Roundup Chemical in Your Cereal:
Oats are the basis of many favorite children’s snacks,
including Cheerios and other baby finger-food cereals.
Because of their small size and still-developing bodies,
babies and young children are more vulnerable to
environmental harms than adults are.
Organic products had lower levels of glyphosate; and almost
two-thirds of the samples made with organically grown oats
didn’t have any detectable glyphosate at all. That’s not too
surprising since glyphosate is banned from use in organic
farming. Still, some organic products — 5 samples in total —
did have some glyphosate.
Even organic oats can be contaminated if they sit next to
fields where glyphosate is sprayed, or if they’re processed
on the same equipment as conventionally grown oats.
What’s the Risk?
So how much should a parent worry about what they’re
feeding their kids?
Experts are divided on this point. In 2015, the respected
International Agency for Research on Cancer declared that
glyphosate was “probably carcinogenic to humans.” There
are efforts under way in Europe to ban the chemical. More
than 1 million people signed a petition calling on the
European Union to prohibit its use, and Germany announced
plans to stop its use there by 2021.
Yet in 2017, the EPA said the chemical was “not likely” to
cause cancer in people.
“This is where it gets tricky. This isn’t straightforward,” says
Michael Davoren, PhD, who studies molecular toxicology at
UCLA. He was not involved in the Environmental Working
Group’s tests.
Olga Naidenko,
PhD, the
Environmental
Working Group’s
senior science
What Does Organic Mean?
What USDA standards does a food have to
pass in order to earn the word organic on its
label?
Advisors for children’s environmental health, says glyphosate
shouldn’t be in food, especially the foods we feed to young
children.
“We believe that toxic pesticides, especially ones that may
be linked to cancer, really don’t belong in the diet,” she says.
But even Naidenko and her co-author, toxicologist Alexis
Temkin, PhD, say the odds of getting cancer from eating
glyphosate-contaminated oats are really low.
Based on their own calculations, they say a single serving of
most of the foods they tested, eaten each day for a lifetime,
would cause just one additional case of cancer in every
million people.
“That’s such a low increased risk to speculate about,”
Davoren says. “When you’re dealing with something like
that, a 1-in-a-million increased risk of cancer, I would say that
isn’t a significant level to be particularly concerned about.”
He says the risk definitely wouldn’t outweigh the health
benefits of eating oats, which are high in fiber and low in fat.
In a statement, Monsanto, a company that makes Roundup
and other glyphosate-based products, said “the EWG’s claim
about cancer is false. Glyphosate does not cause cancer.
Glyphosate has a more than 40-year history of safe use.
Over those four decades, researchers have conducted more
than 800 scientific studies and reviews that prove glyphosate
is safe for use.”
Does that mean glyphosate is safe? You could say the jury is
still out on that, but actually, one jury is in back in, and they
didn’t think so.
Last week, jurors in California found Monsanto liable for
causing cancer in a 46-year-old groundskeeper, Dewayne
Johnson. Johnson was awarded $250 million in punitive
damages after the jury said the company failed to warn the
public about its products’ health risks. Johnson’s case is only
the first to come to trial. The company faces thousands of
similar challenges across the U.S.
Versatile, Popular Weedkiller
Glyphosate doesn’t merely kill weeds. It also helps get crops
Roundup Chemical in Your Cereal.
Glyphosate doesn’t merely kill weeds. It also helps get crops
ready for harvest. Farmers spray it on oats and other grains
so they can move into the field to harvest them sooner. It
also helps to promote even drying so they can harvest more
of their grain at the same time.
For years, the chemical, which was first used in the U.S. in
1974, was considered to be virtually nontoxic to people and
other animals. That’s because it works by blocking an
enzyme that’s only made by plants. Since people don’t make
the enzyme, the chemical was thought to be basically inert in
the body.
But some studies in cells in petri dishes and animals have
found that glyphosate and the weedkillers that use it may be
able to damage DNA.
Internal company emails presented as evidence in Dewayne
Johnson’s trial show Monsanto knew it was “very vulnerable
in this area” and that the company hired outside scientists in
an effort to discredit this science.
Exactly how the weedkiller might be causing this damage
isn’t clear.
Davoren says new studies are pointing to a possible
explanation. Though animals don’t contain the enzyme that’s
blocked by glyphosate, bacteria do.
In fact, in addition to marketing the chemical as a weedkiller,
Monsanto patented glyphosate as an antibiotic in 2010.
Davoren says that because glyphosate is so popular — it’s
the most commonly used weedkiller in the U.S., with more
than 250 million pounds used each day — it’s really hard to
avoid.
“We’re learning more and more about the complexity and the
importance of the human microbiome,” says Davoren. The
microbiome refers to the genes of trillions of bacteria that live
in and on our bodies. Our bodies contain about 100 times
more bacterial DNA than human DNA. “What’s going on in
your microbiome can end up affecting your cancer risk.”
Davoren says the science is still early, but it seems like
glyphosate may be most harmful to “good” bacteria — the
kind that dampen inflammation in the body.
“You’re potentially adding one more subtle environmental
factor that could tip the scales from a healthy microbiome to
Roundup Chemical in Your Cereal.
factor that could tip the scales from a healthy microbiome to
an unhealthy microbiome,” he says, though this is still just a
theory. Much more research is needed before this can be
accepted as fact.
Source: https://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/news/20180815/roundup-chemical-in-your-cereal-what-to-know?
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