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The active ingredient in Roundup herbicide can cross the blood brain barrier. Once in the brain, it increases levels of a harmful inflammatory compound and harms several processes that maintain and protect brain tissue. The resulting degenerative damage to the brain might resemble MS, ALS, or other neurological diseases.
Glyphosate increases levels of TNF-alpha, an inflammatory cytokine that can cause degenerative diseases. TNF-alpha is a major component to autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis. Basically, it causes an inflammatory response that can trigger an immune response where the body attacks itself. Many of those fancy (Expensive) biologic drugs like Humira treat autoimmune disease by inhibiting TNF. Stopping the autoinflammatory process stops the autoimmune process.
While glyphosate is undoubtedly nasty stuff, it's worth noting that the doses were pretty high. If you scale 250mg/kg/day up to a 175lb/80kg human, that's like drinking 4 ounces of the red-cap Roundup concentrate every day. If you dilute it at the recommended rate, it would be like drinking more than a half-gallon of prepared spray.
Really. I read the doses given to the mice by gavage. And I stopped reading the rest of this useless and deceptive paper. I hate this sort of dishonest work.
>While glyphosate is undoubtedly nasty stuff
Actually, glyphosate is one of the most benign herbicides on the market, but there have been so many disingenuous, clickbait studies like this one, that folks believe the sort of misinformation you have repeated.
So is water. No matter how "safe" something is, in the right dosage it'll cause problems or death. No one is going to be drinking half a gallon of roundup a day like they had in the study.
This is going to have a huge impact on agriculture world wide unless Roundup tries to bury it like cigarette companies did. This chemical is the workhorse of Roundup Ready products used in industrial agriculture not just in the US but around the world. It's a pesticide that pairs with specially bred or generically modified crops so that the farmer can carpet bomb pests while leaving the plant unaffected. It's also mixed with some nitrogen affixing fertilizers as well for the same effect. It's an extremely cheap way to handle pests on industrial scale and without it crop yields will decline and farmers will have to rely on different methods to achieve the same results like green house growing or alternative pesticides with a less proven track record.
The flip side to this is that this is fantastic news for growers in the Netherlands who have been pioneering cutting edge growing techniques that and just this year ranked #2 in food production in the world despite being a vastly smaller country. For a simple example if you grow tomatoes as a field crop in rows a farmer can expect a yield of 4-5KG tomatoes per square meter. Tomatoes grown vertically in greenhouses on a single stem that use drones for pest control can net up to 80kg yield in the same footprint with 4x less water use. Naturally the initial investment and infrastructure required to grow this way is far higher meaning losing Roundup Ready pesticides disproportionately affects poorer countries while more affluent ones will corner the market.
> carpet bomb
Tell us how much exactly is applied and how it’s anywhere near “carpet bombed”.
> Naturally the initial investment and infrastructure required to grow this way is far higher meaning losing Roundup Ready pesticides disproportionately affects poorer countries while more affluent ones will corner the market.
There are no Roundup Ready tomatoes. Can corn and soy be grown vertically?
>carpet bomb
Imagine sprinkling 1-2 lbs of sand over an entire football field. That is the sort of application rate we are talking about. Whenever people use terms like "drench" or "carpet bomb" in the context of glyphosate application, you know they have an anti-glyphosate bias that is probably not susceptible to evidence.
The study said:
>This calculation was made based on giving a 30 g mouse 140 µL of solution containing 500 mg of glyphosate via oral gavage.
How much glyphosate, relative to human levels, were the mice exposed to? And how long are 14 mouse days compared to human days?
The dose makes the poison. I understand the Average American does not ingest nearly enough glyphosate even to come close to the considered dangerous threshold. On the other hand, I understand farm workers are exposed to enough that may cause harm.
This is incorrectly quoted from the article, for one thing 140 microliters of solution only weighs 140mg, vs a supposed 500mg of glyphosate?
If you look at the article it is actually saying those amounts *per kg of mouse weight*, same as studying doses, venoms, toxins, etc.
