Carrie Gillum has spent 25 years researching the food and agricultural and agrochemical industry, spending most of her career with the international news agency Reuters. She is now emerging as a modern-day Rachel Carson with two books that reveal decades of corporate secrets and deceptive tactics used by powerful pesticide companies, including the global giant Monsanto. Her books and her ongoing reporting have led her to become recognized as an international expert on corporate control of agriculture and the health and environmental impacts of a pesticide-dependent food system. She was asked to testify before the European Parliament in 2017, and has been an invited speaker at the World Forum for Democracy in Strasbourg, France. She s keynoted events all over the country, all over many countries, on almost all of the continents. Her 2017 book, Whitewash: The Story of the Weed Killer Cancer and the Corruption of Science, won the 2018 Rachel Carson Book Award and the Gold Medal for Outstanding Work from the Independent Book Publishers and many other awards. Her second book, The Monsanto Papers, Deadly Secrets: Corporate Corruption and One Man's Search for Justice, was released on March 2nd of this year, and it s called "The Monsanto Papers: A Man's Quest for Justice." In this episode, we re going to talk about both of them, and how they are different from each other, and what we ve been able to learn about the relationship between science and corporate greed in the pesticide industry, and the corrupt practices that have been going on since the early days of the herbicide-causing industry. We ll be talking about how the Monsanto Papers and The Monsanto are different than The Weed Killer are written by the first book, "Whitewash" by Rachel Carson, and why they are so different from the second book "Deadly Secrets" is so much better than the first "The Weed Killer: How to Protect Your Health from Pesticide Poisoning: The Truth from the Truth from a Weed Killer". And we ll talk about why we should be worried about pesticides and herbicide use in the first place, not just in our food, but in our bodies and our bodies. and why we need to be careful about what we put into our bodies, not in our mouths. the more we eat in the food we eat. We ve all got to choose what we eat, and we have to eat it in our children s bodies, so we should all be careful what we grow in our heads and our lungs.
00:00:00.000I have an old friend of mine on today, and I'm really excited about her.
00:00:05.000Investigative journalist Carrie Gillum has spent 25 years researching the food and agricultural and agrochemical industry, spending most of her career with the international news agency Reuters.
00:00:17.000She is now emerging as a modern-day Rachel Carson with two books that reveal decades of corporate secrets and deceptive tactics.
00:00:26.000My powerful pesticide companies, including the global giant Monsanto.
00:00:31.000Her books and her ongoing reporting and her writing have led her to become recognized as an international expert on corporate control of agriculture and the health and environmental impacts of a pesticide-dependent food system.
00:00:45.000She was asked to testify before the European Parliament in 2017 She has been an invited speaker at the World Forum for Democracy in Strasbourg, France.
00:00:57.000She's keynoted events all over the country, all over many countries, on almost all of the continents.
00:01:06.000Gilliam's 2017 book, Whitewash, the Story of the Weed Killer Cancer and the Corruption of Science, won the 2018 Rachel Carson Book Award and the Gold Medal for Outstanding Work from the Independent Book Publishers and many other awards.
00:01:22.000Her second book, which we were going to talk about today, we're going to talk about both of them, was released on March 2nd of this year, and it's called The Monsanto Papers, Deadly Secrets, Corporate Corruption and One Man's Search for Justice.
00:01:36.000And it has been described by a reviewer as blending, quote, science and human tragedy with courtroom drama and the style of John Grisham.
00:01:46.000That book is about the Monsanto trial, in which I was privileged to be part of the trial team in that trial, and I spent a lot of time with Kerry in San Francisco and Oakland, and particularly with Lee Johnson's trial.
00:02:01.000You know, let's go right into the government industry corruption and what You know, we were able to get with the Monsanto papers where we really got a glimpse of what was happening, of this extraordinarily corrupt relationship between particularly the EPA Pesticide Division.
00:02:21.000And it turns out that the head of that division, Jess Rowland, was actually for many years just representing Monsanto's Interest, the inside of that agency.
00:02:45.000My first book, when people ask me about the differences between my first and second book, in some ways there aren't many, in other ways they're incredibly different.
00:02:54.000But the first book was really about the deception that Monsanto engaged in, deceiving Regulators, the EPA, as well as consumers and scientists and everyone really that they were trying to promote this product to.
00:03:08.000But it also was about deceptive tactics taken by the regulatory agencies and in many cases by scientists and people in the scientific community.
