Dr Stephanie Seneff – Sunlight, Cholesterol, Round-up and so much more Introduction

Today we’re going to cover quite a range, pulling together sunlight, cholesterol, introduce you to sulfates, which you may not have heard about before. But as you will hear are critically important. Vitamin D, melatonin, glyphosate, biofuel, biomass. Oh, it’s a far-ranging, very holistic view of some very important issues.

My guest today is Dr Stephanie Seneff. Stephanie is a senior research scientist at M.I.T.’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. She’s got a Bachelor of Science from M.I.T. in Biology and PhD from M.I.T., the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston,  in electrical engineering and computer science, her research interests have focussed on the role of toxic chemicals and micronutrient deficiencies in health and health and disease, with a special emphasis, as you will hear on Glyphosate… Roundup.

She’s authored over three dozen peer-reviewed journal papers in recent years on these vey topics, and I first came into contact and became aware of her when I joined The Thincs Group, which is an international network of cholesterol skeptics some 10 or 12 years ago, which brings together an amazing group of very highly qualified people to question some of the norms. And we go into some of that in this podcast. So I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Dr Stephanie Seneff.

Podcast Transcript

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:00:06] Hello and welcome to Unstress. I’m Dr Ron Ehrlich. Well, today we’re going to cover quite a range, pulling together sunlight, cholesterol, introduce you to sulphates, which you may not have heard about before. But as you will hear are critically important. Vitamin D, melatonin, glyphosate, biofuel, biomass. Oh, it’s a far-ranging, very holistic view of some very important issues.

My guest today is Dr Stephanie Seneff. Stephanie is a senior research scientist at M.I.T.’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. She’s got a Bachelor of Science from M.I.T. in Biology and PhD from M.I.T., the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston,  in electrical engineering and computer science, her research interests have focussed on the role of toxic chemicals and micronutrient deficiencies in health and health and disease, with a special emphasis, as you will hear on Glyphosate… Roundup.

She’s authored over three dozen peer-reviewed journal papers in recent years on these very topics, and I first came into contact and became aware of her when I joined The Thincs Group, which is an international network of cholesterol skeptics some 10 or 12 years ago, which brings together an amazing group of very highly qualified people to question some of the norms. And we go into some of that in this podcast. So I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Dr Stephanie Seneff.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:01:52] Welcome to the show, Stephanie.

Dr Stephanie Seneff [00:01:54] So great to be here. Thank you.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:01:56] Stephanie, there is so much I wanted to talk to about today, but I wondered if before we started, you might share with our listener a bit about your own journey, your professional journey that’s brought you to this point.

Dr Stephanie Seneff’s Journey

Dr Stephanie Seneff [00:02:11] Yeah, it’s quite interesting. Most of my career I actually spent in computer science. I have an undergraduate degree in biology, and I switched over to computer science for my graduate work all at M.I.T., PhD in electrical engineering and computer science. I never left M.I.T., so I’ve always worked there. I love the place. And as I said, most of my career was spent developing spoken dialogue systems. Systems are precursors to things like Amazon, Echo and Siri. Computer human interaction using speech spoken language which is great.

I mean, I really enjoyed it. I was doing some work on language learning, actually, when I finally started getting interested in biology. Going back to biology. And I had a great project I was doing and many students supervising students doing research on developing games, computer games, language games to help people learn a second language. I specifically help English speaking people learn Chinese. I was very passionate about it, really loved it, but I got worried about autism.

It kind of derailed the whole project. So I kind of just let my students graduate and moved on. It’s really been pretty much biology has been a real passion for me ever since maybe 2008, 2007, 2008, when I got worried about autism and felt that it wasn’t being properly addressed and that the government wasn’t sufficiently worried about the situation. And I think I was right.

We’ve continued to have increasing rates of autism in the United States every year since then, and it’s completely out of hand right now. 1 in 54 kids in the United States has autism. There’s no chatter about it. I mean, the media don’t care. The government doesn’t care. And, you know, parents are in heartache dealing with these children. They can’t fix it. I meet so many autistic parents that try this, try that. I mean, they’re desperate for a solution. It breaks my heart.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:04:00] So, I mean, just to remind our listeners, in case they didn’t know, I think something like 25 or more years ago, the rates were one in five thousand.

Dr Stephanie Seneff [00:04:09] Yeah, exactly. It’s just gone up and up and up, particularly since 2000. And of course, I was looking for reasons why that might be. Being a computer scientist, I can number crunch. I can do a correlation. You know, as I was looking at patterns of disease against patterns of different potential toxic exposures and I was fussing around for five years, I looked pretty seriously at the vaccines. I do think they are a contributing factor. I know that’s a hot topic with a lot of controversies.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:04:33] It’s okay. It’s okay. You’re in a safe place. We can talk controversy. That’s okay.

Dr Stephanie Seneff [00:04:39] That’s great. And. But I was striking out after five years and I learnt a lot about autism, very complicated disease. Many co-morbidities, many problems with the guts, you know, gut problems associated with brain problems and all kinds of issues with food sensitivities and whatnot. And I just couldn’t figure out what it was and very frustrated. And I happened to be at a conference where Professor Don Huber spoke for two hours on this thing called glyphosate.

I didn’t know what it was at the time, I’m embarrassed to admit. That was about eight years ago and I never looked back. I mean, I heard that talk. I was like, wow, this is it. I was so convinced because of what he described as potential problems that glyphosate could be causing matched perfectly with the symptoms I was seeing in the autistic kids. And I was just really, really excited. And I went back and looked at correlations with glyphosate. And it’s an absolute perfect match.

