Thread by @RootCauseDoctor

THE REPRODUCTIVE TOXICITY OF ATRAZINE

The herbicide Atrazine can male frogs into egg-laying females at less than 3 parts per billion

Everything you need to know...

THREAD 🧵

Atrazine is the second most widely used pesticide in the USA after glyphosate

Farmers all over the US spray Atrazine on food crops like corn, sugarcane, sorghum and canola to control weeds

Atrazine is well known as a highly potent endocrine disrupting chemical

It has been proven to interfere with reproductive capability of mammals, birds and amphibians

And is banned in Europe for this exact reason

Atrazine increases the effect of an enzyme called aromatase, which converts male hormones (like testosterone) into female hormones (like estrogen)

More atrazine 👇
More aromatase 👇
More estrogen signals👇
De-masculinization + feminization

The champion of the atrazine story is Professor Tyrone Hayes from UC Berkley

In the late 90s he was employed by chemical company Novartis to study its potential endocrine-disrupting effects

Hayes showed that male frogs exposed to atrazine at doses typically found in the environment were de-masculinized

AKA chemically castrated

When he approached Novartis with these findings, they weren’t happy.

They tried to buy up his research in attempts to suppress and silence the findings

Dr Hayes left the company and continued researching the feminizing effects of atrazine.

In 2010 he released his most famous paper, which showed atrazine was not only feminizing male frogs, but could turn them into egg-laying females

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

Consistent with a catastrophic disruption of testosterone signals, exposed males were

- unable to compete with unexposed males for access to females
- tendency towards male-male copulation

Seems like Mr. A Jones was right

The mechanisms by which atrazine cause endocrine disruption in frogs is highly conserved in all vertebrates

Including mammals

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

Epidemiological studies in humans have linked atrazine exposure
- intrauterine growth retardation
- menstrual irregularity
- poor sperm quality

But the difficulty of elucidating concrete outcome measures in humans should not be taken as evidence for permissible exposure amount

Despite being banned in 35 countries, atrazine continues to be widely used in the USA

Between 2013-2017, an annual average of 72,000,000 pounds of atrazine were applied to an average of 75,000,000 acres of agricultural crops

Atrazine leaches into groundwater and is a common contaminant of municipal water supplies, especially following heavy rains

It can also precipitate in rain and be transported > 1,000 km from site of application

Midwest US and rural areas are most heavily effected

Despite EPA determined limits, it extremely difficult to determine a safe exposure for chems like atrazine

Because of non-linear and synergistic effects with other endocrine disrupting substances

The safest dose is ZERO

rootcausemd.substack.com/p/what-are-xen…

It is therefore critical to avoid exposure for everyone
- men who want to preserve their fertility and masculinity
- sexually developing children/adolescents
- pregnant women, especially in 1st trimester during the reproductive programming window

Filtering your water (preferably with reverse osmosis) is essential to prevent ingestion of atrazine

Avoid industrially produced foods that could contain atrazine contaminated corn (or animals which have been fed this corn)

Why are we still dealing with this chemical?

In 2020 Atrazine was re-reauthorized by the EPA despite the mounting evidence on environmental and human toxicity

Two words – regulatory capture.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33999476/

The producer of Atrazine is Syngenta, an agro-industrial behemoth corporation that also sells seeds

Syngenta was formed in 2000, when two pharmaceutical giants AstraZeneca and Novartis spun off their crop businesses

Interestingly, the exact year that Novartis learned that atrazine increases aromatase and is implicated in development of breast cancer

they patented letrazole, an aromatase inhibitor and treatment pharmaceutical for estrogen-sensitive breast cancer

Just a coincidence? Maybe.

In 2015, Syngenta was purchased by the China National Chemical Corporation, a Chinese state-owned enterprise.

The story of Atrazine epitomized the chemical-pushing poison-antidote cycle of Big Pharma and the Industrial Food Complex

I have termed this the Medical-Pharmaceutical-Agricultural-Complex #MPAC

rootcausemd.substack.com/p/exposing-the…

Remember, atrazine is a product of mono-cropping industrial farming methods

Atrazine, just like glyphosate, should be banned from use in agriculture and farmers should be moving towards methods that do not require its use

Regenerative ranchers like @SimmonsBart don’t use atrazine for these specific reasons

Its up to you to buy locally from ranchers who steward their land without the use of industrial herbicides

Now you know what this toxic endocrine disrupting pesticide is doing to you, the frogs and the environment

- filter your water
- avoid monocropped corn in all its forms
- advocate for its ban

The Rest Is Up To You...

For more articles on reproductive health, regenerative farming and the harms of xeno-estrogens, subscribe to the RootCause Journal of Medicine

rootcausemd.substack.com