00:03:17.000Jess Rowland, as you point out, it's hard to really know because we haven't been able to talk to Jess and the depositions that he was involved in don't seem to have revealed very much.
00:03:29.000But what we see in the internal documents that have come out from the EPA and what came out through litigation is Both through Freedom of Information Act requests and through discovery requests, was that Monsanto thought that this gentleman, Jess Rowland, who was leading the cancer review assessment within the Office of Pesticide Programs at the EPA, was considered a very close friend of Monsanto's.
00:03:55.000And they talk in numerous emails about how he can be helpful to them and he can help them with their defense of glyphosate.
00:04:03.000There are emails where they're talking about just helping them, wanting to help them kill a review of glyphosate safety by a different agency, not the EPA, but a different federal agency.
00:04:17.000And an email where a Monsanto executive says, you know, just told me if I can kill this, I should get a medal.
00:04:24.000And ultimately, the EPA was successful in at least delaying this review by this outside agency.
00:04:32.000But there are many, many, you know, as I detailed in my first book, going back to the 1980s, there are emails and communications buried in the archives of the EPA, that I guess are not buried anymore, that show that the agency was working very hard to put Monsanto's interests above the interests of public health.
00:04:52.000During two of the trials, and we're not allowed to use that memo, but one of the trials that actually allowed us to use it, and I think it It's one of the reasons why we got $2 billion judgment from the jury, because they understood that Monsanto is not just lying to the public about the health effects of Glyphus,
00:05:13.000it was also knowingly and purposely subverting democracy and destroying the careers of scientists who tried to tell the truth.
00:05:25.000They were gross writing scientific publications And then paying prominent scientists to sign those publications.
00:05:37.000I mean, as I said, there's a long history of this.
00:05:40.000The information that came out just even before Discovery, in my first book, Whitewash, this was before the first trial, before a lot of these Discovery documents came out.
00:05:50.000And these were just based on what I was able to get through Freedom of Information.
00:05:53.000And it laid a clear path That from the 1980s, Monsanto had a lot of control and influence With the EPA and other regulatory agencies, the FDA, the USDA, as well as European regulatory agencies.
00:06:11.000And I don't think Monsanto is unique necessarily in that respect.
00:06:16.000You see that play out with the different companies, Dow, for instance, and DuPont and other very powerful and influential companies that have a lot of money to throw around in D.C., I'm sure you've experienced that in many different areas that you've looked into as well.
00:06:32.000It's very hard for anyone really to challenge these companies and the record certainly does not show that EPA put up much of an effort to delve into The true safety profile of these products.
00:06:46.000I mean, one thing we learned, a lot of people, I guess, in the scientific community understood this, but the rest of us really got to understand that the EPA doesn't even require any independent long-term carcinogenicity testing of the Roundup products or these products that are out on the market.
00:07:05.000So formulated Roundup or Ranger Pro or these other chemicals that you might be picking up To use around your lawn and garden are being used on golf courses and school playgrounds.
00:07:17.000The EPA doesn't require testing on those actual products for cancer risk or other human health hazards.
00:07:25.000They look at the active ingredient, glyphosate, they require Monsanto or other registrants to submit an array of scientific studies that delve into the safety of this active ingredient, but they don't for the formulated product.
00:07:42.000And what scientists have found over the years is that these formulations can be quite a bit more dangerous, much more toxic, because there's an enhanced synergistic effect when you mix these with other things, these surfactants and other chemicals.
00:07:57.000And this has been a big problem with Roundup.
00:08:00.000And the EPA still, to this day, doesn't require these long-term tests on these formulated products.
00:08:07.000That was one of the issues that we tried to get in front of the jury, and I think we did that successfully because, as you say, the EPA had a bunch of tests that looked at glyphosate alone, but Monsanto doesn't sell glyphosate alone.
00:08:23.000It sells it blended with a lot of other chemicals, including, as you point out, surfactants.
00:08:30.000The purpose of the surfactant is to help a chemical Infiltrate and permeate the plants, but it has the same impact on human beings.
00:08:42.000So if you get the formulated product, the Roundup, it has the surfactant, which is escorting essentially the chemical glyphosate through your skin and into your system, and that's its purpose.
00:08:56.000And it's far more dangerous with that surfactant than it is alone, but the EPA allows the company Just test the glyphosate, the active ingredient, without actually testing what Roundup does to people.
