What is Gluten Intolerance, Celiac Disease and Wheat Allergy?

A Chemical Problem with a Dietary Diagnosis

1. The Labor Problem

In 1994, Monsanto solved a labor problem. For two decades, farmworkers had strapped tanks of glyphosate onto their backs and walked through cornfields in the early season, spraying individual weeds competing with young plants for sunlight. The work was slow, expensive, and had to be repeated across millions of acres. Then someone discovered a weed that glyphosate wouldn’t kill. Rather than seeing a resistant pest, Monsanto’s engineers saw an opportunity. They extracted the gene that conferred resistance and spliced it into corn. Roundup Ready corn could be saturated with glyphosate and survive. Everything else would die.

The economics transformed overnight. Fire the workers. Hire one airplane. Saturate the entire landscape. Within a few years, 95 percent of American corn was Roundup Ready. Soybeans followed, then canola, sorghum, sugar beets, cotton. Glyphosate use rose fifteenfold from the 1970s. Today, nearly 150,000 tons are sprayed onto American crops annually—roughly one pound per person per year.

But the chemical was still being applied early in the growing season, before food appeared on the plants. Time and rain separated the herbicide from the harvest. Then, around 2006, farmers discovered something else.

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2. The Desiccant Pivot

Sprayed late in the season, glyphosate worked as a desiccant. It dried out crops, killing them just before harvest. For wheat farmers, this solved an ancient problem: rain during harvest causes mold, destroying yields. Spray glyphosate, and the wheat dies uniformly, dries quickly, and can be harvested immediately. The practice spread rapidly across wheat, oats, barley, and legumes—crops that had never been genetically modified to resist glyphosate because they didn’t need to be. They were being killed intentionally, days before entering the food supply.

That year, Robert Kennedy Jr. observed, “you saw this explosion of celiac disease and gluten allergies and all of this stuff.” For the first time, glyphosate was being sprayed directly onto food.

The timeline bears examination:

• Pre-1974: Glyphosate does not exist in agriculture. Celiac disease is rare, estimated at roughly 1 in 5,000.

• 1974–1995: Glyphosate introduced but applied early-season, away from harvest. Gradual rise in diagnoses.

• 1996–2005: Roundup Ready GMO crops expand explosively. Glyphosate use accelerates. Rise steepens.

• Post-2006: Desiccation adopted on wheat, oats, barley. Glyphosate sprayed directly on food. Celiac and gluten intolerance rates explode, reaching 1 in 100 or higher.

Each escalation in exposure corresponds to an escalation in disease.

The escalation has not stopped. Glyphosate creates the conditions for its own expansion. As Denis Rancourt documented in his 2021 submission to Health Canada, more than 38 weed species have developed resistance to the herbicide—superweeds that survive saturation and demand heavier application. The always increasing weed resistance drives always increasing glyphosate use. Monsanto profits from selling more herbicide to solve the problem their herbicide created. The treadmill accelerates. Twenty countries have responded by restricting or banning glyphosate. The United States and Canada have responded by increasing permitted residue limits.

3. The Mechanism

The correlation between glyphosate application on wheat and intestinal disease is not subtle. Researchers Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Seneff plotted the data: glyphosate sprayed on wheat against deaths from intestinal infections. The correlation coefficient is 0.9834—near-perfect alignment. As glyphosate application rose from near zero in 1990 to 20,000 thousand pounds by 2010, intestinal deaths rose in lockstep.

Correlation is not causation. But the mechanism connecting them is biologically plausible and consistent with known microbiology.

Glyphosate kills plants by blocking the shikimate pathway, a metabolic process that produces essential amino acids. Human cells don’t possess this pathway, which is why Monsanto marketed glyphosate as safe for humans. The argument contained a critical omission: human cells don’t possess the shikimate pathway, but human gut bacteria do. The trillions of microorganisms lining our digestive tract—the microbiome that synthesizes vitamins, regulates immunity, and processes food—depend on the same pathway glyphosate was designed to destroy.

The bacteria most sensitive to glyphosate include Lactobacillus and Bifidobacteria—precisely the species that break down gluten. These bacteria possess specialized enzymes that disassemble the difficult proteins in wheat, detaching proline residues that human digestive enzymes cannot handle. When glyphosate kills these bacteria, gluten passes through the gut undigested. The immune system encounters protein fragments it was never meant to see. Inflammation follows. Antibodies develop. The intestinal lining degrades.

Celiac disease, non-celiac gluten sensitivity, and wheat allergy are clinically distinct conditions with different diagnostic criteria—autoimmune, inflammatory, and IgE-mediated respectively. Yet glyphosate’s disruption of the gut microbiome plausibly contributes to all three through overlapping pathways: bacterial die-off, intestinal permeability, and altered antigen exposure.

