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Comment by dev_dull | Hacker News Reader

I knew of this practice and it always bothered me regarding flour. With fruit, for example, I can wash off any herbicide or pesticide applied to the plant during its growth. However, how do I wash glyphosate or 2,4-d off a bag of ground flour?

I wonder if this partly explains why so many people have "gluten intolerance" (many being self-diagnosed). It may not be something inherent to gluten, but rather the way wheat is grown and harvested.

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> I wonder if this partly explains why so many people have "gluten intolerance" (many being self-diagnosed). It may not be something inherent to gluten, but rather the way wheat is grown and harvested.

There's a class of carbohydrates called "FODMAP" (fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols) that are conjectured to be responsible for a lot of "gluten intolerance". There is some evidence that lower FODMAP intake reduces symptom severity in people with irritable bowel syndrome, and measures taken to cut gluten out of a diet can lead to dramatically lower FODMAP intake. So the basic idea is that a lot of people are successfully self-treating their undiagnosed IBS with a "gluten-free diet" and thus misattributing the problem to gluten.

IBS is also connected to pesticides

The article notes that Glyphosate is a 'non-contact' herbicide, which means it doesn't kill on contact. It is absorbed into the plant. So in theory your fruit can also contain it, especially if its a Glyphosate-resistant variety.

Glyphosate isn't used with fruit. He was referring to contact pesticides commonly used to kill insects that damage fruit (Eg. Malathion). You can wash contact non-systemic pesticides off easily enough.

No, the article refers to contact herbicides, not pesticides:

"Non-contact herbicides are taken up by the living plant and incorporated into still growing tissues, while contact herbicides kill the tissues they touch."

Also the article is written by a woman.

> Glyphosate isn't used with fruit.

I suppose corn is botanically a fruit.

I can see sites that say that its regularly used in orchards to control weeds, etc.

It is quite likely that it is used by orchard operators, but would have to be carefully applied away from the plant bearing the fruit else there would be a significant risk of losing the plant, which would be especially devastating in an orchard where trees are around for many years. There, of course, is no such thing as roundup resistant culinary fruit.

I grew up on an orchard that used Roundup for weed control. The chemical was applied directly to the ground beneath the trees, and to the trunks. The concentration was calculated to kill weeds, but not the trees, which were much more robust. Roundup certainly could have been absorbed into the trees and fruit however. Young trees had aluminum shields put around their trunks to protect them.

> Roundup certainly could have been absorbed into the trees and fruit however.

It could, but then the plant would die – or at very least show symptoms of roundup exposure, which is equally undesirable. Roundup binds to the soil, making it not bioavailable for absorption through the roots.

Have you actually had a bag of ground flour analyzed to measure how much glyphosate or 2,4-d it contains?

Unfortunately you just have to avoid it. Wheat, flour and bread isn't processed well in the US. For grains and beans, soak them for 10 minutes in baking soda or 5 minutes in activated charcoal. It doesn't get rid of everything, but it's a solution.

I have to be very careful about wheat products. If I eat the wrong stuff, I get acid reflux, and nasty acne. Some people tell me that I'm allergic to gluten. Others say yeast, because it's mainly crackers and noodles that I can eat. But not all wheat crackers are OK. The only one that I'm sure of is Stoned Wheat Thins, from Canada.

I wonder if it's glyphosate, or some other pesticide.

Anecdotal I know but same here - by trial and error I have also found certain wheat products OK. Name brand saltine crackers, but not generics, certain local breads, but not others. Some beers but not others too. Waiting for the day when this is all sorted out!

Yes, bizarrely enough, Nabisco Saltines are also ~OK for me. But not Breton.

I didn't figure it out until I started logging food and symptoms.

Caramel color is the trigger for me, you may want to isolate that as well to see if it affects you negatively. Apparently caramel color is made by burning sugar (the stuff at the bottom of the barrel) and yields various byproducts.

I'm getting a vibe that this comes across as implausible. So I'd like to add that the skin, central nervous system, and interior layer of the gut are all fundamentally ectodermal epithelia. Both the gut and CNS arise in development through invagination and pinching off. First the gut, and later the neural tube, which becomes the spinal cord and brain. And amusingly, in deuterostomes (vertebrates and their kin), the invagination point (blastopore) becomes the anus :)

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