Health & Fitness

Puzzled by the mass deaths of birds and fish in Alabama? It's also happening elsewhere, across the Eastern and Southern U.S. and around the world -- Gizmodo has a handy map of all the U.S. events.

The Activist Post offers some theories. Before you read them, however, bear in mind what Yahoo News has to say about the subject:

"... [M]ass die-offs happen all the time and usually are unrelated ... Federal records show they happen on average every other day somewhere in North America. Usually, we don't notice them and don't try to link them to each other ...

And there have been much larger die-offs than the 3,000 blackbirds in Arkansas. Twice in the summer of 1996, more than 100,000 ducks died of botulism in Canada."

Here are the theories listed by the Activist Post:

Mainstream Explanations: These have included lightning, hail, mid-air collision, power lines, and New Year fireworks for the birds, and a disease for the fish. But this seems like a heck of a coincidence, and where are the roasted birds from a lightning strike?

Meteor showers: During this period of intense seasonal meteor shower, some people reported hearing sonic booms in the area that might have been an indication of a local shock wave.

New Madrid Fault Line: Could it be related to the recent earthquake activity along a fault line that runs along the mid-eastern section of the U.S.? Could it have dispersed pollutants into the water and atmosphere?

Government testing: Only certain species have been affected, but within the entire region. And some reports have indicated that the organs of the birds were liquefied -- could this implicate species-specific bio-weapons?

GMOs: There are other die-offs are happening across other species, such as bees and bats. Some think they could be poisoned by genetically modified plants.

Geoengineering: Could spraying in the area have caused this?

HAARP: Both birds and fish navigate in highly coordinated ways. Could the HAARP array off in Alaska have short-circuited their navigation systems? Or is it the result of electromagnetic pollution for other human devices?

Scalar Weapons: Some wonder if the cause is directed energy beam weapons deployed via satellite.

Project Blue Beam: Another theory is a sound generator weapon.

Geomagnetic and other Earth changes: The magnetic pole is moving. Add to this a dwindling magnetosphere and falling oxygen levels, plus an increase in sun activity and magnetic storms.

Update: A Wisconsin lab has apparently determined that the birds, at least, died of blunt force trauma.

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The majority of Americans are being misled by official health recommendations to eat “healthy” vegetable oils. Even the term “vegetable oil” is misleading because it gives you the impression that you are receiving vegetable micronutrients when these oils are actually highly toxic, industrially-processed seed oils. Seed oils are some of the most dangerous items you could eat.

This is even more of an issue today as the high amounts of oxidative stress these oils cause seriously impair your immune function and radically increase your risk of all infections including COVID-19. In my view, eliminating all seed oils is every bit as important as optimizing your vitamin D level to decrease your risk of COVID-19.

In the video above, Dr. Chris Knobbe, an ophthalmologist and founder and president of the Cure AMD Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to the prevention of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), gives an excellent synopsis of why seed oils are the unifying mechanism behind westernized chronic diseases like heart disease, obesity, cancer and diabetes.¹

While most have heard about the health risks of eating processed sugars, net carbs and trans fats, seed oils far surpass all of these in the damage they cause to your health. If you were to make one change today to lower your risk of chronic diseases, eliminating all seed oils from your diet would be the highest priority.

By 2006, 88% of Americans Were Metabolically Sick

Heart disease, now the leading cause of death in the U.S.,² was virtually unknown in the 19th century. The same goes for cancer, which caused 0.5% of deaths in 1811 and 5.8% of deaths in 1900 — spiking to more than 31% of deaths in 2010.³ A similar pattern emerged for diabetes, which rare in the 19th century and had a prevalence of 0.37% in 1935. By 2020, there was a 28-fold increase in 85 years, to a prevalence of 10.5%.

Obesity? Same story. With a prevalence of just 1.2% in the 19th century, obesity increased 33-fold in 115 years, to a prevalence of 39.8% in 2015.⁴ By 1990, meanwhile, 24% of U.S. adults were diagnosed with metabolic syndrome, which is a combination of high blood pressure, dyslipidemia, insulin resistance, hyperglycemia and visceral obesity.

By 2009-2015, 88% of U.S. adults did not meet five criteria for metabolic health, measured by blood glucose, triglycerides, HDL cholesterol, blood pressure and waist circumference.⁵

Macular degeneration and osteoarthritis followed similar striking increases, with Knobbe asking the question of what was so ubiquitous during this time that could have prompted these changes. Dietary history provides the answer, with the introduction of four primary processed foods — sugar, industrially processed seed oils, refined flour and trans fats — acting as the culprits.