The rate of autism in first grade, according to IDA, which is a service in the United States that provides help for the autistic financial help with autistic kids in first grade. That rate was going up exactly perfectly in step with the rise in the use of glyphosate if you integrated over the previous four years. So you’re basically looking at that child’s exposure to glyphosate over their lifespan. Sort of, yeah. You can’t go much more than four years without, you know, getting into statistical trouble, but very, very great correlation.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:06:00] And we are going to talk about that. And just to flag for our listeners as well, that glyphosate is known as Roundup and we can walk around our local parks and sometimes see a sign saying glyphosate or Roundup has been sprayed on this park. So it’s out there, not just in the agriculture. It’s out there in the urban environment as well.

Glyphosate or Roundup

Dr Stephanie Seneff [00:06:22] Absolutely. It’s very pervasive. And certainly, it’s all over the food supply in the United States and various groups and advocacy groups have tested for it, found it in all kinds of foods that are very popular with children like Oreo cookies and goldfish crackers and oat cereals, oatmeal and Cheerios.

I mean, all these popular foods are contaminated. And parents are not. I mean, they’re becoming increasingly aware. And I’m pleased about that. And there is definitely an increase in the use of organic and the sales of organic. And the availability of organic and the number of people who are buying organic in the United States. We’re seeing a real movement. And I really appreciate that. I think it’s going to work. Bottom-up grassroots efforts are going to work from the government.

The government is absolutely stubborn about even hearing the message. They’re not doing anything. They don’t seem to care that there’s a problem. And I think it’s going to ruin the country if we continue on this track. I’ve been very, very disturbed about autism simultaneously with the autism thing in 2008.

I also had a personal crisis because my husband was diagnosed with heart disease at that time, a complete surprise. And he was put on a statin drug. And I was, as you know, very much against that drug. So I was like, this isn’t going to happen. We battled over that first year, but I managed to finally convince him to stop taking it.

The doctor, of course, was very upset. So we fired the doctor. We got a new doctor who was willing to put up with the fact that he wasn’t taking it but wasn’t happy with it. And I’m happy to report that this many years later, he’s doing fantastically well. He doesn’t even take, he doesn’t take statins. But he even doesn’t take other drugs at this point. He is drug-free. As far as pharmaceutical drugs are concerned, and doing great. So he didn’t need the statin drug.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:08:03] That is actually, as I mentioned, how we felt, how I first became aware of you because there is that Thincs group, the cholesterol skeptics and it’s a wonderful group and very highly qualified group. It’s not some weekend people that are interested in health care. There’s many like yourself, experienced researchers and PhD’s who know how to analyze data and look at it. You know, as I said, there’s so much want to talk to you about today. But you’ve raised this one, the cholesterol one. And yes. What were some of your observations about? Oh, well, the cholesterol issue?

Observation on Cholesterol

Dr Stephanie Seneff [00:08:40] Well, it was really, it was really quite interesting because my studies on I was working on autism and heart disease at the same time, reading all the literature I could find, really absorbing the biology of it. I was fascinated by the biology of these two diseases. And I came to the conclusion early on, really, before I even knew about glyphosate. I came to the conclusion that sulfate deficiency was behind both heart disease and autism.

It was a common problem with both of them, which was quite an insight on my part. I felt really fascinated by that and identified a particular cholesterol sulfate deficiency in both diseases. And then I became concerned about cholesterol sulfate synthesis in the skin and that kind of became my passion. So I wrote papers. I collaborated with some of the Thincs folks actually wrote papers on cholesterol sulfate and arguing that a deficiency in cholesterol sulfate is the maybe even the primary factor behind heart disease and even potentially autism. So it’s quite, quite remarkable. And heart disease turns out to be extremely interesting. And I’ve written several papers now describing how the macrophages go into the arteries, feeding the heart and they pile on the cholesterol. It’s true. They store cholesterol in fat. They make these fatty deposits. They block the arteries. All that’s true.

But the reason for it is this a deficiency in sulfate. And so as soon as sulfate is supplied, that cholesterol is ready to go to be released as cholesterol sulfate, which is a water-soluble molecule that can go into the membranes of the red blood cells, the LDL particles in all these heart, lipid particles in the blood. Can the cholesterol sulfate, will go into their membrane and protect them from oxidative and glycation damage. So cholesterol sulfate is a super important molecule for protection, which keeps the LDL particles from getting oxidized, and oxidized LDL is what causes the whole cycle of getting the heart disease.

So it all makes sense to me that if you can just make the cholesterol sulfate and then you deliver it to the heart muscle, both the cholesterol and the sulfate are very important for the function of the heart. And that to me is the main story behind heart disease.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:10:45] And that is what I found some interesting. I read the article that we can talk about sunlight and vitamin D, but this mention of sulfate is not one that I’m hearing a lot about, you know.

Dr Stephanie Seneff [00:10:57] I know. I agree.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:10:59] I’m surprised we hear that cholesterol, like sunlight, is demonized, and yet it’s central to our existence throughout human history. But I haven’t heard this sulfite aspect of this. And while we’re not a medical audience, you know, this is an audience. It’s not is a very well educated, well-motivated person. But tell us a little bit about sulfate 101. You know, give it to us as simply as you can.

Sulfate

Dr Stephanie Seneff [00:11:27] Yeah, it’s really, really interesting. I mean, sulfate is you know, it’s overlooked because it’s so common and there’s an assumption that there’s plenty, even though there isn’t there’s an assumption that we don’t have a problem with supply. That’s a false assumption. It populates the glycolates. The glycolates are what lines all the blood vessels. It’s a layer of complicated sugar, complex sugar molecules. They’re all sulfate and at various places.