00:09:14.000And the few tests where people have tested Roundup show that it's far more toxic in the formulation than it is when glyphosate is alone.
00:09:25.000And in fact, in Europe, the surfactant that Monsanto was using for many, many years, the POEA surfactant was banned in Europe because it was found to be so dangerous.
00:09:37.000Now, Monsanto, you know, we even have emails where Monsanto is talking about this ban, this upcoming ban on the surfactant.
00:09:45.000Wanting to spin that, wanting to make sure people don't see that because of a human health hazard, but because of other reasons.
00:09:52.000There's so much information that's come out over the years.
00:09:54.000And I wrote the second book because while the first one focused on the whitewash or the cover-up basically of the science, it was both a cover-up of science that showed harm and a perpetration of deception in the scientific community, putting out these ghost-written studies, like you mentioned.
00:10:14.000And employing these front groups and this whole array of tactics to try to convince the world that this product not only is safer than any other herbicide that you could use, but was safe enough to be It's put directly on food crops.
00:10:28.000And that was a huge thing, but we should go back to that in a minute.
00:10:32.000But I want to say my second book, this book about the Johnson trial, I really wanted to write that because that's about the impact, right?
00:10:41.000And Lee is only one man suffering from cancer, but there are so many, you know, millions of people suffering from cancer, over 600,000 people, right?
00:10:52.000Every year die from cancer just in the United States.
00:10:55.000And approximately 40% of men and women in the United States are expected to get cancer in their lifetimes, according to the National Cancer Institute.
00:11:04.000It's just unbelievable that we are being told that we need to accept and live, learn to live with cancer and And get different treatments and have our body parts cut off and get radiated when we know that pesticides and chemicals and environmental toxins are big contributors to cancer.
00:11:22.000And so I wanted to tell the story of Lee Johnson and what happens when you have a company as powerful as Monsanto that is perpetrating this fraud upon the public that this product is so safe that you can use it everywhere.
00:11:35.000It can become ubiquitous in our air and our water and our food and found in our own urine and our blood serums.
00:11:41.000We can spray it around school playgrounds.
00:11:43.000We can spray it directly on our food and everything will be just fine because everything isn't just fine.
00:11:48.000And so that's what I'm hoping to show readers in this book, The Monsanto Papers, is the story of Lee Johnson, who you got to know, and his struggle to survive cancer, but also to hold Monsanto accountable.
00:12:00.000So it's a different kind of book and a different kind of story, but I'm hoping it's more personal, I suppose.
00:12:06.000People often pay more attention, you know, if it's a personal story.
00:12:09.000I'm so glad that you wrote this book about Lee Johnson, because that was really one of the pieces of, I won't say dumb luck, because there was consideration.
00:12:19.000Because at that time, when we started the trial, there was about 14,000 clients.
00:12:24.000We had to figure out which one to push to the front of the line.
00:12:29.000And there were many reasons to push Lee, because his situation was so dire.
00:12:37.000But he just turned out to be an incredible witness and a very, very sympathetic plaintiff for the jury.
00:12:46.000Yeah, Lee's story really does tug at the heart.
00:12:48.000He was brought to the forefront of the litigation and became the first person to go to trial against Monsanto because his doctor said, you know, it looks like you have 18 months left to live.
00:13:01.000And this helped get him a preference trial granted by the judge in the case.
00:13:07.000But, you know, Lee's father, two young boys, and when he grew up, he didn't have his father in his life, and he struggled quite a bit as a young man.
00:13:17.000But in his midlife, then he was doing really well and really enjoyed his job as a school groundskeeper and was making good money and taking care of his wife and his two kids and Really, I was struck getting to know him and his devotion to really trying to be there and be present and be involved and be a good dad to these boys.
00:13:38.000So, you know, being told that he was going to die before they were, you know, even in their teens, before they were grown, really was just heartbreaking for him.
00:13:47.000And I've gotten to know him quite a bit and putting this story together and telling his story in the book and He's a remarkable man.
00:13:55.000He just essentially decided, not only was he going to take on Monsanto and beat him, but with the help of a few really talented attorneys, but he wasn't going to die, is what he's told me a few times.
00:14:07.000And he is still out there kicking around, even though he's suffering incredibly and still trying to seek treatment.
00:14:14.000But so far, he's beaten that diagnosis and beaten the odds.
00:14:18.000Talk about his relationship with his wife, because that was...