“I believe this is a global human experiment for which no one gave consent. Nobody saw this coming. They wouldn't have signed up for it,” he says.⁶ Knobbe also cites the work of Weston A. Price, the dentist who wrote the classic book “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration.” In the 1900s, Price did extensive research on the link between oral health and physical diseases.

He was one of the major nutritional pioneers of all time, and his research revealed native tribes that still ate their traditional diet had nearly perfect teeth and were almost 100% free of tooth decay.

But when these tribal populations were introduced to refined sugar and white flour, their health, and their perfect teeth, rapidly deteriorated. “Weston Price connected these foods, these very foods essentially, to physical degenerative disease in 1939. Nobody listened,” Knobbe says.⁷ Knobbe seems to be the 21st century equivalent of Price.

Why Seed Oils Are Like Arsenic

The problem with seed oils is that they’re industrially processed, proinflammatory and drive oxidation in your body. Health officials like to state that seed oils are great for you because they lower cholesterol, but as Knobbe says, so does arsenic. The two toxins actually have quite a bit in common:⁸

“We may think this is a joke, but actually, incredibly, there's many parallels between [arsenic] and seed oils, not the least of which is the fact that arsenic is fantastically oxidative, pro-oxidative. And this is exactly how seed oils get us. They drive the oxidation. They're pro-oxidative, proinflammatory and toxic, but of all of these, it is oxidation. That is by far the worst.”

You’ll find seed oils in most processed foods, including fast food and even many expensive restaurants. “Even the finest restaurants are using seed oils because they're about one-sixth the cost of butter,” Knobbe says.

The reason they’ve been able to remain in the food supply, despite their high toxicity, is because they’re not acute biological poisons but chronic ones:⁹ A solid strategy when eating at a restaurant is to avoid ALL the sauces and dressings, as they are virtually all loaded with seed oils.

“They were brought in slowly, beginning in the 1860s. And they were first used to adulterate lard and butter, and then gradually they were used to supplant and replace lard, butter and beef tallow. And that's how they got away with this. And so we gradually became overweight and sick, and they've kept them in the food supply that way.”

In addition to being proinflammatory, Knobbe points out, these seed oil poisons are also:¹⁰

Cytotoxic	Genotoxic
Mutagenic	Carcinogenic
Thrombogenic	Atherogenic
Obesogenic

One-Third of US Caloric Intake Is Seed Oils

Knobbe’s published data show that seed oils, which were introduced into the U.S. diet in 1866, made up 32% of Americans’ diet by 2010, which amounts to 80 grams per person per day.¹¹ In contrast, in 1865, most people would have only about 2% to 3% of their caloric intake from omega-6 linoleic acid, found in seed oils, which would have come from butter, lard and beef tallow.

Ancestrally raised animals had very low omega-6, but this changes when animals are raised in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) the way they are today. CAFO pork may contain 20% omega-6 fats, for comparison.¹² Knobbe highlights several native populations that have very low rates of chronic diseases and comparatively low consumption of linoleic acid, such as the Maasai Tribe of Kenya and Tanzania.

They eat primarily milk, meat and blood — a diet that’s 66% animal fat (33% to 45% saturated animal fat), 17% carbohydrate and only 1.7% omega-6 linoleic acid (LA). They have no heart disease, yet the American Heart Association continues to tell Americans to limit saturated fat to no more than 5% to 6% of daily calories.¹³

Americans, based on a 24% to 32% of daily caloric intake from seed oils, are getting 8% to 12% or higher of their daily calories from linoleic acid alone. In another example, Tokelauans, who live in a territory near New Zealand, eat a very different diet with 54% to 62% of calories from coconut, which amounts to 53% fat, 48% of which is saturated fat.

Only about 1% of their diet or less is omega-6 fats, and they also have no heart disease and virtually no obesity or diabetes.¹⁴ “If we look at these populations,” Knobbe says, “and you can look at all of them, ancestrally living populations, what they don't have is refined sugar, refined wheat, and of course they don’t have vegetable oils”:¹⁵

“… So what about the omega-6 LA in these traditional populations? It is 0.6 to about 1.7%, I think all are under 2%, to the best of my knowledge, where our westernized populations — seven to 12% omega-6 linoleic acid alone. This again is the key takeaway point. So what happens to this omega-6? We accumulated it in our body fat.”