So you can have more sulfate, less of sulfate. There are places where it could be sulfated or not depending upon how much sulfate there is. If there’s sufficient sulfate then it gets very well populated with sulfate and that creates what’s called exclusion zone water, which is gelled water. This is Jerry Pollock stuff. It’s so fascinating. And I really love his work.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:12:11] Yes. And I would just read Thomas Cowans book, you know. Right. I’ve read some interesting stuff. I mean, the whole new science of water, which is a whole other topic, we could go down a rabbit hole of.

The whole new science of water

Dr Stephanie Seneff [00:12:24] Absolutely crucial because the sulfate is what is maintaining the healthy water and lining the blood vessels. And the healthy water is what’s protecting. It’s building a shield because it’s exclusion zone water. It’s called that for a reason because the water becomes like ice. It’s like crystal water with the help of the sulfate.

It becomes crystalline water, like a gel, like jello, for example. It’s quite intuitive. And it coats all the blood vessels and makes a very slick surface for the red blood cells to just slide right through the capillary. So it provides minimal resistance for blood flow, and it’s very crucial for our circulation. But it also builds a shield which keeps stuff from getting in.

You have all these things that are being carried in the blood and they have to be delivered. And there are all special mechanisms. Sulfate is heavily involved in the mechanisms of delivery as well, things attached and heparin sulfate. You know, it’s a complicated story, but it’s controlling what gets in and what stays out in an important way to keep up what’s behind the wall safe. So the epithelial wall is healthy because of the sulfate and the oxidizing and glycating agents are not having an effect.

They’re staying in the blood and not damaging the LDL particles, not by damaging the red blood cells, platelets, all of them are being saved by the sulfate, actually, cholesterol sulfate membranes. That’s keeping them from getting attacked by these reactive agents that are in the blood.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:13:45] And I’m assuming that the statins reduce the cholesterol sulfate

Dr Stephanie Seneff [00:13:49] Exactly. Yeah. Well, the statins, of course, are a train wreck track cholesterol because they interfere with the liver’s ability to make cholesterol and the liver needs to make cholesterol in order to have cholesterol sulfate. And in fact, when there’s not. So the skin makes sulfate in response to sunlight. And that’s where the Vitamin D comes into the skin, makes vitamin D.

It makes sulfate and it combines them to make vitamin D sulfate, as well as cholesterol sulfate, which is released from the skin in response to sunlight. And the vitamin D sulfate, I consider vitamin D to be a signaling molecule. And it’s actually signaling, hey, guys, we’ve got cholesterol sulfate because it goes hand-in-hand with the cholesterol sulfate that’s being synthesized in the skin with the sunlight. And I was just going to, you know, to disrupt the supply of cholesterol, which is obviously going to deplete the supply of cholesterol sulfate.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:14:37] I was always concerned early on in the statins story. And it seems to be less talked about now. But when statins were first started, liver function tests were an important part of the protocol, in fact, three monthly liver function tests, I think was the way it was suggested. Now, that’s kind of oh well. Is it because we’ve kind of given up on that one because it’s so ubiquitous.

Dr Stephanie Seneff [00:14:59] You know, that’s very strange. I mean, I certainly would want to know if my liver it was functioning. Okay, you know, if I was taking statins. The other thing is, of course, these new drugs are very expensive. This is such a shock that so this is PCSK9 inhibitors. Have you heard about those?

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:15:15] I’ve heard. I’ve heard. But, I don’t know very much.

PCSK9 inhibitors

Dr Stephanie Seneff [00:15:18] The doctor is trying to pressure my husband to take those now because he won’t take the statins but maybe he’ll take the PCSK9 inhibitor. Guess again.

Well, they’re interesting because the PCSK9 is a protein that’s produced in the liver and it’s a very high level regulating protein. And what it does is it binds and ties up the LDL receptor so they can’t get back to that membrane. So they can’t receive the LDL. So you can’t return the LDL to the liver. So by building an inhibitor that messes them up, it frees up the LDL receptor to go to the membrane and pick up the LDL. Return it. And reduce the LDL in the blood, which is the whole goal. Right. Get low LDL in the blood by allowing the liver to return the LDL, even though the PCSK9  receptor thinks, PCSK9 thinks it shouldn’t.

And the thing is, PCSK9 gets inhibited by salvation if it gets sulfate and it’ll stop pestering those LDL receptors and allow them to go in return the LDL. So the problem is sulfate deficiency in the liver that’s preventing the LDL receptors from going to the membrane.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:16:21] Now, apart from avoiding statins, how do we improve our sulfates?

How do we improve our sulfates?

Dr Stephanie Seneff [00:16:27] Get rid of all glyphosate. Glyphosate is an absolute train wreck for sulfate in so many dimensions you can’t imagine. That’s why I was so excited when I started to look at glyphosate after I heard Don Huber talk and I went back and started reading papers and I could quickly see that it would disrupt many of the sulfate transporters. I’ve identified multiple. It’s quite fascinating. It’s a whole two whole classes of molecules, the sterols which come out from steroids and cholesterol, vitamin D, all the sex hormones, cortisol.

Those are all part of a whole class of proteins, a class of molecules that come from cholesterol and they’re all self aided in transit, like the adrenal glands, make a whole bunch of these and they ship them out. Cortisol makes up cortisol. DHEA is another one. They ship them out. They’re all sulfated. So the adrenal glands, but lots of sulfate on everything they’re making before they ship it out. When it’s sulfated, it’s inactive. So vitamin D sulfate. People look at it a while ago. Many years ago. Oh, Vitamin D sulfate. What’s that about. Right. And the test is how this stuff doesn’t work.

I mean it is completely doesn’t attach to the receptor so it doesn’t actually affect all the changes that mightn’t be affected. Vitamin D sulfate is in some sense inert. No, it doesn’t, it doesn’t signal. But if you take vitamin D, you deliver it. You take off the sulfate and use apply it to the glycocalyx and then the vitamin D get receptor can work. So what’s happening is these all these molecules, all these cholesterol-derived molecules are transporting sulfate around the body and so are a whole other class of model pills called the aromatics.

