(The Defender)—Exposure to 3G cellphone radiation caused cell damage and death in the user’s cheek tissue, which could lead to the development of cancer, according to a new peer-reviewed study.
The study authors — including Michael Kundi, Ph.D., with the Center for Public Health at the Medical University of Vienna, Austria — said they found “clear evidence for induction of acute toxicity and disturbance of the cell cycle (cytokinesis) as a consequence of exposure” to radiofrequency (RF) radiation levels used by 3G smartphones.
“These processes may possibly lead to the formation of neoplastic cells,” they wrote in their report, published in Environmental Research.
Malignant neoplasms are cancerous tumors, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
Kundi and his co-authors said their study — which used people, not mice — was the “first controlled human intervention trial concerning cytotoxic/genotoxic effects of mobile phone radiation.”
Dr. Rob Brown, a diagnostic radiologist with more than 30 years of experience, told The Defender that the cell damage found in the study “is significant and should be looked at with great concern.”
Brown is also the vice president of scientific research and clinical affairs for Environmental Health Trust (EHT), a nonprofit research and education group focused on the effects of wireless radiation.
He said the study is “particularly valuable” because it is an in-vivo study. “Most research to date exploring the biological effects of electromagnetic fields and radiofrequency radiation has been performed on in-vitro cell cultures, plants and animal models,” Brown said. “Because of this, they have been easier to discount by industry and policymakers.”
Kundi and his co-authors undertook their study because prior research suggests that cellphone radiation “may cause cancer in humans but the underlying molecular mechanisms are currently not known.”
Their results shed light on the molecular mechanisms that may be involved.
For instance, they found that 3G cellphone radiation didn’t cause chromosomal damage, but it did cause the formation of nuclear anomalies that are indicative of “acute cytotoxic effects” and “disturbed cytokinesis.”
Devra Davis, Ph.D., MPH — EHT’s founder and president emerita whose prior research cited “substantial scientific evidence” linking cellphone radiation to cancer — said that just because authors of the Austrian study didn’t find chromosomal damage in the exposed cells shouldn’t be interpreted as suggesting that cancer won’t develop.
“In fact, chromosomal damage is not a necessary precondition for carcinogenesis,” Davis told The Defender. “Carcinogenesis can occur without mutagenesis,” she said, “Factors contributing to cancer include damage to rates of cellular signaling and repair such as were found in this study.”
She said the study — which she called “well-designed” — added to prior studies showing harms from RF radiation by elucidating “additional reasons why phones should not be used close to the head or body.”
Participants wore RF radiation headsets mimicking cellphone radiation exposure
For the study, the authors randomly assigned 41 participants, whose average age was 29, to be in a high RF radiation exposure group — designed to simulate holding a cellphone using 3G next to their head — or a low RF radiation group, ostensibly designed to mimic other real-world exposures to RF radiation.
Participants wore a headset that emitted either high- or low-level RF radiation on one side of the head for two hours on five consecutive days.
The study authors collected buccal smear samples to examine the cells inside both cheeks just before and three weeks after the participants wore the RF radiation headsets.
The researchers also asked the participants to use hands-free devices three weeks before, during and three weeks after the intervention, to minimize other possible cellphone RF radiation to the cheek.
The participants recorded in a journal any potential confounding factors such as gingival bleeding, eating a spicy meal or visiting the dentist during the study timeframe. The journals showed such confounding factors were very rare or not present.
Through scientific analysis of the buccal samples, the researchers found that the cells from the cheeks of participants in the high RF radiation group showed “a significant increase of binucleated cells” — cells that contain two nuclei — “which are formed as a consequence of disturbed cell divisions, and of karyolitic cells, which are indicative for cell death.”
“No such effects were seen in cells from the less exposed side,” they said.
Their analysis revealed increased chromatin fragmentation in the cells, which prior research associated with two forms of cell death: apoptosis and necrosis.
“Both forms of cell death are preceded by condensation of chromatin,” they explained. “Notably in the present study we found also an increase of CC,” or condensed chromatin.
Brown said the findings provide “strong evidence that at least some frequencies emitted by the cellular phone passed through the entire thickness of the cheek’s soft tissue (typically 1 centimeter in thickness or more) to affect the sampled cells.”
He added, “A similar depth of penetration and perhaps even greater should therefore be expected in all parts of the body in which a cellphone may make contact.”
Many young people use a cellphone for more than 2 hours a day
The study authors noted that a limitation of their study was that the participants wore the RF radiation headset for only two hours during each exposure session.
Davis pointed this out, too. “The exposure times used in this study appear much less than those reported in surveys of phone use in many sections of the globe and in younger age groups.”
“For instance,” she said, “Gen Z users report about 6 or more hours daily use of smartphones.”
U.S. Americans on average spend 3 hours and 39 minutes a day on their smartphones, reported ExplodingTopics.com on June 4.
It’s difficult to accurately determine how many of those hours are spent with the phone held close to the head, Davis said.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
