I had to post this one in two posts because there was more than it would let me post in one
The Cancer Blame Game:
The Truth about Glyphosate in Your Food
I’m sure that none of us, if we had the choice, would voluntarily swallow a toxin that increases the risk of cancer. I know I wouldn’t.
But in the real world, our daily choices aren’t so clear cut. Our world is saturated in chemicals, and you can’t avoid them all. In my opinion, you have to choose your battles.
Glyphosate is in the news lately because a California court awarded $289 million in damages to a man who says the herbicide caused his cancer. He frequently handled the chemical as part of his job as a groundskeeper, so his exposure was probably much higher than you and I would ever ingest in food.
The case is on appeal, and meanwhile thousands of other lawsuits are pending. Originally glyphosate was only available under the brand name Roundup, but the patent has expired, and now many different companies market the chemical under different names. Under any name, it’s long been a target of activist groups.
But how real is the threat this chemical poses? I recently asked one of my best researchers to take an intense, open-minded look at the evidence...
Continued below. . .
Are You “Full of It?”
A medical study recently has confirmed what you may have always suspected: that most people are full of … well,
poop.
In a study of autopsies, examiners found that 90% of the cadavers’ colons held an average of 5 to 20 pounds of hardened, decayed feces which were encrusted on the intestine walls.
This means a staggering number of adults (including
you) are walking around with a backed-up bowel that holds
pounds of old, impacted feces that is protruding their bellies and secretly making them ill.
This was confirmed by a
European medical study which found that a whopping 62% of adults whom doctors examined had an average of 10-12 pounds of residual fecal matter buildup in their large intestines and rectums.
But when the doctors gave these poor people a treatment of
a special all-natural colon-cleansing substance (not a laxative!), their bowel mass was reduced from 42% to 17%.
Not only were they able to completely empty their bowels, but this do-it-yourself treatment re-established their natural bowel rhythm so they remained “clean and regular” afterward.
.
I think we need to better understand what the research tells us about glyphosate.
But before I get started discussing the problems linked to the herbicide, I want to make it clear that I am not in favor of the huge amounts that are being sprayed onto farm fields across the US.
There are plenty of less harmful methods farmers can implement that would control weeds while using less glyphosate. We need to be more prudent about how much of it we use, but at the same time I don’t think we need to panic and ban it altogether.
In the eyes of many critics, the worst thing about glyphosate is that it goes hand in hand with genetically modified crops. These crops are engineered to survive being sprayed with glyphosate, so the net result is that the herbicide just kills the weeds while it spares the crops.
How much does glyphosate add to a person’s risk of cancer? According to Arthur Lambert, a researcher at the Whitehead Institute of Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, “even if one accepts the high end of the reported risks (for cancer) the effects (of glyphosate) are, at best, modest.”1
As Dr. Lambert points out, while smoking increases your cancer risk by up to 2,000 percent (i.e. by a factor of 20), the highest estimate of glyphosate’s increased risk from exposure is about 30 percent. That’s too much for me – I sure don’t want to eat it -- but it’s lower than what’s caused by other common toxins.
Amount we’re eating has soared
It’s hard to estimate the impact of glyphosate on cancer risk for many reasons. One of them is that our national use of this toxin has been increasing. Researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine have found that since farmers began growing genetically modified (GMO) foods in the 1990s, human exposure to glyphosate – from food residues – has gone up on average by around 500 percent.2
Because cancer takes decades to develop, in most cases, we haven’t yet seen the impact on cancer rates that may result from the recent, massive increase in consumption.
The California scientists have measured levels of glyphosates by analyzing chemicals excreted in people’s urine since 1993 when farmers first started raising GMO crops. Many GMO crops that are now in our food have been genetically modified to survive the glyphosate exposure that kills weeds.
"Our exposure to these chemicals has increased significantly over the years but most people are unaware that they are consuming them through their diet,” warns researcher Paul J. Mills.
"What we saw (in our research) was that prior to the introduction of genetically modified foods, very few people had detectable levels of glyphosate," says Dr. Mills.
Now, however, 70 percent of us have the chemical in our bodies, he warns. He adds that use of the herbicide has gone up about 15-fold during the past 25 years, because farmers have increasingly planted the GMO crops designed to survive being sprayed. Glyphosate is applied most often to GMO soy and corn, but it’s also applied to wheat and oats grown in the US.
Inactive ingredients – or not?
Researchers have also focused on questions about how herbicides are formulated: The other chemicals that are mixed into glyphosate-based herbicides can also affect health.
Although glyphosate is allegedly the only “active” ingredient in many herbicide products, researchers in England point out that the “adjuvant” ingredients that are combined with glyphosate, and which are considered “inactive,” can pose health difficulties that get overlooked when herbicides and pesticides are studied for their physiological effects.3
"Exposure to environmental levels of some of these adjuvant mixtures can affect non-target organisms -- and even can cause chronic human disease," warns researcher Robin Mesnage of King's College London. "Despite this, adjuvants are not currently subject to an acceptable daily intake and are not included in the health risk assessment of dietary exposures to pesticide residues."
Another concern: Studies show that an increased cancer risk isn’t the only health issue linked to glyphosate.
For example, researchers at the University of California – San Diego have also found the herbicide may be linked to liver problems.4 When they looked at people suffering what’s called nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), it turned out that their levels of glyphosate were significantly higher than in people with healthy livers.
And, these California researchers note, lab studies have similarly indicated that glyphosate can give your liver a hard time.
"There have been a handful of studies, all of which we cited in our paper, where animals either were or weren't fed Roundup or glyphosate directly, and they all point to the same thing: the development of liver pathology," says Dr. Mills.
Problems can be passed down to children
Meanwhile, tests at Washington State University raise the possibility that health issues caused by glyphosate may be inter-generational – your exposure to glyphosate may affect your children and grandchildren.5
These lab studies, done on rodents, found that glyphosate exposure during pregnancy may cause prostate, kidney and ovarian problems in offspring and later generations. They also found the herbicide is statistically linked to a bigger risk of being obese and suffering birth abnormalities.
The researchers conclude that we need to take the risk to future generations into account when analyzing the safety of glyphosate and other toxins. "The ability of glyphosate and other environmental toxicants to impact our future generations needs to be considered and is potentially as important as the direct exposure toxicology done today for risk assessment."