And the aromatics are very important with respect to glyphosate because glyphosate disrupts the enzyme, an enzyme in the shikimate pathway that produces the aromatic amino acids. And those are precursors to all kinds of things, including all the neurotransmitters, thyroid hormone, melanin, the skin tanning age, and all these things come out of that shikimate pathway and the gut microbes. You use that pathway to make the aromatics, which then supply the sulfate because then that serotonin get sulfate in the gut is produced in the gut sulfate in the gut and shipped to the brain. So it’s delivering serotonin and delivering sulfate to the brain. And if you can’t make serotonin, you can’t deliver sulfate. The brain is going to become deficient.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:18:40] Start seeing some mental health issues as well, which are fairly common now. Well, you’ve said so much there. I wish I had my whiteboard in behind me and I could make. But here we have the demonization of cholesterol and actually the utilization of statins. We have the demonization of sunlight and its ability to produce vitamin D that we need. And we have the ubiquitous use of glyphosate, which interrupts all of those programs.

Dr Stephanie Seneff [00:19:12] Exactly. So you wonder why we’re sick.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:19:16] It’s the perfect storm. I mean, how do you… Look… This is a much bigger question. Stepping back from all of this, how do you reconcile these really bizarre public health initiatives? What are your thoughts?

Public Health Initiatives

Dr Stephanie Seneff [00:19:30] I mean, I don’t. I’m absolutely astonished that people haven’t woken up. I feel like I’m screaming to the rooftops and lots of my friends are, too. And for so many people I personally know who are very aware that we’re in a mess and they’re all trying to deliver the message that we’re broken, that our health care system is broken, our food system is broken. We’re prescribing way too many drugs. I mean, all of this is wrong. It’s all wrong. And we’re so sick.

I mean, our country, United States, you know, the world’s biggest spent spender of health care. Our health care is way out front compared to any other country. Yes, we take tons of drugs. We take way more drugs than anybody else. We’re very sick. You know, we got diabetes, obesity, Alzheimer’s, autism, all these things work really center neurological and autoimmune diseases, cancer. I mean, everything is just a mess in this country, I feel. And yet we seem to be perfectly happy with our health care system to some extent. I mean, I don’t get it.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:20:25] You know, I mean, we’ve been introduced to the word co-morbidities through this pandemic. And of course, if you needed any evidence of the influence of comorbidities, it’s why America is first really.

Dr Stephanie Seneff [00:20:39] Absolutely. Absolutely. I think it’s even more than comorbidities. As you know, I’ve really gotten excited about the idea of biofuels. And it was really something that I came up with that idea early on when I started to watch Covid-19 and what especially when Italy got hit hard in Lombardy region, I knew that place had very toxic air.

I mean, they’ve got a lot of issues with air pollution there. And I knew that Europe has been a leader in the biofuel industry, particularly biodiesel. You know, Europa, they use a lot of they use a percentage of biodiesel in them, not even just trucks and buses, but also the cars, in Europe. And that’s a lot of that. Biodiesel is imported from Argentina, where they make it from a GMO roundup ready soy.

So you can imagine that might be contaminated with glyphosate in the United States. We’ve had it. We’re a leader. So Europe and the United States are basically the. And also Brazil and Argentina, I would say those are the leaders in the biofuel industry. And when you look at the United States, at where that where the epidemic is hitting hardest, I every time I find a new hotspot, I can find a reason why biofuel would be causing it. It’s quite remarkable. And starting, of course, with New York City, you probably haven’t followed the details of America, but New York City really had a huge onset of the disease with the hospitals being over overflowing and not enough ICU and all that kind of stuff. And, you know, just tremendous rise in infectivity in New York City.

And so I started to look at New York City with respect to biofuels. And they’re an absolute leader. They’re one of the first of three big cities. There are New York City, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C. that were kind of real leaders in that space. They’re all situated on major waterways. And that’s part of why it works because if you take all this, like what we do in our country is the biomass that’s leftover after you harvest the crops or, for example, the wheat crop, you spray the wheat with glyphosate just a few days before harvest. And then, of course, you dump glyphosate into the food supply, which is why we have an epidemic in gluten intolerance.

But that’s another story. Then you take what’s leftover, you know, the stalks, and you pile them on a barge and ship them down to New York City. And they’ve got all these factories where they turn the crank and produce diesel fuel or they can produce biogas, or they can produce bio heating oil.

I mean, there are all these different versions of biofuels that come out of this process. They also use the output of the sewer system. So there’s like this huge 50-acre spot in New York City on the edge of this creek called Newtown Creek, which separates Brooklyn from Queens, and Brooklyn and Queens are the epicenter of the epicenter in the United States. You know, New York got hit the hardest within New York, New York City, within New York City, Brooklyn, Queens, the very worst hit. When it started to catch on in this country and that that creek is very toxic. I mean, it had a long history of stuff dumped in there. It’s got thick oil, you know, residue on the bottom and all of that. But this at this site, it handles a New York sewer, you know, processes the sewer stuff, and it also adds food elements to it.

Dr Stephanie Seneff [00:23:48] They’ve learned how to sort of pile in some waste food, like some waste oils, and they’re kind of throwing the kitchen sink in there. Sounds like to me. And then turning the crank, when they add this food waste, they can actually produce a larger percentage of yield of actually usable fuel and help to prevent the release of methane gas, which is going to hurt global climate change. So it’s like a good thing to do.