The patient receives a diagnosis. The dietary prescription follows: avoid gluten. The chemical in the food supply is never mentioned, never tested for, never considered.

For a substantial subset of patients, wheat may be the proxy rather than the cause. They aren’t reacting to the grain. They’re reacting to what’s been sprayed on it.

4. Frances Leader

In 1997, a British woman named Frances Leader received a diagnosis of celiac disease. Her doctor instructed her to eliminate gluten-bearing grains from her diet. She complied, and her symptoms improved.

In 2005, Leader was living in Spain. A Spanish doctor ran tests to confirm the celiac diagnosis. The results came back negative. She wasn’t celiac. Cautiously, she reintroduced wheat products to her diet. No symptoms appeared. She ate bread, pasta, the wheat-based foods she’d avoided for eight years. Nothing happened.

In 2008, she returned to live in the United Kingdom. Immediately, she became ill.

Leader investigated the differences between Spanish and British wheat farming. One difference was glaring: British farmers were using glyphosate as a final application to wheat, desiccating the crop just before harvest. Spanish farmers were not.

“It struck me as quite pernicious and devious,” Leader wrote, “that glyphosate is not included in the ingredient list on any wheat product in the UK but it is there... lurking and trashing the health of anyone who eats it.”

Leader’s timeline is precise. Diagnosed “celiac” in 1997, during the early expansion of glyphosate use. Tested negative in Spain in 2005, one year before the desiccant application became widespread. Sick again in the UK in 2008, after desiccation had become standard practice.

She identified the variable her doctors never considered. She has spoken about glyphosate since 2008. “As is always the case,” she wrote, “nobody wants to believe that this common weedkiller could be so deadly.”

5. The Misdirection

The labels—gluten intolerance, celiac disease, wheat allergy—serve a function. They direct attention toward the patient’s body and away from the patient’s food supply. They create a problem located inside the individual, solvable through individual dietary choices, requiring no interrogation of agricultural practice or chemical regulation.

Mainstream medicine currently rejects glyphosate as a proven cause of celiac disease. The objections are familiar: celiac has a genetic component (HLA-DQ2/DQ8 markers); diagnosis rates rose partly due to better screening; other environmental factors—antibiotics, emulsifiers, ultra-processed food—also affect the gut; glyphosate residues fall below regulatory thresholds.

These objections do not withstand scrutiny.

The genetic claim rests on circular reasoning: markers are identified in people who already have the condition, then declared causative. Yet most people carrying HLA-DQ2/DQ8 markers never develop celiac disease. The field explains this through “incomplete penetrance”—an admission that possessing the supposedly causative variant does not guarantee the condition. If genes caused disease, everyone carrying them would be affected. They are not. Environment determines outcome.

Families share more than genes. They share water sources, dietary habits, chemical exposures, stress patterns, electromagnetic environments. “Runs in the family” describes shared terrain as accurately as shared DNA. The man with the “genetic” heart condition shares a household history with his father and brother—the same food, the same tap water, the same cleaning products—not merely a chromosome.

Better diagnostics cannot explain why antibodies in stored blood serum—samples collected between 1948 and 1954, tested with modern methods—show at least a fourfold increase compared to today’s population. The people who gave those samples are not being diagnosed with better tools. Their blood is being retested. They had less antibody response to gluten.

Nor can the objections explain geography. Frances Leader’s experience is not unique. Travelers routinely report eating wheat in Europe—where 20 countries restrict or ban pre-harvest glyphosate desiccation—without the symptoms they experience at home. The same wheat genetics, the same human genetics, different agricultural chemistry, different outcomes.

Three lines of evidence converge: one person across countries, populations across countries, populations across time. All point the same direction.

The redirection isn’t necessarily coordinated. It emerges from a system functioning as designed.

Epistemic capture occurs when an industry influences not just regulations or individual decisions, but the conditions under which knowledge itself is produced. What gets studied depends on what gets funded. What gets funded depends on who controls research budgets. When the industries that profit from a chemical also fund the universities studying its effects, certain questions become systematically less likely to be asked.

The streetlight effect describes the result. A drunk man searches for his keys under a streetlight, not because he lost them there, but because that’s where the light is. Medical research concentrates where funding flows: genetics of celiac disease, immunological mechanisms of gluten sensitivity, diagnostic criteria refinement. The light shines on the patient’s immune response. The darkness covers the chemical applied to the food.

Samsel and Seneff’s research linking glyphosate to celiac disease was published in an interdisciplinary toxicology journal, not a major gastroenterological publication. The researchers connecting the dots work outside the captured institutions. The studies that would definitively establish causation—large-scale comparisons of glyphosate-exposed and unexposed populations, controlled trials eliminating the chemical rather than the grain—remain unfunded, unperformed, unpublished.