00:14:22.000The two of them are so adorable together.
00:14:24.000Yeah, Araceli is just a really amazing woman, too.
00:14:28.000She's a little bit younger, quite a bit younger, I suppose, than Lee.
00:14:31.000He's just the love of her life, and the thought of losing him has been incredibly painful for her.
00:14:37.000And they actually fell in love at first sight.
00:14:41.000They saw each other in a classroom at community college, and he knew at that moment that he was going to try to marry her.
00:14:52.000She took one look at him and, you know, that was it for her, I guess.
00:14:56.000And he, as I said, he was a little bit older and he already had a child before with another woman, but really, you know, wasn't, had never been married before.
00:15:09.000But they've struggled, you know, especially with his cancer and disease.
00:15:12.000He's a really proud man and the loss of his income, the loss of his physical abilities, being so sick has really put a strain on their marriage as well.
00:15:21.000It's hard to see, you know, up close and personal how cancer ravages not only the individual, but also the family.
00:15:28.000And that's what you see in the story of the Johnson case.
00:15:31.000He won his case against Monsanto and the jury unanimously Decided not only that Monsanto was to blame, but indeed their glyphosate-based herbicides caused his cancer, but that he was due $250 million in punitive damages because of the extent and the egregiousness of Monsanto's conduct in hiding the risks.
00:15:54.000But because of some really interesting, I guess, aspects of California law, that judgment was cut significantly to $20.5 million ultimately.
00:16:07.000Talk a little bit about the lawyers, about my amazing partners in this case, particularly kind of serendipity about what happened to Mike Miller at the beginning of the case.
00:16:19.000Yeah, I mean, this story, again, watching it all come together, I knew I had to write a book about it because it was just like watching a movie kind of unfold, right?
00:16:30.000You know, you had Lee Johnson, this very interesting, you know, sympathetic character suffering this really horrible type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma that manifests on the skin.
00:16:40.000So his tumors and his pain and his suffering is all seen on his face and his arms and his legs.
00:17:20.000I visited him in his home multiple times and traveling.
00:17:24.000And when he gets up from bed, you know, there's blood on the sheets and on the pillow where the wounds, the open lesions, the cancerous sores on his, on his head and his body have opened up and bled at night.
00:17:36.000He can barely have anything touch his skin because it just, it falls away at the slightest touch.
00:17:43.000He showed me a lesion on his foot at one point.
00:17:49.000I couldn't believe a person could be alive, and I was looking at a hole in his foot that went down to the bone.
00:17:57.000It's been an unbelievable situation that he's been dealing with.
00:18:01.000In terms of the lawyers, yeah, I mean, the first lawyer that he connected with, or the first firm, was the Miller Firm out of Virginia, a really aggressive plaintiff's firm.
00:18:12.000But they had never taken on a pesticide company.
00:18:15.000And this is Mike Miller, and he's an old Southern guy, and he's kind of gruff, and he's got a real Southern charm about him, but he's also, you know, takes no prisoners.
00:18:25.000And, you know, once he decided to take on Monsanto, he decided he was going to win, and he put millions of his own money, dollars, and the firm's money really into This case and building it over years through discovery and expert witnesses and research.
00:18:41.000So you had Mike, and he looked forward to bringing this case to trial.
00:18:45.000But just the trial was supposed to start in June, and he wanted to take his boys, his own family, on a Memorial Day weekend getaway.
00:18:55.000And they went to the coast, and he was going to go kiteboarding, kite surfing, which is what he loves to do.
00:19:03.000Yeah, and had this just terrible accident where the rigging on his gear malfunctioned and he slammed into the pier at a high rate of speed.
00:19:13.000And, you know, it was a miracle that he survived.
00:19:16.000He had so many broken bones and collapsed lungs and, you know, was just really beat up that they rushed him to the hospital.
00:19:24.000And he was in there saying, still saying he was going to, he was going to take this case to trial.
00:19:30.000So at the last minute, literally almost at the last minute, they brought in this young whippersnapper, I guess is how I see him, Brent Wisner, who really never tried a big case like this before, a young guy in his 30s, and he was brought in.
00:19:46.000To work with Dave Dickens from the Miller firm and take this case to trial.
00:20:07.000And he has this very, very kind of buoyant...
00:20:11.000Personality that I think really connected with the jury, and I don't think anybody could have tried that case better.
