Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on glyphosate: what the evidence says · JRE #1999
SUBJECT: GLYPHOSATE
The short answer
Kennedy claims that when US wheat farmers began using glyphosate as a pre-harvest desiccant around 2006, that same year saw an 'explosion' of celiac disease and gluten allergies, implying causation. Peer-reviewed data show celiac disease prevalence in the United States rose gradually over roughly 50 years, not in a discrete 2006 spike: a Gastroenterology study comparing stored blood from 1948-1954 with samples from 2006-2008 found undiagnosed celiac disease was 4 to 4.5 times more common in the modern cohorts, but the authors explicitly note their cross-sectional data cannot pinpoint when the change occurred and describe a decades-long trend rather than a single-year jump.
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
So all the wheat in our country started being sprayed that year in 2006 with glyphosate. And that's the year you saw this explosion of celiac diseases and, you know, gluten allergies and all of this stuff
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Peer-reviewed data show celiac disease prevalence in the United States rose gradually over roughly 50 years, not in a discrete 2006 spike: a Gastroenterology study comparing stored blood from 1948-1954 with samples from 2006-2008 found undiagnosed celiac disease was 4 to 4.5 times more common in the modern cohorts, but the authors explicitly note their cross-sectional data cannot pinpoint when the change occurred and describe a decades-long trend rather than a single-year jump. A separate review similarly documents prevalence climbing from about 0.03% in the 1970s to 0.5%-1.26% by the early 2010s, again indicating a gradual, multi-decade rise predating 2006 rather than an event tied to that year. The specific mechanistic link between glyphosate and celiac disease traces to a 2013 paper by Samsel and Seneff in Interdisciplinary Toxicology, which is a hypothesis and literature-review article proposing biological pathways and correlating glyphosate usage trends with rising hospital discharge rates, not an epidemiological study demonstrating that glyphosate causes celiac disease or that a 2006 spike occurred. No cited source establishes a 2006 'explosion' in celiac disease coincident with glyphosate desiccation, and the literature attributes the multi-decade rise to a mix of environmental and dietary factors rather than a single causal exposure beginning in one year.