Japanese, Egyptians Plagued by Seed Oils

While ancestral populations have had their health protected by not consuming seed oils, other populations, like Japan, have had declines in health that correspond to increasing consumption of these toxic oils. Since 1960, Japan has had marked increases in obesity, high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, multiple cancers and age-related macular degeneration.

Meanwhile, in 1950, the Japanese were consuming only 3 grams a day of seed oils, which rose to 39 grams a day by 2004. As a percentage of total calories, omega-6 increased from 1.55 in 1950 to 6.2% in 2004. “That's the main problem right there,” Knobbe says.¹⁶ “So Japan's declining health is most likely due to a 13-fold, 1,200% increase in highly pro-oxidative, proinflammatory, toxic and nutrient-deficient seed oils.”¹⁷

In the video above, Dr. Paul Saladino, the author of “The Carnivore Code,” a book on nose-to-tail animal-based eating, and “The Carnivore Code Cookbook,” coming out in December 2021, also explains why he believes the ancient Egyptians became overweight and sick from eating seed oils.

Hemiunu, a man who lived in ancient Egypt and is believed to have been the architect of the Great Pyramid of Giza, is depicted in a statue as being overweight. There’s also an ancient Egyptian queen who was confirmed, via a mummy, to have been obese and suffering from cancer.¹⁸

The Egyptians were an outlier among ancient civilizations because they also had instances of coronary artery disease. Saladino argues that civilizations such as Egypt, which had boats, were more likely to visit villages where they could purchase “processed” foods, including seed oils.

Not only may the Egyptians have been the first population to use seed oils en masse, but the ruling class may have been more likely to have had these expensive refined oils, hence, the obesity occurring among the higher class.

Seed Oils Are the Missing Link to Rising Chronic Diseases

According to Saladino, it was the introduction of linoleic acid in their diets that made the ancient Egyptians fat and sick. He also refers to a report by Jeff Nobbs,¹⁹ which found that 6 in 10 Americans have a chronic disease, and heart disease, asthma, cancer and diabetes have increased 700% since 1935.

During this time, Americans have been smoking and drinking less, exercising more and eating “healthier” according to conventional guidelines to lower saturated fat and sodium. Nobbs, too, believes vegetable oil is the missing link that explains why Americans keep getting sicker:

“[C]hronic disease and obesity rates continue to rise. All the while, vegetable oil has steadily and stealthily made its way into our pantries, restaurants, and packaged foods, now contributing 699 calories per day to our diets, or about 20% of everything we eat.

Is vegetable oil the missing link? If vegetable oil is indeed the hidden culprit behind today's chronic disease epidemic, it's an elegant and simple solution to explain why chronic disease and obesity continue to rise, even as we adhere to public health advice.

I'm convinced that our wars against red meat, saturated fat, cholesterol, and sodium may be misguided. Fighting those battles may be like focusing on the sidekicks when the true villain pulling all the strings is still hiding in the shadows. It's time to shine a light on that slippery villain, our possible public health enemy number one: vegetable oil.”

No. 1 Health Tip: Prepare Your Food at Home

It is vital that you reduce your intake of industrially processed seed oils as much as you can. This means eliminating all of the following oils:

Soy	Corn
Canola	Safflower
Sunflower	Peanut
Grape seed	Rice bran

Olive and avocado oil should also be on the list, as they are commonly adulterated, and even pure olive oil is loaded with linoleic acid. To do this, you’ll need to avoid nearly all ultraprocessed foods, fast foods and restaurant foods. This is why it is so important to prepare as much of your food as you can in your home so you know what you are eating and, in the case of seed oils — what you’re not.

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Yet another smoking gun has been found in the origin of COVID-19, courtesy of newly leaked documents released by research group DRASTIC, or Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19.

The documents include a March 2018 grant proposal that EcoHealth Alliance filed with the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to collaborate with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) to "carry out advanced and dangerous human pathogenicity bat coronavirus research."¹

The proposal was reportedly rejected by DARPA for being too risky, but the revelations further erode the credibility of Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has denied funding gain-of-function (GOF) research at WIV,² and EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak, who called claims that SARS-CoV-2 may have come from a lab “conspiracy theory.”³

DARPA Rejected the Risky Research Proposal

According to DRASTIC, the proposal rejected by DARPA involved “injecting deadly chimeric bat coronaviruses collected by the Wuhan Institute of Virology into humanized and 'batified' mice" and aimed to "defuse the potential for spillover of novel bat-origin high-zoonotic risk SARS-related coronaviruses in Asia."⁴ As reported by Newsweek:⁵

“Thanks to DRASTIC, the world now knows that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had an extensive collection of coronaviruses gathered over many years of foraging in the bat caves, and that many of them — including the closest known relative to the pandemic virus, SARS-CoV-2 — came from a mineshaft where three men died from a suspected SARS-like disease in 2012.

