop would die.

With the advent of genetically-modified corn and beyond, we suddenly could spray the entire field directly — the food that we were eating — with these chemicals, and allow for the food to continue to be delivered.

And so, genetic modification of our crops has led to an explosion of the use of these chemical compounds in our food. And the result was high residues in not just soil systems, but water systems, because these are water-soluable toxins.

So the water-soluable toxins of glyphosate would get integrated into our freshwater runoff from the farms, wound up in our river systems, which would ultimately end up in oceans.

The whole time, you have evaporation going on, which allows the glyphosate to be present in the air you breathe and ultimately in the clouds that would then come down in rain.

That entire hydraulic cycle would become contaminated with this glyphosate chemical.

Glyphosate is now the most ubiquitous antibiotic on earth. It kills bacteria, fungi, protozoa, parasites. It kills the stuff it touches. And in so doing, it has denuded the diversity of life within our soil and water and air systems.

In the United States today, for example, 85% of the rain that we see and 85% of the air we breathe is contaminated with Roundup. This extraordinary fact has led to the phenomenon that we are all expressing this chemical within our systems.

In some recent clinical trials that we’ve done in our laboratory, we were measuring the effects of glyphosate on human systems, and measuring the ability of bacteria and fungi, through their communication network, to repair the damage done by this chemical.

So we brought in a bunch of people, studied their blood and urine, etcetera, and we could not find a single person that wasn’t peeing Roundup.

— Dr. Zach Bush, MD, Healing Secrets: The Wisdom of your Microbiome