00:20:17.000The weird thing was, immediately after Mike got injured in that terrible accident, we had a call from him at Bob Hedlund with Brent on the call, and Mike was saying to Brent, you know, Brent had been working on the case for a year, and he said, you're gonna have to take over A lot of the litigation responsibilities because I'm out, but his partner, Tim Litzenberg, was on the call and was going to lead the litigation.
00:20:46.000During that phone call, Tim Litzenberg had a grand mal seizure and just disappeared from the phone call.
00:20:53.000And then, you know, the next day we learned that Tom Hedlund and Brent was going to have to lead the litigation.
00:21:00.000Because the Miller firm was, you know, really behind the eight ball.
00:21:23.000You know, we've just lost Mike Miller in this accident.
00:21:26.000And now Tim is going, what is going on?
00:21:28.000You know, as I said, it was like a movie, the way this played out, I think.
00:21:32.000And of course, Tim now is in prison, which was another interesting turn that had nothing to do with the Johnson case, but played out later.
00:21:41.000It's been a really interesting cast of characters to watch and to learn from.
00:21:46.000I spent a lot of the time in the book trying to also share with readers sort of what I found it really fascinating myself to delve more deeply into the court system and how it works because even though I've been a reporter for 30 years and I've covered numerous court cases,
00:22:13.000I learned so much really watching and learning and Trying to research how this all works, the good, the bad, and the ugly, you know, how the sausage is made in these very big cases.
00:22:24.000You know, I think there's a lot of debate in Washington, obviously.
00:22:28.000It's been there for many years about trying to rein in, should the plaintiff's bar be reined in, these personal injury attorneys.
00:22:34.000There's a lot of discussion about exploitation of people and ambulance chasing and And I certainly see an element of that, I think, looking into this a little bit deeper.
00:22:46.000But I also came to understand so clearly that without the Miller firm and the Baum-Hendland firm and the work that you do and others, these companies never get held accountable.
00:23:02.000It's really in the hands of lawyers who are willing to put their reputations on the line and their money and their time.
00:23:09.000And their lives, you know, it takes weeks, months, years away from their personal life to try these cases.
00:23:16.000It's not a perfect system, but it's really all we have, and thank God we have it.
00:23:21.000As you point out, the attorneys, the firms that are bringing these cases oftentimes are betting their entire existence on a specific case.
00:23:33.000They'll put five, ten million dollars into a case, and if they don't win that case, The firm could be bankrupt or in terrible trouble.
00:23:41.000I think there were at least two firms in the Monsanto litigation that if we had not won those cases, that those firms would have probably been out of business and the attorneys who were running those firms would have probably been personally bankrupt.
00:23:57.000Yeah, no, I've talked to a number of them involved in the roundup litigation and they were mortgaging houses and taking out new business loans and A lot of law firms, there's a whole hedge fund investor scheme and program that's out there for investors to invest in this sort of litigation.
00:24:16.000Again, I don't think it should be that way.
00:24:18.000We should have a system where companies that engage in wrongdoing and market harmful products are regulated more tightly and are held accountable through our existing laws and systems of justice, but that isn't the way it works.
00:24:33.000So you have to have this system Where you have these firms who are wealthy, quite wealthy, and can take on these cases, or you never get justice for people.
00:24:44.000I mean, millions of dollars just for the database alone, that the discovery documents, millions of pages of discovery documents to maintain that and to use the technology and the artificial intelligence that's necessary to be able to go through those and Find the relevant pieces of information that you need to make that case.
00:25:04.000That's over a million dollars a year for that database alone.
00:25:07.000It's a big money game and it's unfortunate.
00:25:10.000There are a lot of the plaintiffs that I've talked to in this roundup litigation, there are now, what, 100,000 or so people that sued Monsanto, alleging that these herbicides caused them to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
00:25:22.000And a lot of them have been getting settlement payouts or being offered settlement payouts now.
00:25:27.000Bayer, which bought Monsanto, After losing three trials, the Johnson trial and then Harding and Pilliad, and the last one, Pilliad, with the $2 billion verdict, Bayer decided to settle these cases and has offered around $10 billion to spread among all of these people.
00:25:44.000But what these plaintiffs are finding is, you know, they don't wind up with very much once the lawyers get paid and insurance gets reimbursed, if there is, and taxes, if it's structured in a way that they have to pay taxes.
00:25:57.000And a lot of them are very disappointed.
00:26:02.000Even Lee Johnson has expressed some disappointment.