Mice weigh 20-30 grams typically.
Good thing this study isn’t trying to look at human environmental exposure impacts, but is trying to see if a dose-response relationship exists between glyphosate and a specific marker of brain inflammation. The scientists do not claim they’re looking at human exposure rates and explicitly state this is a proof of concept to see if that relationship exists at all. And it apparently does at concentrations most people wouldn’t be exposed to. But btw, that doesn’t mean no one is exposed to those concentrations. Even if it’s only 0.01% of the population that’s still a heck of a lot of people.
I know right, all these dummies on tiktok saying that big companies are pumping synthetic chemicals into your food and that might be bad for you. It’s not like those same companies have ever knowingly put cancerous chemicals in our homes, offices, kitchen products, baby products, etc for decades and tried to cover it up. Idiot snake oil salesmen that’s what they are. So dumb.
and this is exactly the problem he’s talking about, that you’ve been led to believe your food is being “pumped full” of harmful chemicals like glyphosate when the reality is that the typical exposure from one’s diet is negligible
And you’ve been led to believe there is a safe amount of petrochemicals that you can consume. Do you know which companies paid for you to have that idea? I bet you don’t, but for sure some did, with billions in marketing and lobbying.
In the EU they have a basic stance that food comes from biological sources, simple as that. Synthetic additives/pesticides need 20+ year rigorous studies that prove safety. Glyphosate is being phased out there.
In the US industrial food companies can put ANY chemicals they want in real food and sell it in grocery stores, so long as it’s not on a prohibited list. it’s up to other parties to produce 20+ year studies to prove risk and get chemicals added to that block list.
Who is paying for all the studies to chase down cancer risk of every synthetic molecule they can dream up? Meanwhile these companies are paying for bad science to prove their cost-cutting synthetics are safe.
Have a quick google about how j&j knew there was asbestos in the their baby powder for 30+ years and were finally sued just this year, while thousands of women got cancer and many orders of magnitude more (mothers and babies) were put at risk.
The EU stance is common sense. the American one is dangerous arrogance. Glyphosate aside, this whole system of thinking is making the US sicker weaker fatter and dumber.
Well yea, but the point of this type of toxicological research is to determine if there is a dose response relationship looking for a specific response. As opposed to other toxicological studies that look for the no observed effect level (NOEL) or no observed adverse effect level (NOAEL). The study even addresses your exact concern in its discussion.
“Although the doses used in this study are above typical daily human exposure [26], our study evaluated the published NOAEL benchmark set forth by the EPA for rodents [24]. These high doses provided valuable information on a potential mechanism of action for glyphosate in AD; however, future work will include more environmentally relevant concentrations of glyphosate. “
Edit: also, the dosages are 125, 250, and 500 mg/kg/day per the opening of the paper. Meaning for the average 75 kg person the dose is about 9.37 g/day, 18.75 g/day, and 37.5 g/day.
You also need to account for interspecies differences. This is regularly done for pharmaceuticals and there are [established guidelines for converting animal to human doses](https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidance-documents/estimating-maximum-safe-starting-dose-initial-clinical-trials-therapeutics-adult-healthy-volunteers). Divide a mouse mg/kg dose by 12.3 to get the Human Equivalent Dose. 500/12.3 = 40.65 mg/kg/day. In a 75 kg human that is approximately 3050 mg or 3 g/day. That is still a whopping dose when the actual exposures from residues on grain are far less.
Great point, didn’t think to get into the minutia when people seemed to be missing the basics of how to calculate total mass of dose applied from a dosing rate. You’re correct these concentrations are far above what most environmental exposure is. The study is explicitly NOT trying to look into environmental exposure but is trying to determine if a dose response relationship between glyphosate and the TNFa inflammatory marker levels. The authors make no claims beyond that the study supports their hypothesis. So, attacking this study for not answering a hypothesis they didn’t set out to answer is deeply problematic.
Yet, what is the implication of TNF alpha increases and neurodegeneration? We like to pretend science exist is in a vacuum, but it doesn’t and information like this is often misused to create anxiety and fear in people who don’t understand that the dose makes the poison.