You know, it’s argued as being a very progressive and farsighted idea to try to stop global climate change, you know, all this good stuff. But if you’ve got glyphosate in the food in the food, in human waste, and in that in the food waste and in the and then the crop waste, all these things have glyphosate in them. I think you’re going to get glyphosate in your product. And then if you’ve got an old bus with a poor engine, that’s not well-tuned. You know, you’ve got smoke spewing out the back. I bet you there’s glyphosate in there.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:24:44] To remind us about I thought this was interesting, that it’s not just a herbicide, but it’s a desiccant which dries out a crop and makes it easier to harvest because green crops, green stalks are much more difficult to harvest. So why not spray them and dry them out? What a wonderful idea.

Dr Stephanie Seneff [00:25:00] Well, in fact, for canola, in particular, I found an article on the Web that talked about, if so, sometimes they grow canola just as a fuel crop. They never want any food out of it. Then this article, they said, is really a good idea to add glyphosate to the crop right before you harvest it, because then it’ll be much easier to scrape up all that stuff and through it on the barge.

So I imagine they’re doing that, you know, with the canola and certainly the soybeans. Soybeans are GMO roundup ready to happen to be using that on the soybeans. Wheat is another one. I told you wheat. And also, sugar cane is sprayed right before harvest as well. And then you’ve got all the cows. They’ve got the manure. So that’s another thing they add.

You know, they’ll mix in manure from the cows and also the waste from the process of the meat processing industry. There are lots of meat processing plants, not only in the United States. I know also in Germany, there was a meat processing plant, had a huge epidemic. There have a lot of outbreaks in meat processing plants too.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:25:55] We are having it here too. And I’m assuming the manure is coming from the CAFOs. The feeding lots. They’re not coming from the grass-fed and finished regenerative. That would be a bonus. But that is a problem as well, because within those animals full of full of antibiotics and chemicals and hormones to keep them. Keep them alive. We wouldn’t say healthy.

Dr Stephanie Seneff [00:26:21] So when you’re processing the meat, you know because there is glyphosate in the meat as well. But they also in the fat means the animals are contaminated with glyphosate throughout because it accumulates in the tissues. And but they’re these meat processing plants are figuring out how to have a nearby site where they turned the waste from the meat processing plant into biofuel, into biogas, and then they use that biogas to fuel the plant. So if they’ve got any gas leaks in the gas lines, there’s your glyphosate.

I mean, I really think life is a tremendous sensitizer for Covid19, and that’s the other part. A piece of the puzzle is to look at the E-cigarette story. And I wrote about that article, really multiple articles written, because that’s so fascinating how people who smoke cigarettes. And I knew about this before Covid19. Yeah, I was looking into it. I was puzzled because e-cigarettes, maybe they’ve got life. And I’m always thinking, you know, if I see some strange disease, I’m always thinking glyphosate.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:27:15] And is that what you found?

Dr Stephanie Seneff [00:27:18] That’s what I think. Now, I haven’t tested anything I’ve got. You know, I don’t do testing. I probably should get into the business of testing, but I haven’t. I’ve tried to get other people interested in testing. But the thing that was interesting about the e-cigarettes was that they the primary ingredient of that, the base, the solvent. And you put the nicotine into it is glycerol.

And glycerol is a major waste product of the biofuel industry. It produces lots of glycerol as a by-product when you extract the fuel. And so they are looking for ways to use that glycerol because they’ve got a glut of the glycerol market right now because of the increased activity of the biofuel industry. So I think that it’s probably was a motivator for why they came up with the idea of e-cigarettes in the first place back in the 2008 timeframe, that it’s. So I think the glycerol has by offsetting that when you smoke an e-cigarette, you’re breathing the glyphosate. And then the glyphosate really disrupts the lungs, immune response.

And I think that causes the virus to, first of all, the immune system is unable to clear the virus. When you get exposed, you can’t clear. The virus has a field day and starts multiplying wildly, and now you’re coughing it up and so you’re spreading it to everybody else. So I think the infection rate goes way up in a situation where everybody’s breathing glyphosate. It greatly increases the chance for someone to pass it on to someone else or to get very sick from it.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:28:41] Now, you know, Glyphosate Roundup is, of course, a Monsanto product, which is, of course, now a Bayer company. And I believe Bayer just made a contribution of something like twelve billion dollars or ten billion dollars to a group of people. Can you share with us why that was not just an act of generosity? What was it just to remind us of how serious this issue is? And even in the law courts, they would agree.

Dr Stephanie Seneff [00:29:09] Right. And that started with Dwayne Johnson. I was I remember I was here in Hawaii. I was in the water, and my husband was looking at his phone and they got this announcement that Dwayne has won. This we were watching that lawsuit very carefully. Dwayne Johnson in California accused glyphosate of causing his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

It was only chemical he had been using, and he was using it on schoolyards, which is also just really painful to think about. And yeah, he was young, he had young kids. And he was an I mean, you just your heart went out to him, you know, and he had a jury trial and he won a big award, I think was 350 million dollars and there was it was immediately or pretty soon thereafter cut way back by the judge, the jury awarded him a huge amount of money.

The judge cut it back to something like 78 million. And very recently, just the last couple of days, it’s gone through an appeals court and it has survived the appeal completely intact. Monsanto everything was denied as far as Monsanto was trying to say this and that wasn’t true. They denied everything, but they again reduced the amount. So I don’t know at what point he is going to get exhausted, ready for that money to show up because Monsanto or Bayer, just keeps on raising it to the higher court.

Dr Stephanie Seneff [00:30:17] But that was the first one. Then there were two more after that. Also got big awards from jury trial. So it’s really looking like a pattern. And then there’s this huge class action. There are multiple class-action lawsuits. But this particular one is a large number of people. I don’t know how many, but it’s thousands. So it’s a small amount to each person, you know, and.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:30:36] I think it was twelve thousand and each got two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which in the scheme of things is not that much. Yeah, but the point is better than nothing. And part of the problem of course with your system in America and to some degree, ours in Australia is that we don’t work on the precautionary principle. Right. We let things run. And if the courts deem it to be illegal, then action may be taken. May be taken.