The absence of evidence becomes evidence of absence. Doctors tell patients the cause of their condition is unknown, or genetic, or autoimmune. They prescribe elimination diets. They do not prescribe organic food, because no study they’ve read has established that it matters. The studies haven’t been conducted because the funding hasn’t existed because the questions haven’t been asked because the light doesn’t shine there.

6. The Founding Lie

There were founding decisions, and there were people who made them knowing what they were doing.

Kennedy’s legal work against Monsanto produced what peer-reviewed journals could not—internal communications the company never intended to become public. The litigation discovery documents revealed that Monsanto knew glyphosate caused cancer. They knew it early. They worked with the EPA to hide it. They paid scientists to dispute findings. They ghostwrote studies. They killed research by other agencies. When the EPA initially classified glyphosate as a carcinogen based on mouse studies showing kidney tumors, Monsanto brought in paid experts to challenge the findings. The EPA allowed them to reopen the assessment. The company promised to redo the study. In forty years, they never did.

“Agency capture is pervasive,” Kennedy observed. “The control that Monsanto had over the pesticide division—they had their own guy running that division within the government, running EPA’s pesticide division, making sure not only that the pesticide division did not regulate Monsanto but that no other agency in the government was allowed to look at them.”

The pattern is familiar. The tobacco industry pioneered it: “Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the body of fact that exists in the mind of the general public.” Create uncertainty where consensus exists. Fund research that muddies waters. Capture the agencies meant to regulate. Discredit independent scientists. Delay action for decades while the bodies accumulate.

Monsanto studied the playbook and scaled it. Where tobacco had millions, glyphosate had billions. Where tobacco influenced a handful of researchers, glyphosate captured entire institutions. The inversion was seeded deliberately, by people who knew what they were hiding.

7. Convergent Opportunism

Once seeded, the structure no longer required its architects.

The diagnosis creates markets. Gluten-free products generate billions in annual revenue. Digestive enzyme supplements promise relief. Specialty testing identifies sensitivities. Pharmaceutical companies develop treatments for the symptoms. Food manufacturers reformulate products, adding value through subtraction, charging premiums for absence.

None of these interests need to coordinate. None require a room where executives decide to blame gluten instead of glyphosate. The structure rewards certain behaviors and punishes others. A gastroenterologist who diagnoses celiac disease and prescribes dietary modification is practicing standard care. A gastroenterologist who suggests the patient’s wheat isn’t the problem—the glyphosate residue on the wheat is the problem—is practicing outside guidelines, risking professional sanction, offering advice with no billing code.

The term for this pattern is convergent opportunism: multiple actors discovering, independently, that a structure serves their interests. The gluten-free food manufacturer protecting market share, the pharmaceutical company selling digestive aids, the agricultural chemical company avoiding liability, the processed food industry reformulating rather than sourcing clean ingredients—each acts from rational self-interest, each action reinforcing the frame that locates the problem in the grain rather than the chemical.

The original architects of glyphosate’s expansion could retire or die. The founding lie no longer requires their maintenance. The ecosystem maintains itself. The inversion becomes stable—self-sustaining without ongoing coordination, maintained by convergent interests rather than central control.

8. The Pattern

Gluten intolerance is not unique. It is one instance of a recurring pattern: conditions attributed to patient sensitivity, genetics, or unknown causes, when the actual cause is chemical exposure that implicates powerful industries.

Kennedy connects the same 2006 timeline to other conditions, including the contested autism debate—a subject beyond this essay’s scope, but one that follows identical structural logic. The chronic disease epidemic—now affecting over half of American children—invites the same questions. Diagnoses proliferate. Causes remain officially unknown. Research funding flows toward genetics and patient management, away from environmental exposures and industrial chemicals.

The pattern holds because the structure holds. Epistemic capture ensures that certain questions aren’t asked. The streetlight effect ensures that research illuminates approved topics. Convergent opportunism ensures that multiple industries benefit from the misdirection. The comfortable lie—that the problem is your body, not your food supply—demands nothing except compliance with dietary restrictions and pharmaceutical regimens. The uncomfortable truth demands confrontation with agricultural policy, chemical regulation, corporate influence over science, and the systematic production of ignorance.

The patients are real. The suffering is real. The damage to intestinal villi, the autoantibodies, the inflammation, the nutritional deficiencies—all real. The diagnosis accurately describes what is happening inside the body. It simply misdescribes why.

9. The Equilibrium

A falsehood tilted slightly from truth requires constant energy to maintain. A falsehood fully inverted—the complete opposite of truth—finds its own equilibrium. The internal logic becomes self-reinforcing. Doctors diagnose what they’re trained to diagnose. Researchers study what gets funded. Patients follow dietary advice that provides partial relief. The gluten-free industry grows. The chemical companies face no liability. The regulatory agencies certify safety. The loop closes.