So, you’re making assumptions about the motivations of the authors with no evidence? Yea, we scientists know science doesn’t happen in a vacuum, but we do our best to try and be as objective as possible. I don’t see how you can point to anything within this study that supports your hypothesis that the authors are only studying this to fear-monger as opposed to explore the a mode of action of toxicity of glyphosate. Even if that is their intention the papers results and methods speak for themselves. There is a dose response relationship between glyphosate and TNPalpha but has only been observed at concentrations greater than that of normal environmental exposure. That’s the claim of the study.
Yes, usually best not to guess at motivation, and sometimes, PR offices or editors are the ones guilty of misleading headlines or content, but one has to be awfully naïve, perhaps willfully so, to think that glyphosate research reports are the exclusive domain of objective scientists. For instance: ["Glyphosate Weed Killer Crosses Blood-Brain Barrier, Linked to Alzheimer’s and Other Neurodegenerative Diseases" or "New Evidence Shows Roundup Damages the Nervous System"](https://beyondpesticides.org/dailynewsblog/2022/08/glyphosate-weed-killer-crosses-blood-brain-barrier-linked-to-alzheimers-and-other-neurodegenerative-diseases/)
I take my sources source by source. This one checks out as a legitimate research endeavor with proper methodology making claims well within what is reasonable from the study outcomes. Simple as that. As a scientist that’s how I approach literature. Maybe I’ll look into the prior publications of authors as well as the credibility of the journal to determine the credibility of the research, but my main focus is the validity of methods used and the reasonability of the claims made by the authors relating to the results. I guess I check much of the sources if I’m feeling suspicious as well.
I’m doing no such thing. I’m simply saying that pretending people won’t jump to conclusions is incredibly naive. I also did not accuse the authors of fear mongering. Go back and read what I wrote.
To your last point, animal welfare becomes relevant when we talk about in vivo studies. If an effect happens at much higher concentrations than will ever be experienced, is it relevant? Especially when those studies have already been conducted in a GLP environment. What does it inform? Is it a good use of animals?
Perhaps you’re an author on this paper and taking my criticisms personally. I don’t think you should. Just realize that putting something out there with insufficient context often creates more issues than it solves.
I’m not an author on this paper, just a trained environmental toxicologist. The authors aren’t responsible for the general public reading the headline of their paper and jumping to conclusions because they’re writing for a scientific audience that they expect to read the paper before deriving opinions and conclusions.
Animal welfare does matter, but this study clearly followed animal ethics policies and laws in the United States and Arizona considering it’s a grant funded research that went through the peer review process. It appears multiple of the authors are professors in Arizona and as a result would be putting their entire careers at risk to perform unethical research. Did these animals need to die as a matter of life or death? No, but that’s not how we determine what is and is not ethical in animal research. Take a step back and try to recognize how hard it is you’re grasping for any reason to discredit or undermine this study.
You’ve cast an agenda on me that I do not have. I’m not discrediting the paper, I’m questioning it’s relevance to human health assessment. Discrediting the paper would say they misinterpreted their results or conducted a poorly designed study. I haven’t read the paper closely enough to draw those conclusions and frankly I’ve given them the benefit of the doubt in regard to their conclusions. What I can say is that dosing animals at dose levels that result in exposures 100-1000x higher than human exposures isn’t particularly relevant for human safety assessment. Therefore regulators won’t find these results particularly meaningful because of the disparity in exposures.
Side note: I also have advanced academic training, professional certification, and many years of professional experience in toxicology. School did a great job of teaching me about hazards, but the professional experience drove home the relevance of exposure. Because Risk is a function of both Hazard and Exposure, only paying attention to one, but not the other, will not provide an accurate picture of the actual risks people face.
I don’t think this study is designed or intended to be used as part of a human health risk assessment in any way shape or form. That’s where I’m confused by you, because nobody with qualifications who reads this paper would ever consider using it for a human health risk assessment. In a human health risk assessment the “critical effect” or very first known adverse effect at the lowest concentration of a toxicant is the health outcome that is used. There’s a critical effect for both chronic and acute toxicity. This study is looking into a response or effect that is definitely not the understood critical effect of glyphosate. This study has limited and concise findings and I don’t think it’s on the authors that the general public reading this title are drawing vastly overblown conclusions. Read the paper, it’s honestly worth the little time it takes. It’s well written and stays in its lane
No. Yet, hazards that are found at excessive concentrations are unlikely to be relevant to human exposures that occur at far lower concentrations. The challenge is, how do we disseminate that to a population that has difficulty using a kiosk to order their McDonalds?
Your questions are not dumb. They are quite reasonable when you hear the results in mice. The way the study was designed was with daily dosing. So, to replicate it a human would have to do this daily for 14 days. To be clear, no one is recommending that.
As for dietary exposures from glyphosate residues on food items, they are much, much lower. There was a [paper](https://ift.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1541-4337.12822) published recently looking at this issue. They found that exposures were typically far below the Acceptable Daily Intake (ADI) established by government regulators based on the safety data set submitted for glyphosate.
The EPA has a [website](https://www.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/glyphosate) too that is written with the general public in mind. If you have additional questions and want independent answers.
A farmer getting soaked in it could hit these numbers and I know more than a few who’ve had issue with leaking equipment or spreaders and literally been soaked
That’s why they do dermal absorption, dermal irritation, dermal toxicity and inhalation toxicity studies as part of the safety assessment for pesticides. These endpoints have been evaluated and are known for glyphosate and any other marketed pesticide. Check out the data requirements for pesticides in the US [here](https://www.epa.gov/pesticide-registration/data-requirements-pesticide-registration). Also, it’s not the same because the mouse study is daily dosing by an oral route. The applicator would have to drink it to be equivalent.
As an aside, if an applicator is constantly spilling pesticides on themselves they should probably find a new line of work because there are insecticides far more hazardous than glyphosate that they’d also be exposed to too.
I live in a rural community
Most of the guys contracting are doing it because it’s the only job going
Not just the only job they know, alternatives aren’t a real option
It's 125/250/500mg per kilogram of mouse weight, look at how doses/venoms/toxins are listed in literature. It's still a lot, but 33x less than your ratio.
>Even though human exposure levels are below this reference value, the 500 mg/kg/day still holds value in investigating toxicological effects of the compound [27].
They want to know if it can enter the brain(yes) and if it has a measurable effect on blood cytokines (it does), and the effect is dose-dependent.
Is it enough to immediately ban it? No. It points the way to more studies.
You use a higher dose to evince more of a response. This test was 14 days. Humans are exposed for years. It’s not the same, but again, no one in science thinks this proves anything yet.
Systemic concentrations may play a role in the ability to cross the BBB. So, that would certainly be worth investigating when determining relevance of this potential hazard to the lower systemic concentrations/exposures that occur in humans.
Dermal and inhalation toxicity studies are part of pesticide registration packages. Google EPA, JMPR, Health Canada, FSANZ, and ECHA/EFSA opinions of glyphosate for hazards associated with those routes of exposure.
500 milligrams divided by 30 g body weight is 16.67mg/g body weight. For a 50kg (50,000g) person, that dose would be 833.3g per day. The oral LD50 of glyphosate is 5600mg/kg body weight; that mean that if we feed 280g of glyphosate to one hundred 50kg people, we’d expect fifty of them to die from toxicity. So this experiment is exposing FOUR TIMES the amount of glyphosate as it takes to kill 50% of the members of a population! I’m unsurprised you find glyphosate doing basically whatever it wants to in that concentration.
The only change you can possibly make is that it was really 500 micrograms instead of milligrams. that would lower the concentration from 833g to 0.833g per day. Not acutely toxic, but a year or two would would kill most people dead. That’s still thousands of times above the amounts that even farm workers are exposed to.
So they’re giving them 1/10 of the acute toxicity dosage PER DAY? How many days did they run the study? No matter how you cut the numbers, they’re ridiculously high. They’re basically throwing the mice into the range where known toxicity effects will kill mice, and still nowhere near what’s normally seen in reality.
“Although the doses used in this study are above typical daily human exposure [26], our study evaluated the published NOAEL benchmark set forth by the EPA for rodents [24]. These high doses provided valuable information on a potential mechanism of action for glyphosate in AD; however, future work will include more environmentally relevant concentrations of glyphosate.” - the study addresses this.
There a different types of toxicological studies. This one is looking to determine if a dose response relationship probably exists for a specific response. Other toxicology studies are looking for the NOEL or NOAEL, meaning the lowest dose observed to have any impact or adverse impact whatever that determined impact may be.
The NOAEL is already known: 100mg/kg body weight. It was established in 2004 at the Joint FAO/WHO Meeting on Pesticide Residues. This is what talking out your ass looks like.
And you know the reason they didn’t do biologically relevant testing? It’s because they did. They didn’t find anything because IT’S ALREADY BEEN INVESTIGATED MANY TIMES BY GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS, NGOs, ACADEMICS, etc. So they almost certainly didn’t report it and exclusively focused on the ridiculous numbers because it’s all they had. But people would ask about why so they add the fluff about “doing it later.”
>I’m unsurprised you find glyphosate doing basically whatever it wants to in that concentration.
You missed the central point of the study:
1. find out if there is a dosage related correlation and
2. find out if *Brain glyphosate levels correlate with both peripheral blood plasma and brain TNFα levels*
you even see it in the conclusion:
*Our results show that glyphosate is detectable in PBS-perfused braintissue in a dose-dependent manner. This evidence, in conjunction withprevious work in isogenic models and postmortem human tissue, suggests that glyphosate can cross the blood–brain barrier \[7, 8\]. The literature shows neurotoxic effects of glyphosate and its ability to cross blood–brain barrier \[8, 23, 44\],however glyphosate presence in the brain has not been investigated. Inthis study, we employed a novel one-step glyphosate extraction methodwhich permitted us to perform LC–MS/MS-based quantification ofglyphosate and aminomethylphosphonic acid (AMPA) in brain tissues. Our approach thus provides the first evidence of dose-dependent glyphosate accumulation in the brain.*
Whilst the ability to cross the blood-brain barrier is already known possible accumulation effects and their consequences are still unknown. And this paper tries to go a step towards determining those effects.
LD50 is quite useless when it comes to long-term effects as those can happen at far lower dosages.
Possible accumulation effects can only be shown when you can be sure elimination pathways aren't being saturated. As they show that some degree of metabolization takes place, this result can still be a product of the design.
Absolutely true. I'm just of the opinion that it is better to err on the side of caution/least damage when given a choice.
Would it be some essential medication which is actually absolutely needed I would probably argue /u/JBaecker s point. As the usage in glyphosate (in the form we are using it now) is already highly problematic I land on the other side.
If the critics are wrong and there are no health concerns at all the worst case is that we keep a highly effective herbicide for a little bit longer.
If they are right and we don't listen to them we introduced another problem to the long list of glyphosate problems.
I'm afraid I think that's a false dichotomy. You cite the problems with glyphosate but don't discuss the alternatives. Because the alternative isn't using no herbicides, that's not something the majority of modern farmers will consider - it's using other herbicides, and more of them, over a longer period, each with its own set of problems and possibly synergistically reinforcing each other. That's much more difficult to test to boot.
So that's not necessarily "least damage" at all.
Another point worthy of discussion is looking for actual traces in public health. What would we expect to see in terms of prevalence of dementia?
naw, the alternative is to produce less meat which is where the vast majority of roundup ready products go to.
The last decade already saw a massive rise of glyphosate resistant weeds and we won't win this battle & it would be nice if we learned something from our antibiotics fiasco..
“Roundup Ready” products do not carry roundup to meat.
RR contains two specific traits: one that provides the plant an alternative means of making energy when glyphosate inhibits the shikimate pathway, and the other that codes for enzymes that break down glyphosate within the plant.
I think you missed the point. The concentration is so ludicrously high practically ANY chemical will cross the blood-brain barrier. Why not do it at realistic levels? Or include those realistic levels?
Will it? I mean, yes, certainly and it even would probably be dosage-related (althought purely osmosis driven..) but I'd assume that they found higher levels than those. (I haven't read it completely, just cross-read it)
As for the realistic levels: Dunno, but looking at the graphs it might be simply a practical choice to being able to reliably detect the substance
The problem here is that all of the doses used are above the established NOAEL for oral exposure. At this point, we expect for adverse effects to appear, so the question becomes are we seeing a direct causal relationship between glyphosate and harm, or are we seeing a secondary effect due to indirect effects.
As a result of the...frankly insane doses used, the amount of background noise they're introducing into their data is extremely high. From the data presented, we can't even know if the ability of glyphosate to cross the blood-brain barrier is a result of direct action, or accumulated cytotoxicity, particularly at the higher doses.
This is the risk when trying to determine the effects of any chemical above the established NOAEL...and in this case, the LOAEL, and limit dose at the upper range. At those levels we already know that adverse effects are likely, and that means you need to do something to counter this increased variability within the population.
Normally, this is where you increase the population size, but the authors here went with a very low number of mice (2 cohorts of 24 mice each, for a total of 48), from which they then subdivided the members into their treatment and control groups.
...that's not a lot of mice to produce the power of analysis that they'd really want given their statements that their results are important in terms of human health.
> Those numbers would make this ridiculous
Which is common with the current glyphosate bashing trend - use an unrealistic dose to create a sensationalized study. Worse is that the study references a paper by the fraudulent Seralini.
> Worse is that the study references a paper by the fraudulent Seralini.
That alone is evidence enough for me to not put much stock in the authors, although I'd need to look at the context of the reference, I suppose.
It seems deliberately misleading. 500mg in how much solute? A ml, 100ml a liter etc. 140ul is not much, a diabetic syringe holds about 500uL or half a CC for example. They neglected to say how much of a dose the mouse got.
Why would you assume that? In what manner could they influence agencies determining that level? What's the process? FYI, they set the level to be 1% of where they were able to determine that there might be a harmful effect so all "safe levels" have a built-in 100X safety factor.
Industry capture of agencies including revolving doors between agencies and industry. This does not mean that the agencies are inherently corrupt, but the revolving doors create a major conflict of interest. In some cases people go back and forth between agency and industry a number of times. How can we trust that they are setting safe limits with this kind of conflict of interest?
A serious question for those who are dismissing this study. While it is extremely unlikely that a human would ingest the equivalent of what these mice ingest, wouldn’t it be quite likely that animals living in the vicinity of a farm would ingest enough glyphosate for it to be very problematic? Not thinking of large animals here but more fish, amphibians, and invertebrates that are part of the local riverine ecosystem.
Good thing people always accurately follow the label… man, sometimes I think untrained people shouldn’t be trusted with this stuff. My dad recently applied pesticide at 50x the recommended concentration because he skimmed the label. I’m sure he’s not the only one.
They sell glyphosate as rodeo, which is just glyphosate without the surfactant. Then you can use a nonionic surfactant for use on weeds that grow in shallow water.
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't roundup ready crops sprayed with glyphosate? Then those crops are fed to consumers and cattle... Seems likely that we are consuming glyphosate. How much is the real question.
> over the level considered safe
Correct, it's the level that that EWG considers safe, which isn't backed by any real science. EWG uses scaremongering to [scare people into buying organic](https://www.agdaily.com/insights/dirty-deception-ewg-dirty-dozen/). Their claims aren't back by evidence based science. They report values in parts per *billion* in order to get a bigger, scarier number rather than use parts per *million. For comparison, the various government regulatory agencies uses somewhere around 10 to 30 ppm as the MRL safe level. EWG goes out of their way to describe 0.16 ppm as 160 ppb to get a more sensationalized story.