00:26:05.000When you're told you're going to get $289 million, and then you get $20 million less taxes and lawyers fees and all that sort of thing, it's a disappointment.
00:26:17.000There's really probably no way to adequately compensate people for the suffering that they undergo when they are faced with cancer, and especially terminal cancer.
00:26:26.000Thank God we have these lawyers who are trying to do this work.
00:26:39.000These all sound so nerdy, right, to talk about glyphosate or paraquat.
00:26:44.000Paraquat's another herbicide though that there's a real scientific consensus now that exposure to paraquat contributes in a great degree to the development of Parkinson's disease.
00:26:56.000There are Cases that are being brought around the United States now that could rival, could grow to be as large as the Roundup litigation by people alleging that their exposure to Paraquat herbicide has caused them or their loved ones to develop Parkinson's disease.
00:27:25.000The judge, the federal judge, most recently, when Bayer tried to put forward a proposal that would shut off future cases, essentially, kind of put a clamp on future trials, keep people from being able to seek punitive damages in any future roundup trials.
00:27:42.000The federal judge denied it, you know, and said, we see why you want to do this.
00:27:47.000Looks like the weight of scientific evidence is favoring the plaintiffs right now, and we see why you want to cut this off, but, you know, we're not going to help you do it.
00:27:55.000Bayer now has said that they're going to consider taking Roundup off the residential market in the U.S. So I'm still writing about that and just really trying to keep people abreast of the dangers of these different pesticides and how we need to look at the risks as well as the rewards and help keep us all safer, help keep our kids safer.
00:28:15.000The irony is that farm workers are probably suffering more than home gardeners from Monsanto, but we Represented almost exclusively home gardeners because you can isolate glyphosate and the impacts on glyphosate.
00:28:33.000If you're a farm worker, you handle 20 different kinds of neonicotid pesticides and all of these other pesticides.
00:28:40.000And it's hard to say that your non-Hodgkin's lymphoma came from the Monsanto if the other side can come in and say, well, you sprayed all these other different pesticides.
00:28:51.000We really, the groups that we were representing were mainly home gardeners who could testify that the only chemical that they had and never had contact with was glyphosate.
00:29:02.000Yeah, someone asked me that just earlier this week, actually.
00:29:06.000Why are we not seeing a lot of farmers in this litigation?
00:29:11.000Farmers are typically not using just one pesticide.
00:29:14.000They're typically using a lot of different pesticides if they are conventionally farming, if they are using pesticides.
00:29:21.000So, you know, they may be exposed to atrazine and clopirifos and paraquat, as well as glyphosate, dicamba, 2,4-D, a whole array of these chemicals.
00:29:29.000And it's important to know, though, that if farmers are using them, we're all exposed too.
00:29:34.000These are, there are residues commonly found.
00:29:38.000I was just looking at the most recent FDA report.
00:29:41.000312 different pesticides found on thousands of food samples looked at by the FDA.
00:29:48.000More than 50% of the samples that they looked at contained pesticide residues, chloropolis, Chlorpyrifos, known to be Damaging the children's brains is right up there at the top.
00:29:58.000Glyphosate was one of the most prevalent found in our foods, found in air, water.
00:30:03.000As I said at the beginning of our conversation, there's a prevalence of these pesticides in our environment now, and it's incredibly hard to avoid them, particularly glyphosate, which is sprayed on so much of our food.
00:30:14.000It's important, I think, that we all are aware of the risks and that we can, if we're concerned, we can make choices to limit our risk, hopefully, and to let our policymakers know that we want Better protection, better public policies, more stringent regulation.
00:30:30.000This is all really important if we want our kids to have a healthier future and their kids and their kids and their kids and so on.
00:30:37.000I mean, it's important for people to know if you're eating bread, if you're eating anything with corn in it, it's in your wine, it's in your children's breakfast cereals, it's in your beer.
00:30:49.000It's ubiquitous now in the environment.
00:30:52.000You really have to go out of your way to eat food that doesn't have it.
00:30:54.000And we were able to sue on one illness, which was non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, because the science had matured on that.
00:31:04.000But there's all kinds of illnesses that Clearly, they're being aggravated by glyphosate.
00:31:11.000A lot of the neurodevelopmental disorders that we're seeing, the gluten allergies, which were coterminous with glyphosate, many kinds of non-alcoholic fatty liver cancer, which we're now seeing in children for the first time in history.
