Glyphosate — What It Does in the Body and the Metabolic Connection

I want to be careful with this one.

Not because the information isn't important — it is among the most important I will share this year.

But because glyphosate sits at the intersection of genuinely alarming science and genuinely contested research, and I believe you deserve honesty about that distinction rather than false certainty in either direction.

Here is what I will do:

I will tell you what is well-established. What is emerging and plausible. What is contested and why. And I will name the pattern of industry influence that has shaped what we have been told — because that pattern, by now, should feel very familiar.

What you do with that information is entirely yours.

Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Roundup, the herbicide developed by Monsanto in the early 1970s and now the most widely used agricultural chemical in the world.

By the 1990s, Monsanto had developed genetically modified crops — primarily corn, soy, cotton, and canola — engineered to survive glyphosate application. These "Roundup Ready" crops allowed farmers to spray entire fields to kill weeds without killing the crop itself.

The result: glyphosate application on American farmland increased by more than 100-fold between 1992 and 2012.

It is now detectable in the air, the rain, the groundwater, the majority of conventional food samples tested, and — in multiple studies — in human urine, breast milk, and blood.

Here is what most people were never told:

It was first patented in 1964 by Stauffer Chemical as a descaling agent — a chemical used to clean mineral deposits from pipes and boilers. Because it chelates minerals — meaning it binds to them and removes them — it was highly effective at stripping calcium, magnesium, manganese, zinc, and copper from industrial surfaces.

It was later patented as a herbicide — because the same mineral chelation that cleaned pipes also starved plants of the minerals they needed to grow, killing them effectively.

And then — in a detail that did not receive nearly the public attention it deserved — it was also patented as an antimicrobial and antibiotic in 2010, by Monsanto, because it kills bacteria.

Including, research has since established, the bacteria in the soil.

And the bacteria in the human gut.

Glyphosate is a broad-spectrum antimicrobial. This is documented and uncontested. It kills bacteria through a mechanism called disruption of the shikimate pathway — a metabolic pathway present in bacteria, fungi, and plants but not in human cells.

This is why we were told it was safe for humans.

We do not have the shikimate pathway.

What that reasoning missed — entirely — is that our gut bacteria do.

The trillions of microorganisms living in the human gut use the shikimate pathway. Glyphosate disrupts it. This is not a hypothesis — it is established biochemistry. The question that remains contested is the degree to which human dietary glyphosate exposure is sufficient to meaningfully disrupt the gut microbiome — and the honest answer is that we do not yet have definitive long-term human studies, partly because those studies have not been funded, and partly because the independent researchers attempting to conduct them have faced significant industry opposition.

Glyphosate is a mineral chelator. It binds to manganese, zinc, cobalt, copper, and iron — among others. In soil, this chelation depletes the mineral availability that plants depend on. What happens to minerals in food that has been grown in glyphosate-treated soil and may itself carry glyphosate residue is an area of active research — with plausible but not yet definitively proven implications for human mineral status.

In 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer — the cancer research arm of the World Health Organization — classified glyphosate as "probably carcinogenic to humans," based on review of available evidence. This classification prompted significant controversy, litigation, and the eventual acquisition and rebranding of Monsanto by Bayer, which has paid out multiple billion-dollar settlements in glyphosate-related cancer lawsuits while maintaining the product is safe.

The EPA currently maintains that glyphosate is not likely to be carcinogenic. Independent researchers and the IARC disagree. This discrepancy — between regulatory agency position and independent scientific assessment — is itself a pattern worth noting.

Research by Dr. Stephanie Seneff at MIT and others has proposed mechanisms by which glyphosate substitutes for the amino acid glycine in human proteins, potentially disrupting protein function in ways that could contribute to multiple chronic conditions. This research is intriguing and mechanistically plausible — but it remains contested and has not yet been definitively established in human studies. I include it because the pattern it describes is worth watching, not because it is settled.

