Tarzan
Level 6 Valued Member
There seems to be an epidemic of gluten intolerance these days and wheat is the main source of gluten so it gets the blame for most of the issues, but have you ever considered that maybe it's not the wheat that's causing the problems?
Wheat has been a staple for many years all around the world and most populations have been able to tolerate it with no problems with a few rare exceptions mainly involving people with compromised immune systems or digestive issues. So what's changed in the last 30 years to turn wheat from a benign staple to a toxic menace for so much of our population?
Most scientific sources state that wheat crops are not genetically modified, wheat is hybridised and most wheat is polyploid, that is it has multiple sets of chromosomes compared to many other organisms that exist in the more common diploid state with one set of chromosomes coming from each parent. It's hard to point the finger at polyploidy being the culprit because polyploid wheat has existed for many years before gluten intolerance and ceoliac disease became common. 3 levels of ploidy were categorised as early as the 1920's and wheat for the most part caused no issues for many years after that, so polyploidy seems to be a non issue.
One factor that has changed in the last 30 years is the way wheat is being grown, and the main change has been the broad scale use of herbicides. The main herbicide being sprayed with wheat is Roundup with the main active ingredient being glyphosate but the herbicide being sprayed on wheat is not being sprayed the way most people would think a herbicide would be used.
This is where things get really interesting, the glyphosate/roundup is being sprayed on the crop about a week before harvest to kill the wheat plant and dry it out. When glyphosate is used like this it's called a desiccant or a ripening agent. This is done to ensure an even harvest as slightly unripe wheat will be forced to loosen its grip on the wheat grains and enable the threshing machines to extract all the wheat that would normally be lost. So to reiterate almost ripe wheat is drenched in glyphosate/roundup just before harvest. This has become industry standard practice in many agricultural crops.
But glyphosate has been proven to be non toxic in mammals because we lack the pathway that plants and other lower forms of life have that facilitates glyphosate's effectiveness, most of it simply just washes out of our system as it's water soluble and any residue is not toxic because we lack that the required pathways to metaoilise it ie.the shikimic acid pathway
When we examine glyphosate a bit further. glyphosate is a synthetic amino acid based on the common amino acid glycine with a side chain of methyl phosphonate attached. So basically glyphosate is an analogue of glycine and our bodies can't tell the difference and will even use glyphosate in preference to glycine in some cases when protiens are constructed & cells are created because of the strong negative charge of the glyphosate molecule.
So when toxicity tests on glyphosate are carried out it's simply not toxic in the traditional sense, it has no observable toxic effect to mammalian cells. that's where it starts to get really interesting.
When glyphosate is present it gets incorporated into newly manufactured protiens the protiens created are inferior to normal protiens, they tend to make poorly formed weak structures. Glycine is the most abundant amino acid in the human body and it's a large component of many different types of collagen that hold us together, glycine is also a neuro transmitter and it acts on the serotonin system to regulate many excitory functions including inflammation.
So our cells build new proteins in the nucleus using a multi-phase pathway, the DNA is used as a master map (so to speak) and the DNA sequence is mapped to RNA in a process we call transcription. After transcription to RNA the ribosmes in our cells use the RNA sequence through a process known as translation to assemble new proteins from amino acids and then the proteins get folded into a functional working proteins, partly at the ribosome and then they finish folding after the amino acid chain has been linked. Proteins are incredibly complex structures that don't just exist as static entities, they can be like mini machines that perform some absolutely amazing tasks, they really are wonder of nature.
This is where glyphosate can be used as a substitute for glycine and get incorporated into the proteins as they are being manufactured. When glyphosate is used, the newly folded proteins can be faulty or mis-folded as the glyphosate doesn't key into other sites in the protein the same way that glycine does, it's a different shaped molecule and because of its physical structure sometimes parts of the newly folded protein can't key into their respective sites in other parts of the protein. Normally a mis-folded protein would be rejected by the ribosome and disassembled back to amino acids and then recycled but apparently ribosomes don't recognise the proteins assembled with glyphosate and they pass the test so speak and then get incorporated into new cells.