It knows that the Institute was actively working with these viruses, using inadequate safety protocols, in ways that could have triggered the pandemic, and that the lab and Chinese authorities have gone to great lengths to conceal these activities.”

EcoHealth Alliance requested $14 million from DARPA for what it expected to be a 3.5-year project. DARPA, however — despite stating the project had a “good running start” — rejected the proposal, citing “several weaknesses,” including "concern that vaccine approaches may lack sufficient epitope coverage to effectively protect against the diverse and evolving quasi species of the many coronaviruses found in the bat caves."⁶

Still, even though DARPA denied the grant proposal, and has denied funding the EcoHealth Alliance and WIV,⁷ it doesn’t mean the research wasn’t ultimately carried out. As the Daily Mail put it, “The $14.2 million (£10.5 million) grant bid was rejected. But did another funder pick up the proposal? At the very least, this proves the researchers were toying with precisely the sort of risky science that could have cooked up a virus eerily similar to the one behind the pandemic.”⁸

Proposal Involved Search for Novel Furin Cleavage Site

To gain entry into your cells, SARS-CoV-2 must first bind to an ACE2 or CD147 receptor on the cell. Next, the S2 spike protein subunit must be proteolytically cleaved (cut). Without this protein cleavage, the virus would simply attach to the receptor and not get any further.

“The furin site is why the virus is so transmissible, and why it invades the heart, the brain and the blood vessels,” Dr. Steven Quay, a physician and scientist, explained at a GOP House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on Select Coronavirus Crisis hearing.⁹

While furin cleavage sites do exist in other viruses like Ebola, HIV, zika and yellow fever, they’re not naturally found in coronaviruses. The entire group of coronaviruses to which SARS-CoV-2 belongs does not contain a single example of a furin cleavage site, Quay said, and is a significant reason why many believe SARS-CoV-2 was created through GOF research.

In a jaw-dropping turn of events, DRASTIC’s research revealed that EcoHealth Alliance’s 2018 proposal involved the introduction of human-specific cleavage sites to bat coronaviruses. As noted by The Intercept:¹⁰

“[T]he proposal describes the process of looking for novel furin cleavage sites in bat coronaviruses the scientists had sampled and inserting them into the spikes of SARS-related viruses in the laboratory.

‘We will introduce appropriate human-specific cleavage sites and evaluate growth potential in [a type of mammalian cell commonly used in microbiology] and HAE cultures,’ referring to cells found in the lining of the human airway, the proposal states.”

COVID-19 Lab Origin: ‘A Threshold Has Been Crossed’

A number of scientists speaking with The Intercept told the news outlet that the furin cleavage site information unveiled in the 2018 proposal has tipped the scales in the search for COVID-19’s origins. Scientist Alina Chan stated:

“Some kind of threshold has been crossed … Let’s look at the big picture: A novel SARS coronavirus emerges in Wuhan with a novel cleavage site in it. We now have evidence that, in early 2018, they had pitched inserting novel cleavage sites into novel SARS-related viruses in their lab. This definitely tips the scales for me. And I think it should do that for many other scientists too.”

Previously, Richard Ebright, board of governors professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University and laboratory director at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology, said that additional documents released by a FOIA lawsuit show without doubt that grants from NIH were used to fund GOF research at WIV, and that Fauci lied about it:¹¹

“The documents make it clear that assertions by the NIH director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement in Wuhan are untruthful."

Much of the controversial research was carried out by the EcoHealth Alliance. Fauci told a House Appropriations subcommittee that more than $600,000 was given to EcoHealth Alliance, which funneled the money to WIV, over a five-year period for the purpose of studying bat coronaviruses and whether they could be transmitted to humans.^12,13 Regarding the latest documents uncovered by DRASTIC, Ebright told The Intercept:¹⁴

“The relevance of this is that SARS Cov-2, the pandemic virus, is the only virus in its entire genus of SARS-related coronaviruses that contains a fully functional cleavage site at the S1, S2 junction [the place where two subunits of the spike protein meet] … And here is a proposal from the beginning of 2018, proposing explicitly to engineer that sequence at that position in chimeric lab-generated coronaviruses.”

