I suppose that mercola.com might give one pause but the plant scientist, Huber, who is being interviewed seems genuine enough and a quick web search uncovered the fact that Huber has been attacked by Purdue’s "Glyphosate Stewardship Working Group" which is sponsored by BASF, Bayer, Dow AgroSciences, DuPont, Illinois Soybean Association, Indiana Soybean Board, Monsanto, Sygenta, USDA-CSREES NCIPM Competitive Grants Program, and Valent USA . I suppose it is cynical of me but I take this as an endorsement of the fellow. The paper, which is the source of some of the more striking claims in the interview, has been published in the computer science journal Entropy and can be found on the web at,
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/glyphosatePoisonsCrops.php
The principal claim in the paper is that glyphosate (the active ingredient in the herbicide roundup) is implicated in a whole host of diseases including, autism, Alzheimer's, leaky gut, obesity, Crohn's and even including colony collapse disorder in bees. The evidence they present is partly epidemeological -- the magnitude of the use of roundup tracks the increasing incidence of these diseases -- and partly biochemical. They conjecture mechanisms by which glyphosate might contribute to these diseases. It is very hard for one who is not a biochemist to say if these are at all plausible but one aspect of the connection is easy to appreciate. Glysophate has often been thought safe for humans since the chemical pathway which it disrupts is present in plants but not in animals. However, some bacteria have this pathway and the mechanisms posited for the action of glyphosate all involve shutting down the beneficial bacteria in the gut. I think it would be very interesting if someone could find a biologist able to make an independent assessment of this paper. It won't be easy as the paper is more than 40 pages long with 300 references. John Palmer