So that was a layman's view of protein synthesis, I'm an engineer not a scientist so if there's any technical errors in that explanation feel free to chime in and correct me. I know some of you guys have science degrees so any input would be welcome here.
Wheat has been a staple for many years all around the world and most populations have been able to tolerate it with no problems with a few rare exceptions mainly involving people with compromised immune systems or digestive issues. So what's changed in the last 30 years to turn wheat from a benign staple to a toxic menace for so much of our population?
Most scientific sources state that wheat crops are not genetically modified, wheat is hybridised and most wheat is polyploid, that is it has multiple sets of chromosomes compared to many other organisms that exist in the more common diploid state with one set of chromosomes coming from each parent. It's hard to point the finger at polyploidy being the culprit because polyploid wheat has existed for many years before gluten intolerance and ceoliac disease became common. 3 levels of ploidy were categorised as early as the 1920's and wheat for the most part caused no issues for many years after that, so polyploidy seems to be a non issue.
One factor that has changed in the last 30 years is the way wheat is being grown, and the main change has been the broad scale use of herbicides. The main herbicide being sprayed with wheat is Roundup with the main active ingredient being glyphosate but the herbicide being sprayed on wheat is not being sprayed the way most people would think a herbicide would be used.
This is where things get really interesting, the glyphosate/roundup is being sprayed on the crop about a week before harvest to kill the wheat plant and dry it out. When glyphosate is used like this it's called a desiccant or a ripening agent. This is done to ensure an even harvest as slightly unripe wheat will be forced to loosen its grip on the wheat grains and enable the threshing machines to extract all the wheat that would normally be lost. So to reiterate almost ripe wheat is drenched in glyphosate/roundup just before harvest. This has become industry standard practice in many agricultural crops.
But glyphosate has been proven to be non toxic in mammals because we lack the pathway that plants and other lower forms of life have that facilitates glyphosate's effectiveness, most of it simply just washes out of our system as it's water soluble and any residue is not toxic because we lack that the required pathways to metaoilise it ie.the shikimic acid pathway
When we examine glyphosate a bit further. glyphosate is a synthetic amino acid based on the common amino acid glycine with a side chain of methyl phosphonate attached. So basically glyphosate is an analogue of glycine and our bodies can't tell the difference and will even use glyphosate in preference to glycine in some cases when protiens are constructed & cells are created because of the strong negative charge of the glyphosate molecule.
So when toxicity tests on glyphosate are carried out it's simply not toxic in the traditional sense, it has no observable toxic effect to mammalian cells. that's where it starts to get really interesting.
When glyphosate is present it gets incorporated into newly manufactured protiens the protiens created are inferior to normal protiens, they tend to make poorly formed weak structures. Glycine is the most abundant amino acid in the human body and it's a large component of many different types of collagen that hold us together, glycine is also a neuro transmitter and it acts on the serotonin system to regulate many excitory functions including inflammation.
So our cells build new proteins in the nucleus using a multi-phase pathway, the DNA is used as a master map (so to speak) and the DNA sequence is mapped to RNA in a process we call transcription. After transcription to RNA the ribosmes in our cells use the RNA sequence through a process known as translation to assemble new proteins from amino acids and then the proteins get folded into a functional working proteins, partly at the ribosome and then they finish folding after the amino acid chain has been linked. Proteins are incredibly complex structures that don't just exist as static entities, they can be like mini machines that perform some absolutely amazing tasks, they really are wonder of nature.
This is where glyphosate can be used as a substitute for glycine and get incorporated into the proteins as they are being manufactured. When glyphosate is used, the newly folded proteins can be faulty or mis-folded as the glyphosate doesn't key into other sites in the protein the same way that glycine does, it's a different shaped molecule and because of its physical structure sometimes parts of the newly folded protein can't key into their respective sites in other parts of the protein. Normally a mis-folded protein would be rejected by the ribosome and disassembled back to amino acids and then recycled but apparently ribosomes don't recognise the proteins assembled with glyphosate and they pass the test so speak and then get incorporated into new cells.
So that was a layman's view of protein synthesis, I'm an engineer not a scientist so if there's any technical errors in that explanation feel free to chime in and correct me. I know some of you guys have science degrees so any input would be welcome here.
Last edited: