People look at you like you're crazy if you tell them you avoid oats, grains, nuts that are particularly heavy in glyphosate.
1. Glyphosate is one of the more heavily studied chemicals known to man.
2. The evidence for it causing cancer is poor. Studies routinely fail to find evidence for it.
3. The subset of studies that do find evidence for such a link, find it in occupational exposure, by people who have been working knee-deep in it for decades. [1]
Yes, people probably should look at you like you're crazy, because you're extrapolating from cherry-picked evidence that supports your priors.
[1] Whose exposure is dramatically higher than that of someone eating food grown with it.
People who claimed that UK government gave them AIDS, on purpose, were called crazy. 50 years later, it turns out they were right.
"The blood was imported from the US after a UK shortage, where people such as prisoners could donate in return for cash. The minutes ..shows that officials knew that haemophiliacs were being given dangerous blood from the US that was making them ill with hepatitis... No one raised the alarm to stop the spread of the blood and instead, officials hoped the imported goods would not get a "bad name".
There was a major effort to supress this information. People has to extrapolate based on limited data.
These situations are not rare - when the workers in Teflon factories were having birth defects and cancers, and started questioning that maybe it's related to their job, they were called crazy too.
In my family we extrapolated based on limited data, twice, and doctors were looking at us like we were crazy, and it turned out we were right. If we didn't press the issue, two family members would have been dead.
So now I am jaded and I have limited faith in Medical establishment and institutions doing their homework.
The fact that governments did shady stuff in the past isn't proof for every conspiracy theory under the sun.
The specific papers (worst effects of a great deal of exposure) oft cited are:
Myers, J.P.; Antoniou, M.N.; Blumberg, B.; Carroll, L.; Colborn, T.; Everett, L.G.; Hansen, M.; Landrigan, P.J.; Lanphear, B.P.; Mesnage, R.; et al. Concerns over use of glyphosate-based herbicides and risks associated with exposures: a consensus statement. Environ. Health 2016, 15, 19.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26883814/
Leon, M.E.; Schinasi, L.H.; Lebailly, P.; Beane Freeman, L.E.; Nordby, K.-C.; Ferro, G.; Monnereau, A.; Brouwer, M.; Tual, S.; Baldi, I.; et al. Pesticide use and risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoid malignancies in agricultural cohorts from France, Norway and the USA: A pooled analysis from the AGRICOH consortium. Int. J. Epidemiol. 2019, 48, 1519–1535.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30880337/
Zhang, L.; Rana, I.; Shaffer, R.M.; Taioli, E.; Sheppard, L. Exposure to glyphosate-based herbicides and risk for non-Hodgkin lymphoma: A meta-analysis and supporting evidence. Mutat. Res. Rev. Mutat. Res. 2019, 781, 186–206.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31342895/
I'm in a grain growing district and glyphosate isn't being applied to grain ready to eat | harvest here, just sprayed pre harvest to kill weeds and mid season to suppress weeds coming up in competition.
If people are concerned they could source from international suppliers that demand no glyphosate contracts such as https://www.grainmillers.com/grower-specifications/
For an industry review of the possiblities of avoiding
Farming without Glyphosate? https://www.ahri.uwa.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/plant...
is a decent balanced paper - it points out the vast number of studies show no real cause for concern while also giving the papers that show issues for farmers and the possible future for glyphosate free farming.
Rather than saying it doesn't affect this group but does affect another group it would be more appropriate to establish the level of consumption/exposure that is likely to cause a statistical increase in the likelihood of developing cancer.
I'm not really concerned about its dietary effects since there's no evidence there, but as an amateur entomologist the effects of Roundup on butterfly populations have been devastating - in the past milkweed was pretty hard to completely weed out by hand, but modern farming can clear hundreds of acres of every trace of milkweed with Roundup/glyphosate.
Spraying chemicals on crops to make them cheaper to harvest is enough evidence to convince me it's best to avoid all cereal products unless they're organic.
We have a very important microbiota that are bacteria themselves. The antibiotics on meat and environment can break havoc there, specially for people that work or live near those environments and can breathe or drink the pesticides.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36464527/
If so, that study appears to point to rinse aid as the culprit in the damage, not the detergent.
I haven't seen the data or reporting on glyphosate residues. Without clear, unbiased proof of safety following the precautionary principle, there is no assurances that this shit is safe to eat.
