Hacker News Reader

Comment by michelb | Hacker News Reader

In The Netherlands we have A LOT of farmers with parkinsons. Most, if not all cases seem to be related to Roundup/Glyphosate.

View on HN

I wonder how much of this gets "downstream" to people eating the food produced.

EDIT: https://www.ewg.org/foodnews/summary.php

The 2023 DIRTY DOZEN

Of the 46 items included in our analysis, these 12 fruits and vegetables were most contaminated with pesticides:

    Strawberries
    Spinach
    Kale, collard and mustard greens
    Peaches
    Pears
    Nectarines
    Apples
    Grapes
    Bell and hot peppers
    Cherries
    Blueberries
    Green beans

The carnivore doesn't sound so idiotic viewed under that lens. The thing about mammals is that they have liver and kidneys, which are remarkably good at filtering toxins. Certainly much better than a plant.

I wonder if the reason many feel better eating only meat is that they avoid pesticides that wreck havoc on their body. I know I do feel like a million bucks after just 10 days, even though it's extremely boring.

On the flip side is bioaccumulation, in which contaminants and toxins are concentrated in organic material, particularly animals, and most especially for predators-of-predators.

The reasons for high mercury levels in tuna, shark, and swordfish is that each of these is both a predator and often eats other predatory species. There are numerous other examples of both species and contaminants, including even natural and even vital substances, e.g., vitamin A toxicity in carnivorous livers.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioaccumulation>

That's a good point, though we (humans) tend to eat only herbivores and not many carnivores/predators, probably because of that reason. I can't think of any actually, apart from fish.

The reason has far more to do with metabolic efficiency of conversion of biomass into food than with bioaccumulation --- you'll see roughly a 10-fold drop in food production at each trophic level. There are exceptions amongst hunter and trapper cultures, though even there herbivores are generally more abundant than carnivores, and are less treacherous to hunt. You will find ominvores occasionally included in diets: bear, racoon, and members of the rodent family on occasion.

Fish (amongst other sea life) are an exception specifically because humans aren't concerned with that efficiency, and carnivorous fish tend to grow larger which poses efficiency benefits when line- or net-fishing.

Another class is birds, notably fish-eating species, which may be 2nd- or 3rd-order carnivores (carnivores of carnivores, or carnivores of carnivore-eating carnivores).

Personally, I'm much more concerned about the risks to farm workers than risks to the general population.

Roundup/Glyphosate is such a nasty chemical. Farmers use it in practice regularly for crop desiccation [1] in order to yield more harvest cycles. Why do we still allow it knowing what we know?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_desiccation

Because cash rules everything around me ("CREAM"), aka dolla dolla bill yall.

Or to put it another way, roundup is made by a large, influential company (Monsanto) and they can pressure regulatory agencies & politicians.

Monsanto is big money, that's why. Just like everything else in our blown out civilization.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com