32 Emails — Almost Every Word Redacted

The U.K.’s Daily Mail also obtained key documents — a total of 32 emails — that could shed light on a secretive teleconference held among British and U.S. health officials at the beginning of the pandemic February 1, 2020. But the emails, which were obtained via a FOIA request, were nearly entirely blacked out.¹⁵

The call was organized by Fauci and Jeremy Farrar, director of The Wellcome Trust, and attended by Patrick Vallance, Britain’s chief scientific adviser, and others, “to address several aspects of the SARS-CoV-2 genome that pointed towards an artificial origin, by means of generating adaptive changes through passaging and/or direct manipulation of the genome.”¹⁶

Charles Rixey, a COVID-19 analyst who combed through 100,000 pages of FOIA documents and reviewed more than 1,000 research articles, stated:¹⁷

“[C]ompletely obscured is the fact that at least one, and very likely all, of the people on the conference call were aware of the existence of the FCS … It’s even worse when you consider that 18 months later, they still can’t explain it — the Proximals refuse to respond to the fact that the FCS doesn’t exist within the sarbecovirus sub-genus that SARS-CoV-2 falls under.

This is a problem, because members of the sub-genus are too distinct to recombine with the varieties of SARS-like viruses from other branches that do contain the FCS.”

The “Proximals” Rixey refers to are the five editors of "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,"¹⁸ a paper published in Nature Medicine in March 2020 that became the preeminent "proof" that SARS-CoV-2 had a natural origin and couldn't possibly have come from a lab.

It was later revealed that Fauci, Farrar and Dr. Francis Collins, NIH director, had a hand in the paper, as one of its authors wrote a March 6, 2020, email to the trio and colleagues, thanking them for their "advice and leadership."¹⁹

Did Pivotal Call Change the Pandemic Narrative?

January 31, 2020, virologist Kristian Andersen — one of the Proximals, whose paper found the virus could not have been created in a lab — emailed Fauci, cc’ing Farrar, stating, "The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered."²⁰

It was clear that Andersen and others on the February 1 call thought the virus looked engineered. According to the Daily Mail:²¹

“He [Andersen] said the binding mechanism ‘looked too good to be true, like a perfect key for entering human cells’ while its furin cleavage site — a feature not found on similar types of coronavirus that allows it to enter efficiently into human cells — might be expected ‘if someone had set out to adapt an animal coronavirus to humans by taking a specific suit of genetic material from elsewhere and inserting it.’

Farrar opened the discussion, which was then led by Andersen and Eddie Holmes, an Australian-based virologist who told the Wellcome chief before the call he was ‘80% sure this thing had come out of a lab.’ Yet after their conference call, these same experts played leading roles in efforts to dismiss such fears as conspiracy theories in science journals and on social media.”

The Daily Mail requested emails, notes or transcripts relating to the February 1 call as well as WIV or Shi Zhengli, Ph.D., the director of WIV’s Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases, also known as “bat woman,” but the government rejected the request due to “costs,” even though they stated, “We hold the information that you have requested.”²²

This, together with the heavily redacted emails and abrupt change in scientists’ opinions regarding COVID-19’s origins, “begs an obvious question,” Bob Seely, a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said. “Just as with China’s secrecy: why would officials not share such information if there was nothing to hide?”²³

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This article was previously published February 28, 2021, and has been updated with new information.

In this interview, Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., a senior research scientist at MIT, reviews the health impacts of glyphosate. She has just finished writing a book about glyphosate called "Toxic Legacy: How the Weedkiller Glyphosate is Destroying Our Health and the Environment," which is expected to be published in June 2021.

For years, glyphosate was assumed safe and claims of toxicity were vehemently denied. But in recent years, studies on glyphosate have been demonstrating toxicity even at very low levels. Seneff also believes glyphosate exposure may be a key player in cases of severe COVID-19, which we'll unravel in this interview.

Glyphosate's Mechanism of Action

The "gly" in glyphosate actually stands for the amino acid glycine. The glycine amino acid in glyphosate has a methylphosphonate group attached to its nitrogen atom, which is responsible for its effects and toxicity.

After studying the research literature on glyphosate, Seneff has reached the conclusion that your body sometimes substitutes glyphosate for the amino acid glycine when it is constructing proteins, and this can have devastating consequences in some cases. The proteins created with glyphosate instead of glycine simply don't work because glyphosate is much larger than glycine and also negatively charged, and as a result this alters important physical characteristics.

