Roundup found in 95% of studied beers and wines | Hacker News Reader

Roundup found in 95% of studied beers and wines

bigthink.com

78 pointsoedmarap27 comments

Tsingtao has the highest glyphosate content of the beers tested at 48.7ppb. That's 0.02254 mg per 16 ounces. You'd have to drink nearly 100 pints per kilogram of body weight in a day to get to the 2mg/day EPA safe limit recommendation referenced in the linked article. The article, and the US PIRG report that "1 part per trillion" of glyphosate can stimulate cancer cells but doesn't say what unit of measurement that figure is measured from.

Also consider PIRG's funding sources and biases. I'm absolutely for minimizing the use of pesticides but, this is just not it.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=49.7+ppb+of+16+ounces

https://uspirg.org/feature/usp/glyphosate-pesticide-beer-and...

https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/u-s-public-interes...

[Edit: I missed the per kilogram of body weight part of 2mg/kg/day on the EPA guidance]

Also consider influencewatch.org's biases

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/influence-watch/

Ah! Thank you. I already knew of PIRG via Ralph Nader, but you're correct. Influencewatch definitely leans right which is unfortunate if they want to appear neutral.

It's not just 2mg/day; it's 2mg/day/kg of body weight.

So a woman who weighs 110lbs (50kg) would have to drink 50 times that, or 5000 pints in one day to pass the EPA limit.

Obviously most people won't drink that in a year, and this article is fairly useless for limiting itself to the easy-clicks topic of booze versus industrial agriculture chemicals. What I think would be interesting is to look at, across an average diet, what one's total daily glyphosate exposure might be, against any relevant clinical information, but that's more of a research paper than a piece of blog content.

Oh, thank you for catching that! I can't believe I missed such a big detail.

Whats the clearance rate? Does it store in fat? What is the dosage from other things in the diet. Those are very important questions.

Amazing when you consider the confidence espoused in the tone of the original post and the dismissiveness of a major safety matter. And it's still the top comment here two days later. This is on HN, what hope do the commons have?

Is glyphosate not found in other foods and drinks? Are beers and wines special in some way?

# diapers : "Traces of dangerous chemicals found in disposable nappies in France"

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/23/france-traces-...

# children foods: "Weedkiller found in wide range of breakfast foods aimed at children"

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/16/weedkill...

RoundUp would be found in close to 100% of everyone's urine, if only people had access to the tests.

The article is pretty misleading.

There is no substance that is absolutely safe at any level for humans. Even water will easily kill you (over-hydration is a real risk, especially for athletes).

FTA:

> The EPA says glyphosate is safe up to 2 milligrams per kilogram of body weight per day, and Bayer, who now owns Monsanto, claims that its safety for consumption by humans has been proven by years of research. However, the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer, among many others, disagrees, and considers glyphosate a potential human carcinogen.

The three claims are completely compatible, the WHO isn't disagreeing, it is simply listing as a potential carcinogen. This is actually less bad than eating salami, which is actually a known carcinogen.

Regardless of the actual safety of glyphosate, the article is journalistic crap.

And that's before we get into the actual amount of beer you'd have to drink to ingest any significant amount of glyphosate...

Referencing the toxicity of water is a bit disingenuous, since the average human body is 60% water or more to begin with. Glyphosate, on the other hand, is a substance wholly artificial and foreign to the human body. Its only logical that if the substance is capable of interfering with a plant's enzyme pathway, said molecule can also have a similar role in animal hosts as well.

Surely each of us is carrying more than trace amounts of this substance, unfortunately. Its used in grain crops as a pre-harvest crop desiccant, although in a way to limit residue effects. The fact that France has banned the herbicide, with other European countries considering similar bans, is something I found interesting.

Glyphosate interferes with the shikimate pathway by inhibiting the EPSP synthase enzyme. The shikimate pathway is not present in animals.

European Union follows the precautionary principle, that means it would ban a substance if there's a scientific uncertainty about the substance's safety (unlike US, where you'd have to prove that it's harmful). The problem is you can never be 100% certain about any substance's safety. And it's quite easy to convince the politicians that the safety concerns are bigger than they really are by using bad science and aggressive lobbying. Even so, the France's decision to ban glyphosate was very controversial in EU.

> Referencing the toxicity of water is a bit disingenuous, since the average human body is 60% water or more to begin with. Glyphosate, on the other hand, is a substance wholly artificial and foreign to the human body.

Quite the opposite: water is the basis of our life, a substance that we all depend on. Still, it can easily kill you.

It is exactly my point: no substance is entirely safe.

I wish they could have included more craft beers or smaller wineries. I don't drink the mass market stuff, in part because it's a given they will engage in worst practices if it saves half a penny.

Peak Organic IPA was the one microbrew they did test and it contained no glyphosate. It's also a really good beer.

I doubt it matters -- all the craft breweries and home brewers are sourcing malt from the same set of farms as the big guys.

That just sounds like a cynical thing to say, not a fact backed up by evidence.

This is an example of a very bad science that should never be published.

If there was actual proof we wouldn't be reading about beer on a site that manipulates browser history so you can't use the back button.

Back button seems to work fine for me on Chrome.

Try scrolling through the article and then using the back button.

No issues for me with Firefox (Linux and Android). What browser are you using?

Brave. There are over 50 ads and trackers on that page.

No issues here (pihole user)

Bad web dev practices may hint at a site being unreliable, but it's a bit ridiculous to assume something is false because of it.

I absolutely agree it's not proof.

However, I'd bet it's not statistically independent either. If you assume that submitters to Hacker News often put effort into selecting well-behaved web sites, and if you assume that legitimate news stories are carried by a wide variety of outlets, then it skews the odds in favor of the story not being legitimate.

I never assumed it was false because of that. It's false because there isn't any evidence proving their supposed point.

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