The instability enters through people like Frances Leader, whose bodies don’t follow the narrative. Sick in Britain, healthy in Spain, sick again in Britain. The variable isn’t her genetics. The variable isn’t gluten. The variable is what’s been sprayed on the food.

She identified it in 2008. She has spoken about it for seventeen years. Nobody wanted to believe her.

The structure is designed to not believe her. The structure is designed to not ask the question. The structure is designed to keep the light shining on the patient’s immune system while the chemical application rates remain in darkness.

But the correlation coefficient is 0.9834. The mechanism is plausible. The Lactobacillus die. The gluten goes undigested. The immune system reacts. The diagnosis follows. The label protects the chemical.

The hypothesis generates testable predictions. If glyphosate residues were removed from wheat while gluten content remained unchanged, rates of gluten intolerance should decline within one generation. If they do not, the hypothesis fails. The studies required to test this are not technically difficult: large epidemiologic comparisons of celiac prevalence against regional glyphosate practices; intervention trials substituting organic wheat for conventional while holding gluten constant; microbiome research measuring glyphosate exposure, bacterial populations, and immune markers together.

These studies do not exist. Not because they are impossible, but because they are unfunded. Not because the questions are unimportant, but because the light does not shine there. The absence of research is not evidence against the hypothesis—it is evidence of the very epistemic capture the hypothesis describes.

What is gluten intolerance, celiac disease, wheat allergy?

A chemical problem with a dietary diagnosis.

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References

Barnett, J.A. & Gibson, D.L. (2023). Glyphosate and gut microbiota: A review of the effects on the shikimate pathway and implications for human health. University of British Columbia research review on glyphosate’s selective depletion of gluten-degrading bacteria including Rothia species.

Kennedy, R.F. Jr. (2023). The Joe Rogan Experience, Episode 1999. Discussion of glyphosate history, Monsanto litigation discovery documents, and regulatory capture.

Leader, F. (2023). Personal testimony on glyphosate and celiac disease. Comment on “Glyphosate,” Lies are Unbekoming, July 16, 2023.

Mesnage, R. et al. (2021). Shotgun metagenomics and metabolomics reveal glyphosate alters the gut microbiome of Sprague-Dawley rats by inhibiting the shikimate pathway. Environmental Health Perspectives. Confirms glyphosate-induced dysbiosis at regulatory-approved exposure levels.

Proctor, R.N. (2011). Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition. University of California Press. Source of tobacco industry strategy: “Doubt is our product.”

Rancourt, D. (2021). Comments to Health Canada regarding proposed increases to glyphosate Maximum Residue Limits. Ontario Civil Liberties Association. Source of superweed resistance data (38+ species), 20-country restriction figure, and regulatory capture analysis.

Rubio-Tapia, A., Kyle, R.A., Kaplan, E.L., Johnson, D.R., Page, W., Erdtmann, F., Brantner, T.L., Kim, W.R., Phelps, T.K., Lahr, B.D., Zinsmeister, A.R., Melton, L.J., & Murray, J.A. (2009). Increased prevalence and mortality in undiagnosed celiac disease. Gastroenterology, 137(1), 88-93. Source of fourfold increase in celiac antibodies since 1948-1954 using stored serum samples.

Samsel, A. & Seneff, S. (2013). Glyphosate, pathways to modern diseases II: Celiac sprue and gluten intolerance. Interdisciplinary Toxicology, 6(4), 159-184. Source of glyphosate-wheat correlation (R=0.9834), mechanism analysis, and Lactobacillus research.

Seneff, S. (2021). Toxic Legacy: How the Weedkiller Glyphosate Is Destroying Our Health and the Environment. Chelsea Green Publishing. Comprehensive documentation of glyphosate mechanisms, shikimate pathway disruption, and microbiome effects.

Shehata, A.A., Schrödl, W., Aldin, A.A., Hafez, H.M., & Krüger, M. (2013). The effect of glyphosate on potential pathogens and beneficial members of poultry microbiota in vitro. Current Microbiology, 66, 350-358. Source of differential glyphosate sensitivity: Lactobacillus and Bifidobacteria susceptible, Salmonella and Clostridium resistant.

Unbekoming. (2023). “Agnotology: On Constructed Ignorance, The Pattern and The Anointed.” Lies are Unbekoming. Source of streetlight effect analysis and the systematic production of ignorance.

Unbekoming. (2024). “The Mechanics of Stable Falsehood.” Lies are Unbekoming. Framework for founding lies, convergent opportunism, and self-sustaining inversions.

Unbekoming. (2025). “Epistemic Capture.” Lies are Unbekoming. Analysis of pharmaceutical industry control over knowledge production and the colonization of medical institutions.

Unbekoming. (2025). “The Fifth Wall: Genetics as the Final Fortress of Medical Extraction.” Lies are Unbekoming. Critique of genetic determinism, incomplete penetrance, and the shared terrain argument.

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