Dr Stephanie Seneff [00:31:06] Yeah, it’s a huge step forward. I was so excited when I heard that I did not expect Dwayne Johnson to have a chance. I just expected Monsanto would be so powerful they wouldn’t let it happen. And I was so delighted.

I still sort of riding on a high because of that, because I think it’s really had an impact. And it also brought much more public awareness of glyphosate, which caused more people to be interested in eating organic. So I think I mean, it’s become people random people have become much more aware of the toxicity of glyphosate in the past few years. And this really pleases me. And I’ve seen the rise in the use of organic and the amount of organic.

It’s available on the shelves, at the grocery stores, even the common grocery stores. It’s going up dramatically. You can get organic food. Pretty easily. Now in the United States is certainly where I live.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:31:54] This. See, that’s what I found so interesting about this article that you shared with me. It hasn’t quite come out yet, I don’t think. But anyway, it was this connection between biofuels, biomass, which sounds like a wonderful idea. But glyphosate. And you also make the point that while correlation doesn’t mean causation, the actual correlation when it gets to that level of it is pretty significant. It was pretty correlative, wasn’t it?

Dr Stephanie Seneff [00:32:23] Well, it’s quite remarkable. And I’ve been looking at every time there’s an outbreak somewhere, I’ll take a look. And like Dallas, Texas, was one. And then I found this huge bio. You know, I found several different. It was a meat processing plant in Dallas, Texas. And they had and that industry was proud of the fact that they had been able to use this biodigester, anaerobic biodigester to produce biogas to fuel the plant.

So you just you can feel that’s going to be exposure, you know. And then Arizona is getting hit hard now. And there’s this town, small county, Santa Cruz County at the Mexican border is that has the highest infection rate in all of Arizona. And so I was just looking Arizona biofuel. And sure enough, Santa Cruz s where there’s a biofuel activity going on there. I saw something from 2008, 2013, 2014 Web pages reporting on this exciting thing in Arizona. Santa Cruz, Bio-fuel. So, you know, it’s just like Germany had a meat processing plant that was hit hard by Covid19. And I looked it up and sure enough, there was like a bigger sewer system combination thing where they were pulling the waste from the meat processing plant, combining it to human waste, and churning out making biofuel.

So it’s like, you know, every time I hear about places hit hard in Boston, you have Chelsea is the hardest hit by far the town of Chelsea. I know the town well. We drive through it on the way to the airport right next to the airport. It has this huge tank storage tanks for the airport that it stores all the fuel for the airlines. And airline fuel also has biofuel in it. There’s an aviation biofuel that’s been under development since like 2008 and it’s been increasing. Biofuels have been going up dramatically in the last couple of years, both in the United States and in and in Brazil.

By the way, the United States and Brazil are their two major leaders in the biofuel industry. And they’re also the two hardest-hit countries in terms of Covid19 deaths. We have a much higher death rate in Brazil, in the United States than they do elsewhere in the world. The two leaders in glyphosate, lots of glyphosate as well as lots of biofuels. So it’s a pretty strong pattern when you look. It’s just quite amazing that you can pretty much find the answer. Every time you hear about a particular place that’s hard hit. You can explain it through the biofuel potential for biofuel exposure.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:34:42] Now, one of the things that I also want to talk to you about, because I also read another wonderful article you wrote on Sunlight and vitamin D and the fact that they’re not the same thing and we demonize sunlight for you know for a long time now. Now, tell us some of the problems with demonizing sunlight. What is? What are some of the good things? I mean, we kind of know, but it’s been lovely to have it laid out for us.

Demonizing Sunlight

Dr Stephanie Seneff [00:35:06] Cholesterol sulfate, we talked about it already, but vitamin D for sure. I mean, the thing is, I think when you take a vitamin D supplement, you’re missing the point because you’re taking it out of context. You know, vitamin D by itself, if you eat a food that naturally has vitamin D in it. It’s also going to have cholesterol sulfate in it. So vitamin D I think is in a way as a signal.

Hey, you’ve got cholesterol sulfate and vitamin D also is interesting because it goes to that goes through a lot of steps before it becomes active. It goes to the liver and it gets converted to a 25 hydroxyvitamin D and then it goes to the kidneys and it gets converted to 1, 25 hydroxyvitamin D, and then it’s active.

Then it can be received and cause change, cause the metabolic policy decisions in the cells that are generally good. But if you’re taking huge doses of vitamin D, first of all, you’re distracting the liver side enzymes. They have to be busy activating the vitamin D instead of doing other more important jobs like, you know, oxidizing cholesterol and making bio lass’s and detoxing toxic chemicals.

I mean, there’s a lot of things that those Cytochrome enzymes do, I think vitamin D is actually a signaling molecule. First of all, if it’s produced in the skin, assuming that it’s been produced alongside cholesterol sulfate, it becomes a signal, hey, you got cholesterol sulfate. It goes to them and says “Oh, hey, your side enzymes are working”. You know, it goes it could oh, your stipends.

It’s working in the kidney as well because it’s Hiep enzymes are getting messed up by life, amongst other things. Lots of chemicals mess up the side of people, 50 enzymes, and that’s caused a lot of problems. But so the vitamin D is sort of checking off these things and then finally getting activated and then it can go ahead and signal to the cells, hey, guys, everything’s good. You can go ahead with business as usual. So if it doesn’t make it through all those hoops, then those are indicators that there’s trouble and you’ll have low vitamin D and you’ll have a susceptibility to all kinds of problems. Of course, a weakened immune system, because immune cells really depend upon the vitamin D signals to indicate that everything’s OK.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:37:11] We kind of talked about, well, you the sunlight is one thing when relation to vitamin D, but there’s also melatonin as well. Yes. Right. Which we’re missing out on. Melatonin is a pretty important molecule. Isn’t it?