Monsanto's own research, dating back to the late 1980s, shows that glyphosate accumulates in various tissues, even though they claim it doesn't.¹ The Monsanto researchers proposed that it was "incorporated into" the proteins in the tissues. This is not widely appreciated, even in the natural health community.

Now, if you have a distorted analog of glycine (in the form of glyphosate), the protein constructed from it is not going to work like it's supposed to. In her book, Seneff details the amino acids in proteins that are most susceptible to damage because of what she calls a "glyphosate susceptible motif."

"It's really fascinating biology and so terrifying when you think of the potential consequences, if I'm right," she says. "It matches so well with all the diseases that are going up dramatically in our society that I really think I'm onto something huge here."

An aromatic amino acid called EPSP synthase is a critical enzyme that almost surely gets disrupted by glyphosate through this mechanism of substituting for glycine. This gets a bit technical, but it is important. The plant version of EPSP synthase binds a phosphate group in its substrate phosphoenolpyruvate at a site where there is a highly-conserved glycine residue (highly conserved usually means that it is critical for proper function).

It has been shown experimentally that, if you change the DNA code so that the glycine is substituted by an amino acid called alanine (one extra methyl group), the enzyme becomes completely insensitive to glyphosate at any concentration. It also takes a hit on phosphate binding because of the extra methyl group, but you can tweak another amino acid nearby to fix this problem, while still keeping its insensitivity to glyphosate.

Researchers from Dow-Dupont did exactly this to a maize version of EPSP synthase using CRISPR technology and were able to create synthetically a version of the maize's own EPSP synthase that was completely resistant to glyphosate. The title of this paper is: "Desensitizing Plant EPSP Synthase to Glyphosate: Optimized Global Sequence Context Accommodates a Glycine-to-Alanine Change in the Active Site."²

The shikimate pathway is the pathway that produces aromatic amino acids, which are essential to humans as we cannot create these amino acids in our body. The argument is we're not susceptible to glyphosate because our cells don't have EPSP synthase — in fact, they don't have the entire shikimate pathway.

However, our gut microbes do have that pathway, and they use it to make essential amino acids for the host. So, our gut microbes are indeed affected by glyphosate, and when they're damaged, our health can suffer in any number of ways.

But what might be an even more devastating problem with glyphosate is the way it probably messes up a large number of proteins that bind phosphate at a site where there is at least one, and often three, highly conserved glycine residues. Glyphosate slips its methylphosphonate group into the spot that is supposed to be where phosphate from the substrate fits snugly. Phosphate can't bind because glyphosate is in the way.

The arguments for why glyphosate specifically disrupts proteins that depend on glycine for phosphate binding are described more fully in a paper Seneff published together with colleagues arguing that glyphosate is a major factor in kidney failure among young agricultural workers in Central America.³

The Importance of Deuterium

Laszlo Boros is a professor of pediatrics at UCLA and an expert on deutenomics, "the science of autonomic deuterium discrimination in nature."⁴ After reading one of Seneff's papers, he contacted her, suggesting she look into deuterium.

"I was blown away, and I immediately saw the connection to glyphosate," she says. "This was a year ago in December, and I've just been reading everything I can on deuterium since then and hooking it to glyphosate. It's just astonishing what I found, even, ultimately, [linking it] to COVID-19.

It's been quite a year for me in terms of major breakthroughs in my understanding of how metabolism works and how it's getting messed up by glyphosate, and then how that's causing us to not be able to effectively deal with COVID-19."

In normal physiology, your cells, specifically the mitochondria, function to help deplete your body of deuterium. Deuterium is a naturally occurring isotope of hydrogen. If you didn't already know, deuterium is also known as heavy hydrogen, because it has a neutron in addition to the proton and electron in the hydrogen atom.

Provided your cell is healthy, it has deuterium-depleting enzymes and organelles that help remove deuterium from your cells. If your mitochondria are damaged by glyphosate, they're not going to be able to eliminate the deuterium properly.

Deuterium is like iron in the way that it's both essential in the right amounts and toxic in excess. Hydrogen is the smallest atom and by far the most common atom in your body. Deuterium, being a heavy hydrogen, has one extra neutron, in addition to the normal proton and electron that regular hydrogen has.