Also, yes, industrial meat ag is bad for creating new pandemics between human workers<->livestock animals packed together in CAFOs<->wildlife, antibiotic resistance (antibiotics injected to make animals grow faster), and climate change. Sometimes animal rights people tout animal cruelty, but few people are convinced because the cognitive dissonance "forcefield" is too strong to accept this idea. Adapting a quote by Upton Sinclair: "It's difficult to get someone to understand something when their tastebuds and drone-delivered fast food depends on their not understanding it." Probably a whole other area for discussion. :]
In the absence of compelling precautionary evidence and systematic safety processes, it's clear that the faithful adherents of organic production are more likely to be safer than industrial megafarming done with the same blind faith in the miracles of chemical wizardry that brought us such hits as organophosphates, chlorpyrifos, DDT, and the over 85k compounds that are de facto unregulated because they are allowed until specific injury is proven after the damage is done ("whack-a-mole"-style), rather than first proven safe.
But the "organic" label doesn't check whether the farmers were "faithful adherents of organic production", only that they fulfilled the organic checklist. They can use as much chemical fertilizer and pesticides as they want, so long they're on the approved list. In the same vain farming and "industrial megafarming" isn't mutually exclusive.
- Bacillus subtilis
- Bacilus thuringiensis
- Beauveria bassiana
- Boric acid: Structural pest control, no direct contact with organic food or crops.
- Coniothyrium minitans
- Copper: Copper hydroxide, copper oxide, copper oxychloride, includes products exempted from EPA tolerance, provided that copper-based materials must be used in a manner that minimizes accumulation in the soil and shall not be used as herbicides.
- Copper sulfate: Application rates are limited to levels which do not increase baseline soil test values for copper over a timeframe agreed upon by the producer and accredited certifying agent.
- Corn gluten
- Cydia pomonella granulosis
- Diatomaceous earth
- Gibberellic acid
- Horticultural vinegar
- Hydrogen peroxide
- Lime sulfer: Including calcium polysulfide
- Minerals such as elemental sulfur, bicarbonate, or kaolin clay
- Myrothecium verrucaria
- Non-detergent insecticidal soaps: As a pesticide, fungicide, or algaecide for food crops
- Oils, including petroleum, vegetable, and fish oils: Types include dormant, suffocating, and summer oils
- Peracetic acid: For use to control fire blight bacteria. Also permitted in hydrogen peroxide formulations at a concentration of no more than 6% as indicated on the pesticide product label
- Pheromones and pheromone traps
- Plant-derived substances such as neem, caraway oil, seed fennel, quassia, or ryania
- Ryania/Ryanodine
- Sabadilla
- Spinosad
- Streptomycin sulfate and tetracycline
- Sticky traps
- Vitamin D3: As a rodencide
https://www.agdaily.com/technology/the-list-of-pesticides-ap...
See also https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-7/subtitle-B/chapter-I/su...
And the farms are re-certified annually to be in compliance.
To maintain organic certification, your certified organic farm or business will go through an annual review and inspection process.
https://www.ams.usda.gov/services/organic-certification/beco...
- More than 45,000 onsite inspections per year by certifying agents to monitor compliance with USDA organic standards. Every certified operation has at least one onsite inspection each year.
- Certifiers audited by USDA to make sure they are implementing the rules correctly.
- Residue testing program to verify that prohibited pesticides aren’t being applied to organic crops.
- Robust compliance and enforcement activities.
- Risk-based investigations based on operation size, complexity, geographic location or compliance history.
https://www.ams.usda.gov/services/organic-certification/orga...
We call them assholes. Or fucking assholes, depending on the degree.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37905251 ( 18 days ago )
Here's where I might lose you. In our country, illness is a way to make money [3]. If you're really sick and trying to stay alive, you'll spend everything you've got. So the quickest way to turn people's savings into profit while also reducing the population of non-productive people is for them to fall ill, pay as much as they can to survive and then ultimately die an early death, which triggers a death tax event [4].
1. https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/a...
2. https://www.eatthis.com/toxic-food-ingredients-linked-to-can...
3. https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucejapsen/2023/01/13/unitedhe...
Similarly to how so many people that died from covid tended toward very low vitamin D levels [https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...]
Most "medical" research tends to never focus on actual nutrition. Probably because that would reduce profits for those with vested interest from selling treatments.