Vitamin D and Melatonin

Dr Stephanie Seneff [00:37:24] It absolutely is. Yeah. Are you thinking melanin the skin tanning agent or melatonin? Well, both.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:37:29] Well, well, melanin. They’re both skin tanning agent is one thing, but melatonin another. Let’s talk about each of those because we don’t hear a lot about melanin. Right. That has an important protective edge.

Dr Stephanie Seneff [00:37:41] And in fact, that’s one concern with glyphosate because melanin comes out of the shikimate pathway. So I’m assuming that if glyphosate is disrupting the gut microbes, they won’t be able to make enough of those precursors to make melatonin and melanin.

Both of them come out of the shikimate pathway. So if you have a melanin deficiency, then you can’t tan. And so then you can the sun can become toxic because you have natural protection against the sun through the tanning process I always advocate people should get out in the sun in the spring and the sun when the sun is not so harsh and build up a tan.

By the time they get to the summer, they can be out on the boat, on the ocean, no problem, because they’ve got that suntan to protect them. But if glyphosate is preventing their ability to actually have a suntan because there’s not enough melanin, that’s not going to work and the sun is going to become toxic and you’re going to get things like skin cancer, which is, of course, the thing they always say that you’ve got to stay out of the sun. The skin doctor says, you know, stay out of the sun, take the vitamin D supplement.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:38:36] And put on the sunscreen and sunscreen. It’s got its own story.

Dr Stephanie Seneff [00:38:40] Sunscreen. It’s got its own story. And they use aluminum in the sunscreen, high-end sunscreen they use this aluminum to sort of make the zinc oxide more palatable for spreading. You know, for putting on that thing like a white paste makes it more easily spread, and in the aluminum, it also like glyphosate disrupts the enzymes, and the enzyme that we believe makes sulfate is called endothelium nitric oxide I’ve written a lot about it.

And it is an essentially like a syp enzyme and it’s gonna be susceptible to aluminum poisoning as well as to glyphosate poisoning. And so I think it’s getting disrupted as well by the glyphosate, by the aluminum. So the sunscreen is not only keeping you from making the vitamin D, but it’s also keeping you from keeping your own system from working properly to make even the cholesterol sulfate.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:39:36] See, I often do say on this podcast that the way our system works, it’s just such a great economic model. You know, it’s fed by the chemical and the food industry. It’s managed by the pharmaceutical industry. I mean, if you wanted to perfect the economic model, our health, the way we approach our health is the perfect way to do it. It’s just not a very good health model.

Dr Stephanie Seneff [00:39:58] It’s a good monetary model. The same industry, too, right? Bayer is a pharmaceutical company, and they own Monsanto. It’s the same industry.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:40:06] Now, another one, the melatonin. Also, we associate melatonin with sleep. Yes. Also, such an important regulatory hormone as well. It’s a molecule as well.

Dr Stephanie Seneff [00:40:18] It’s a wonderful, wonderful molecule. The more I read about it, the more I’m interested in learning more. In fact, it’s been showing up in COVID 19 papers. I don’t know if you realize, but they’re advocating melatonin as a treatment for COVID 19, which is interesting.

It’s a fantastic antioxidant and it can bind metals and help to protect you from metal toxicity. And of course, it’s part of the shikimate pathway. It’s actually produced from serotonin. So you have the serotonin that is made in the gut in large amounts from the precursors that are blocked by glyphosate. And then serotonin sulfated in the gut and then to gets shipped to the brain and deliver sulfate to the brain. And then it becomes a precursor to melatonin.

So then melatonin also gets sulfated, actually, the melatonin that’s in the cerebral spinal fluid is sulfated. So I think the melatonin is actually delivering sulfate to the brain at night while you sleep. And that sulfate is very important for clearing cellular debris.

That’s another role that it plays. Besides this electrical system, the water that I mentioned it, sulfate creates a very acidic, it can buffer acidic water. So we have the glycosomes that are the digestive system of the cell and they use sulfate to help maintain their very low P.H., which allows them to break things down. So when there’s not enough sulfate and when the melatonin can’t deliver the sulfate, the brain can’t clear the debris. And now you get things like Alzheimer’s because you’ve got this amyloid-beta plaque that you can’t clear.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:41:43] And it’s also implicated in mitochondrial regulations, isn’t it? Absolutely. Very interesting there. Yeah. Yeah, there’s so much going on there. And now, listen, we’re coming. We could go on talking about so many things. And I actually was intrigued that your background is in artificial intelligence. AI. And all the things that you described Siri and Amazon and other than that. But AI is also presenting itself as some kind of existential threat to humanity. Bet you never saw that coming.

Dr Stephanie Seneff [00:42:18] I didn’t. I tell you, when I was working on it, it looked like such a hopeless task to get this stuff to work. And it was never going to be. I was really amazed that it became something that was able to go into general usage.

I was delighted about that, that our work, you know, actually became something that was a product you could sell because, in the early days, things were working so badly we didn’t think it was ever going to work. But I did not think about all the issues of all of, you know, surveillance and all these things of the speaker.

All that being able to recognize your face and able to track you and all those things that are happening now with it. And also, of course, taking over jobs, you know, the robotics and whatnot. So many jobs and even high-level jobs are going to start disappearing.