Now, your cells are surrounded by structured water, which is negatively charged and contributes to your body's energy production by supplying deuterium-depleted hydrogen to lysosomes and mitochondria. The structured water is maintained by sulfates, which makes sulfate extremely important for health. Sulfate is made dysfunctional by glyphosate, which in turn destroys structured water, resulting in impaired energy production in the cell.⁵

"The mitochondria have [a] membrane, which has a part inside the membrane that's really, really important," Seneff says. "That's where you have those protons, and you really don't want it to be deuterons. This is what Laszlo brought home to me."

How Your Body Creates Deuterium-Depleted Water

Endothelial NOS (eNOS) makes nitric oxide (NO), and for every molecule of NO that it makes, it produces two molecules of water, which are deuterium depleted. Stephanie believes the NO created by eNOS may act as a signal that deuterium-depleted water has been created. Interestingly enough, deuterium-depleted water is also created during the inflammatory process.

"The inflammation is there for a good reason, and the reason is to produce deuterium-depleted water," Seneff says. "It's all because the mitochondria are failing in their task of producing their own deuterium-depleted water, which they get in part through the structured water from the sulfate [and] through enzymes that are highly skilled at choosing hydrogen over deuterium …

NADH and NADPH are also fascinating. I've been chasing them through all the proteins. They are interesting because they are the carriers of that wonderful hydrogen that's not deuterium. When you trace what's doing what, where, you realize that the cytoplasm is producing NADH and handing it over to the mitochondria.

The mitochondria then take that H [hydrogen atom] off and throw it into the intermembrane space. So, the whole process ends up with the intermembrane space being assured that this is H [hydrogen] and not D [deuterium].

This is crucial because then those protons, once they build up, come back through the ATPase [ATP synthase] pump. If they are deuterons, they are going to wreck the pump … You release reactive oxygen species [that] break it, and of course, then you can't make ATP."

For clarification, the ATP synthase pump works like a mini-motor. When a hydrogen atom with one proton goes through it, it works flawlessly and generates ATP. If deuterium enters it, which has one neutron and one proton, making it twice the weight of hydrogen, it breaks that motor.

Interestingly, deuterium is everywhere, naturally, but your body has developed an intricate way to make it harmless by trapping it in the structured water, where it's beneficial, as it actually supports the creation of structured water.

Problems arise when you cannot make enough structured water to sequester it all. Then, the deuterium gets loose, causing mitochondrial dysfunction, impairing energy production and contributing to chronic disease.

Glyphosate Damages Health in Many Ways

As noted by Seneff, glyphosate harms your health in a number of ways. For example, she cites a recent paper showing it causes endocrine disruption, which can lead to breast cancer, reproductive issues, obesity and thyroid problems.⁶

Another paper shows glyphosate sensitizes cells to be more receptive to cancer after exposure to other chemicals.⁷ "Glyphosate makes everything else more toxic than it would otherwise be," Seneff says. "It disrupts your defense system against toxic chemicals." Other research shows epigenetic and generational effects, even when no apparent problems can be found in the first generation exposed.⁸

Glyphosate also impairs flavoproteins — proteins that bind flavins. Many of these proteins play a crucial role in transferring hydrogen from NADH or NADPH to other molecules, essentially supporting the delivery of pure hydrogen to the mitochondria. Flavoproteins have a characteristic GxGxxG motif at the site where they bind phosphate in the flavins. The 'G' stands for glycine and the 'x' is a wildcard — any amino acid, including glycine.

This means they have at least three susceptible glycines at this critical region of the protein. Flavoproteins are molecules that facilitate the transfer of protons and electrons, and know how to avoid deuterium, by exploiting a special feature of hydrogen called proton tunneling.

All of them can be expected to be disrupted by glyphosate. A critical flavoprotein is succinate dehydrogenase, and several papers have shown it is adversely affected by glyphosate, Seneff says. It is the only enzyme that plays a role in both oxidative phosphorylation and the citric acid cycle in the mitochondria.