00:31:27.000And the culprit is almost certainly glyphosate and many, many, many other injuries and illnesses that we're seeing in our children and in adults.
00:31:37.000I was just preparing a presentation, actually, to talk to a group of environmental doctors in the next few days and just re-looking and looking at some of the new literature.
00:31:47.000And, you know, it really is just starting to stack up to a really worrisome situation with glyphosate because it isn't just cancer, as you said.
00:31:55.000There's a lot of research now that non-alcoholic fatty liver disease ties there.
00:31:59.000You're seeing liver disease in animals that are fed these crops with glyphosate residues in them.
00:32:05.000And a lot more evidence starting to show up that glyphosate is an endocrine disruptor, which, you know, these EDC chemicals are particularly worrisome because they interfere with the hormones in the body.
00:32:17.000And that can play out a whole array of ways, right, affecting your immune system, but also reproductive problems and things like that.
00:32:25.000So it's probably been a really, really bad idea to spray this chemical all over, you know, soybeans and corn and The sugar beets and alfalfa that the animals eat and even wheat.
00:33:01.000I guess there are so many different ways to argue that, but one thing I could say is we have over a billion bushels of corn and soybeans right now in ending stocks in the U.S. This is a data point that our USDA tracked.
00:33:14.000Over a billion bushels of corn every year that we don't use.
00:33:31.000The world has enough corn and soybeans and sugar beets and wheat and cotton and canola and all these other things that glyphosate is designed to be sprayed with.
00:33:40.000The reason that you have food insecurity and scarcity in a number of countries and regions around the world has nothing to do with the lack of chemicals.
00:33:47.000It has everything to do with infrastructure, political upheaval, distribution resources, transportation, a whole lot of different factors that our United Nations has looked at.
00:33:57.000And the United Nations has studied this issue in depth and has said repeatedly, we don't need Pesticides in these prevalent ways that we're using them to feed the world.
00:34:08.000And they called for a new treaty among countries to reduce pesticide use because the risks so far outweigh the rewards.
00:34:18.000And you have a number of farmers around the U.S., a growing number of farmers, as well as food companies and grain handlers and others, that are recognizing not only the human health implications but the environmental health implications that come with an overuse of glyphosate and other pesticides and they're looking and doing and investing in what we call regenerative agriculture or more sustainable farming practices where you don't use as many pesticides or you don't use them in the ways that
00:34:48.000you were before you don't use them at all and they're finding that their yields are matching or in some ways beating Or these crops that are being grown with pesticides.
00:34:58.000So there are rewards, obviously, with pesticides.
00:35:01.000If there weren't, farmers wouldn't have been using them.
00:35:03.000These companies wouldn't have been making billions of dollars.
00:35:05.000But the risk reward ratio, the calculus, has swung way out of balance.
00:35:11.000And if we don't get it back in balance, restore it, our kids are going to have a very dark and unhealthy future.
00:35:17.000We're already seeing that play out right now.
00:35:19.000One of the things we're seeing is that glyphosate not only poisons the plants, but it destroys the soil.
00:35:26.000It destroys these very rich ecosystems that are critical for food productivity.
00:35:31.000And the long-term injury from glyphosate actually is correlated with a decline in per acre production all over the world.
00:35:40.000There's a really wonderful movie that I know you've seen, which is called Kiss the Ground.
00:36:11.000We have a lot of moms who get this podcast who are worried about chemical exposures to their children, and a lot of their children already have sensitivities.
00:36:20.000What can consumers do to avoid glyphosate and these other pesticides in their foods?
00:36:28.000It's pretty hard to do, obviously, but the easiest answer, I guess, that What is most obvious also is eat organic.
00:36:36.000Glyphosate and these other synthetic pesticides are typically not allowed, you know, under the organic standard for production of organic fruits and vegetables and all these different foods.
00:36:48.000There's a study out of California that came out in 2017.
00:36:52.000A teen, I believe it was, that showed that you can drop your glyphosate levels in your urine pretty dramatically and pretty quickly by switching to an organic diet.
00:37:00.000So there have been a number of studies out there that show that you really can reduce your exposure if you really pay attention to the types of foods that you're buying and feeding your family.
00:37:10.000Gary, thank you so much for joining me.
00:37:48.000Yeah, a little tiny nonprofit trying to pull all these documents and data together and do Freedom of Information Acts and then requests and then share them with reporters and anybody who's interested.