You know, jobs that involve, for example, preparing a legal report. There’s going to be ways you can kind of just grab a bunch of stuff and automatically throw it together and produce a document that’s the first cut. That’s 90 percent there. And then the computer just does that. So that’s the kind of work we did with the sort of language processing. There’s a rich space there that’s probably going to take over jobs that today are well-paying jobs. And they’re not considered you know, they’re not like factory jobs.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:43:29] Not to mention the algorithms, which can predict what we might like to read next and look at next, which is probably the most frightening aspect.

Dr Stephanie Seneff [00:43:39] And, of course, all the filtering that they’re doing by analyzing the content of materials and then deciding that it’s fake news and you can’t publish it yet the AI technology is involved in making those decisions about what’s OK for people to see and what isn’t.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:43:55] We are coming to the end. And I know I want to ask you one last thing, and I wanted to ask you just take a step back from your role as a researcher at M.I.T. and a person who’s interested in all these you’ve written so many articles because we’re all on this health journey through life in our modern world. What do you think the biggest challenge is for an individual on that journey?

The Biggest Health Challenge

Dr Stephanie Seneff [00:44:20] Wow. Stay away from pharma. I mean, I think we really have to pay tremendous attention to our food by not only by organic but by non processed foods, you know, wholesome whole foods, minimally minimal processing, or just by top of the line food. When you buy eggs, don’t just buy organic eggs, you know, but by outdoor, you know, never caged.

I mean all the different things. No, of course, no antibiotics and whatnot. But just be very careful to buy high-end food and in a sense, not see it as too expensive. Because I think, of course, there are people who don’t have a lot of money and they’re concerned about trying to be frugal in their food choices. And that gets difficult because, of course, organic at the moment costs more.

But they need to understand that it’s worth it because if they get really sick, there is going to be so much more expensive than the extra money they spent for the quality food. So just eat really wholesome and nutrient-dense, you know, high sulfur. I mean, we really work hard on eating sulfur, containing foods, and of course, getting out in the sunlight, making sure you have plenty of sunlight exposure and take off the glasses.

I’ve never used sunglasses and I don’t believe in them and I don’t even believe in glasses anymore. I stopped wearing my glasses maybe 10 years ago and I found out I didn’t need them. My eyes actually got better to the point where I just didn’t need them anymore. So I think we’ve been told to be afraid of the sun. We should worship the sun. And if you live by the ocean, you know, walking on the beach in the water barefoot is about one of the healthiest things you can do, especially on a sunny day.

The ocean air and the grounding, because you’re getting the negative charge from very, very good grounding when you’re walking in the water. So getting outdoors and even just walking in the woods, I mean, walking outside in very pretty places that are as far away from civilization, you can find this is what I like, stay away from the pollution, the air pollution in the cities, stay away from the highways. I mean, even maybe take the back roads to work if you can. Rather than getting on the highway because it’s not going to be as much toxic air. Little steps like that can make a difference, I think.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:46:33] Well, Stephanie, that’s all music to our ears. And to hear it coming from you makes it even more meaningful. So thank you so much today for joining us and sharing your wisdom with us.

Dr Stephanie Seneff [00:46:43] Thank you so much for having me.

Conclusion

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:46:46] Well, it’s head spinning, isn’t it? I mean, there are so many connections. We’re told the cholesterol is a problem and not only told to avoid cholesterol-containing foods, but the use of statins, which is referred to as a blockbuster because they generate more than a billion dollars worth of sales every year, is ubiquitous.

In fact, the biggest selling one Lipitor has sold over the last 10 or 12 years, about 120 billion dollars worth of sales. So it is a huge industry and many practitioners, many so-called experts in the field, which include many cardiologists, have built their whole careers on keeping cholesterol as low as possible. And that’s not an easy thing to let go when your reputation depends on it.

When you’ve built your whole practice around it. So there we are taking statins to lower our cholesterol, which is so vital to so many of the body’s important protective functions. A great economic model. Then we’re told to stay out of the sunlight, which produces vitamin D, and melatonin, which vitamin D is often referred to as an anti-cancer drug. But it’s implicated in absolutely every disease that you can imagine. So. So now we have vitamin D deficiencies. And interestingly, during this COVID crisis that we pandemic vitamin D levels, we going to do a whole program on vitamin D as well because it’s so critically important.

But of course, staying out of the sun affects vitamin D levels, and taking a supplement may seem like a good idea. But as you heard, getting out in the sun, exposing your skin and importantly, your eyes to that as well, produces a whole range of far more complex molecules which have an important role to play.

And then, of course, isn’t biofuels and biomass a great idea? Well, yes, it probably is, but it depends on how that biofuel and biomass is grown. And of course, glyphosate is a topic we’ve touched on a few of our podcasts and will touch on again in the future. And its correlation with diseases is not just minor.

When you look at the statistics it is highly correlated to the incidence of many diseases. And I’ll share with you an interesting graph on that as well. So you know a lot there and a lot. I’ll have some articles which I will link to some articles that Stephanie has written and I’ll link them in the show notes. Now, don’t forget, we’ve got some amazing online programs coming.

We’ve got the “Unstress with Dr Ron Ehrlich” app, which keeps you informed of all of those things. Don’t forget also to leave a review on our on iTunes and now we’re recording these. So and when we record them and they’re available on YouTube, when I get really good at editing, I can drop some really interesting images in with that. And I think it’s rather nice seeing our faces as well. So if you’re listening to this is audio. We’ll continue to do so. But if you wanting to put some faces to names and see some additional stuff, we’ll look at the YouTube that’s becoming a little more sophisticated as we come as we go along. So until next time, this is Dr Ron Ehrlich. Be well.

 

This podcast provides general information and discussion about medicine, health, and related subjects. The content is not intended and should not be construed as medical advice or as a substitute for care by a qualified medical practitioner. If you or any other person has a medical concern, he or she should consult with an appropriately qualified medical practitioner. Guests who speak in this podcast express their own opinions, experiences, and conclusions.