In addition to aromatic amino acids, the shikimate pathway is essential for riboflavin synthesis, and riboflavin, a B vitamin, is the main precursor to flavins. This means that riboflavin deficiency can be triggered from glyphosate exposure as well. Glyphosate also causes damage by:

• Increasing calcium uptake in cells, which causes toxicity to neurons
• Interfering with the ability to take glutamate out of your synapses
• Making manganese unavailable — This in turn disrupts and prevents glutamate from being turned into nontoxic glutamine after it's removed from your synapses. The enzyme responsible for the conversion is also highly dependent on glycine, which could be replaced by glyphosate

Deuterium-Depleted Water May Be Central to Metabolism

According to Seneff, it appears deuterium-depleted water plays a central, hitherto unappreciated role in metabolism, as your body has so many ways to create it. For example, deuterium-depleted water is created through:

"All these molecules that go through these complicated steps are all focused on delivering deuterium-depleted water to the mitochondria," Seneff says. "I mean, it's an absolute obsession that the cell has." She goes on to review how processes that may appear to have nothing but harmful effects are actually an effort to heal the body. This, for example, seems to be the case in COVID-19:

"I believe that whatever biology is doing, it's doing it for a good reason. There may be damage, but there's a good reason why you need that damage in order to survive long term. It's trying to fix a problem that's very serious, and that's what I think is happening with [SARS-CoV-2].

Not only does it induce this lipoxygenase, which produces deuterium-depleted water, it then creates this inflammatory environment, which brings in the platelets and the macrophages, the immune cells and the stem cells. All these are having a big party in there in all this fluid that's building up inside the lungs.

Meanwhile, it also increases the production of hyaluronic acid. Hyaluronic acid is able to trap deuterium-depleted water. It makes structured water. So, you get structured water inside the alveoli of the lungs, and then you get fluid water in the interstitial spaces.

The blood vessels are leaky, the capillaries are leaky. Everything's coming out of the capillaries into this interstitial space where there's this fluid water, and you've got this lipoxygenase making deuterium-depleted water.

So, you're producing this environment of deuterium-depleted water, inviting the macrophages to come in, and the platelets release their mitochondria … the stem cells also come in and release their mitochondria, and then macrophages sweep up the mitochondria — and all this is happening in the interstitial space in the lungs where the fluid is. This is why you cannot breathe. You're drowning.

Maybe one of the most important things platelets do is hang on to mitochondria that they can deliver to the macrophages under conditions of stress. So, what happens is all these mitochondria get released in that interstitial space, and the macrophages induce this macropinocytosis, where they actually sweep up the water and everything that's in it and bring it inside the macrophage, including the mitochondria.

It's actually been shown that platelets can release mitochondria into the environment, and macrophages can take them up and use them as perfectly functioning mitochondria. It's astonishing. So, what they're doing is restoring the mitochondrial health to the immune cells."

Glyphosate Damage May Be a Factor in Severe COVID-19

As explained by Seneff, your immune cells are impaired by glyphosate, so the older you are, the more likely you've been exposed to glyphosate for decades and therefore have poorly functioning immune cells. Interestingly, Seneff points out that the comorbidities of COVID-19 — obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure — are also diseases whose prevalence is going up dramatically over time, exactly in step with glyphosate usage on core crops.

"So, I think it's mostly about glyphosate," she says. "If you've accumulated a lot of glyphosate in your tissues, you're not going to do well with COVID-19, and that's because [your body] is trying to repair the mitochondria in the immune cells so that the immune cells can actually clear the virus. If they can't make ATP, they can't do their job, and the virus flourishes."

The key take-home message here is that this is yet another reason to clean up your diet to make sure you're not exposed to glyphosate. It basically wrecks your immune cells, and the cascading damage that takes place in severe cases of COVID-19 appears to be your body's response to salvage or repair those poorly functioning immune cells.

Dietary Recommendations

The answer to this problem is, first of all, to eat certified organic foods whenever possible. "We won't buy it if we can't find certified organic, and we've really seen health improvements since we've started doing that," Seneff says. "I really swear by it, and I try to get all my friends to do the same. I think if you can eliminate glyphosate, you can really see great improvements in your health no matter what your problems are." Other dietary recommendations include eating/drinking more:

Sulfur-containing foods such as organic eggs and seafood	Organic grass fed milk and butter. Butter is one of the lowest deuterium foods available
Glacier water, which is naturally low in deuterium	Animal fats, which are also low in deuterium
Molecular hydrogen	Probiotics foods such as sauerkraut and apple cider vinegar

To help "push" glyphosate out of your body and mitigate its toxicity, you can take an inexpensive glycine supplement. I take between 5 and 10 grams a day. It has a light, sweet taste, so you can actually use it as a sweetener.

"It makes sense because it's basically going to outnumber the glyphosate molecules," Seneff says. "Remember, glyphosate's going to compete with glycine in building the protein. If there's a lot of glycine around, then it's much less likely that glyphosate will get in there."

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