Why? Because it has better vibes?
The EPA says it's not an endocrine disruptor. Numerous studies and experts suggest that it is, although I can't find any major government or NGO that agrees.
I'm not a doctor or molecular biologist. How should I decide which experts to trust? I can easily afford food grown without glyphosate, so that's what I eat.
EDIT: I'm not religious about this, presumably all the restaurant food I eat is grown with glyphosate. But my local grocery store only has organic produce, I usually buy that since it's convenient and the cost difference is not a big deal.
No, it doesn't.
> I'm not a doctor or molecular biologist. How should I decide which experts to trust? I can easily afford food grown without glyphosate, so that's what I eat.
Yeah, and I tuned my car to emit extra black smoke for better motor vibration. It now ROARS and consumes more gas, helping to stimulate the economy!
The International Agency for Research on Cancer is part of the WHO.
https://www.iarc.who.int/featured-news/media-centre-iarc-new...
What am I missing?
High concentration and quantity and long term exposure to glyphosate is probably bad for the farmers spraying, but their listing of glyphosate is completely irrelevant for the consumer buying a crop that was sprayed with it. They never once mention any danger to consumers in that entire article.
Even in that limited case (occupational hazard), the data is mixed, and the IARC says that the US AHS study of 50k pesticide applicators did not find a correlation between cancer and glyphosate. They say that doesn't overrule the other findings.
They are being hyperconservative for the safety of workers. That literally doesn't apply to you, the consumer.
This category includes: carpentry, bracken ferns, aloe vera extract and traditional Asian pickled vegetables, magnetic fields, radio, coffee.
I'm not kidding, go see yourself: https://monographs.iarc.who.int/list-of-classifications (group 2B).
This agency has zero credibility now. No serious agency (EPA, EFSA, etc.) classifies it as dangerous: https://www.efsa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/2023-07/glyph...
It's like I can cite the Cato institute and Heritage Foundation to say that we should ban electric cars, because they are polluting the air with brake dust.
Specifically,
> A cancer hazard is an agent that is capable of causing cancer, whereas a cancer risk is an estimate of the probability that cancer will occur given some level of exposure to a cancer hazard. The Monographs assess the strength of evidence that an agent is a cancer hazard. The distinction between hazard and risk is fundamental.
> The identification of a cancer hazard should trigger some action to protect public health, either directly as a result of the hazard identification or through the conduct of a risk assessment.
The key thing to recognize here is they are making preliminary assessments of existing lines of research, looking for studies into whether an agent has been associated with cancer in humans, animals, or mechanistically, and characterizing the strength of such evidence, as to whether or not something can cause cancer.
The purpose of doing this is so that other standards bodies can assess the actual dose/response relationship and your probability of getting cancer from levels of exposure. Glyphosate in in group 2A, along with things like being a barber, night shift work, hot beverages, red meat. Lots of things the EPA does not ban.
Why? Because as the organization itself says, hazard does not mean risk. The fact that studies show a robust association between one thing and some increase in cancer incidence, at any dose, does not mean the level of exposure any regular person experiences raises their probability of getting cancer by any meaningful amount we should care about or regulate.
The problem here is you're almost certainly not actually reading the publications of either IARC or the EPA, which are not in conflict with each other. You're reading science journalism, which almost universally presents this in the most misleading, fear-mongering fashion possible to attract eyeballs.
Basically they conclude that the chemical has the potential to increase cancer incidence in some dose. But they are not making any statement about whether glyphosate as used in agriculture increases cancer risk?
IARC's piece in this puzzle is to aggregate research showing something is a carcinogen, but this includes a lot of things that are harmless or even healthy in low doses. Sunlight, for instance, is obviously a carcinogen, but the amount of exposure you want is not zero. X-rays can cause cancer, but the optimal lifetime exposure to x-rays is not zero. Once IARC classifies these things, the purpose is to recommend to other researchers to now go look into these to find dose/response curves in animal to see what a safe and unsafe level actually is.
As far as the EPA has been able to tell, glyphosate at the level any human would ever get exposed to from its use as a pesticide, is safe, even though it's a carcinogen. Think of like being in the same city as smokers exposes you to cigarette smoke in the shared air, but at levels nowhere near enough to meaningfully raise your cancer risk in spite of the fact you're regularly breathing in carcinogens. Living in the same room with a smoker is a lot worse. Actually smoking is even worse than that. Probably don't drink straight glyphosate on a regular basis.
Similarly, you don't want to drink bleach, but cleaning your counter with bleach and then eating off of it is not only perfectly safe, but arguably even better than just eating off the counter beforehand, because bleach disinfects it.
No effects. Weak evidence shown in in-vitro studies is not supported by the animal experiments or statistical data.
And a sidenote, a murine model study with less than 100 specimens in each group is trash-tier, unless the effect is on the level of "We tested it on animals, and none of them survived".