Here is where the glyphosate story connects most directly to the insulin resistance and metabolic health at the center of everything I discuss:

A healthy, diverse gut microbiome is essential for insulin sensitivity.

The short-chain fatty acids produced by beneficial gut bacteria — butyrate, propionate, acetate — directly improve cellular insulin response, reduce systemic inflammation, and protect the gut lining that, when compromised, allows inflammatory particles into the bloodstream that drive insulin resistance further.

If glyphosate meaningfully disrupts gut microbiome diversity and composition — by acting as a broad-spectrum antimicrobial against organisms that have the shikimate pathway it targets — then the implications for metabolic health are significant.

The pattern the research is pointing toward:

Glyphosate exposure → disruption of gut microbiome diversity → reduced short-chain fatty acid production → increased gut permeability → systemic inflammation → worsened insulin resistance.

This is a mechanistically plausible chain. Each link has research support. The full chain in humans, at real-world dietary exposure levels, is the part that requires more independent study than has yet been funded.

I am telling you this honestly — because I believe you deserve to understand what is established, what is emerging, and what is still uncertain. Industry has profited enormously from exploiting that uncertainty. But intellectual honesty requires that I not overstate what the science has definitively proven, even in service of a conclusion I believe the pattern supports.

If you have been reading this blog all year, you will recognize what I am about to say.

The industry that developed glyphosate funded the research that established its safety profile.

The regulatory agencies that approved it relied heavily on industry-submitted studies rather than independent research.

The scientists who raised concerns faced professional opposition, funding challenges, and — in documented cases — industry-coordinated campaigns to discredit them.

Independent researchers attempting to replicate the original safety studies have found results that diverge significantly from the industry-funded originals.

This is the same pattern we traced with the Sugar Research Foundation.

The same pattern that shaped the dietary guidelines that contributed to the insulin resistance epidemic.

Different product.
Same playbook.

The consistency of that pattern is itself evidence worth weighing.

I want to be clear: I am not asking you to never eat a conventionally grown vegetable again. That is neither realistic nor, in the balance of what we know, the right response.

What I am suggesting is informed reduction of burden where it is most meaningful:

Choose organic for the highest-residue crops. The Environmental Working Group publishes an annual Dirty Dozen list — the twelve crops with the highest pesticide residue loads. These are the ones where organic matters most. Strawberries, spinach, kale, peaches, pears, nectarines, apples, grapes, bell peppers, cherries, blueberries, and green beans consistently appear. Choosing organic for these specifically is a meaningful, practical reduction in glyphosate and pesticide exposure.

Eat diverse fiber to support gut microbiome resilience. A diverse, well-fed gut microbiome is more resilient to perturbation — including chemical perturbation. Thirty or more different plant foods per week feeds the diversity that helps the microbiome recover and maintain its function.

Reduce ultra-processed foods. Processed foods made with conventionally grown commodity crops — corn, soy, wheat — carry the highest glyphosate residue loads and are the dietary source of most consistent human exposure in research studies.

Support your liver and detoxification pathways. As we covered in the liver post, your Phase 2 detoxification pathways — requiring amino acids, B vitamins, and cruciferous vegetable compounds — are your body's primary mechanism for processing and eliminating the chemical burden it encounters daily.

Filter your water. Glyphosate has been detected in groundwater in agricultural regions. A quality water filter — carbon block or reverse osmosis — meaningfully reduces this exposure pathway.

Had you heard of glyphosate before today?

Did the mineral chelation and antimicrobial patent history surprise you?

Does the pattern of industry influence feel familiar by now?

Reply and let me know what you think. Are you interested in informative blogs like this?  This series is generating the most important conversations I have had this year — and your response matters.

If you are beginning to see that the metabolic challenges you have been navigating are not just about what you are eating — but about what has been done to the food system you are eating from —

You are asking exactly the right questions.

And I would love to walk alongside you as you navigate them.

💬 Join our free Natural GLP-1 Support Facebook Group

📥 Or reach out directly — let's talk.

Rooting for you — always,
Rachel xo