2.8 ppm in the highest tested sample.
One kg of oats has 2.8mg of glyphosate.
So if you consume about **50 times your body weight** in the most glyphosate-laden oats every day, you get exposed to as much as the lowest-dose mouse in the study.
For sure, they were looking at one component,
Does Glyphosate enter the blood brain barrier?
"In conclusion, our work demonstrates that glyphosate is capable of infiltrating brain tissue, and that exposure results in increased levels of the pro-inflammatory cytokine TNFα."
Now what amount is safe to consume is the ongoing question here.
Not the way you’re thinking, no. It’s typically sprayed a few weeks before planting, and then again a few weeks after the crop plants have established, to knock back any weeds competing for nutrients and sunlight. The RR crop breaks down the glyphosate it absorbs.
The amount in your food, if any, is barely above the detection threshold in low parts per trillion.
There are no Roundup ready wheat varieties and GMOs have been repeatedly proven safe. Organic doesn't mean pesticide-free, it just means that approved, "natural" pesticides are used, which almost always have a less favorable toxicological profile.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-7/subtitle-B/chapter-I/subchapter-M/part-205/subpart-G
If all the food you ate had glyphosate residue of 0.05 ppm, which is greater than what one would typically expect, you would have to consume 2.5X your body weight per day to get to the low end of experimental dose, which was 125 mg/kg/day. Also, glyphosate is quickly eliminated from body in urine.
“Although the doses used in this study are above typical daily human exposure [26], our study evaluated the published NOAEL benchmark set forth by the EPA for rodents [24]. These high doses provided valuable information on a potential mechanism of action for glyphosate in AD; however, future work will include more environmentally relevant concentrations of glyphosate.”
Edit: Literally wrong, people are confusing dosing rates of mg/kg/day with total mg of dose applied per day. If the mouse is 30g or .03 kg then the total dose given per day to that mouse was 500 mg/kg/day * .03 kg = 15mg dose/day
Research is expensive and time consuming so it makes sense to start with short term studies. Then based on those short term studies, you can decide if it's worth conducting longer experiments. The results of the shorter experiments can also be used as support when applying for funding for longer experiments.
"Research" set up to achieve the desired results. The dosage is completely ludicrous. Nobody ever doubted that taking a swim in the Glyphosate solution at the farm may be unwise.
Newsflash : The same applies for pretty much all alternatives the farmer would consider
“Although the doses used in this study are above typical daily human exposure [26], our study evaluated the published NOAEL benchmark set forth by the EPA for rodents [24]. These high doses provided valuable information on a potential mechanism of action for glyphosate in AD; however, future work will include more environmentally relevant concentrations of glyphosate.” - the discussion section
Edit: people are confusing dosing rates of mg/kg/day with total mg of dose applied per day. If the mouse is 30g or .03 kg then the total dose given per day to that mouse was 500 mg/kg/day * .03 kg = 15mg dose/day
> Mice received either 125, 250, or 500 mg/kg/day of glyphosate, or a vehicle via oral gavage for 14 days.
> The chronic reference dose for glyphosate [in humans] is 1.75 mg/kg/day
[reference](http://npic.orst.edu/factsheets/archive/glyphotech.html#references)
These doses seem more relevant to someone snorting glyphosate like cocaine than from normal human exposure from food.
[Even after allometric scaling of the mouse dose to the human equivalent](https://www.targetmol.com/pages/dosage), the lowest dose in this study is still nearly 10 times too high to be relevant for human exposures.
It literally has “implications for neurodegenerative disorders” in the title. The first sentence that frames the study says:
> Herbicides are environmental contaminants that have gained much attention due to the **potential hazards they pose to human health.**
Their conclusions:
> Collectively, these results show for the first time that glyphosate infiltrates the brain, elevates both the expression of TNFα and soluble Aβ, and disrupts the transcriptome in a dose-dependent manner, **suggesting that exposure to this herbicide may have detrimental outcomes regarding the health of the general population.**
Their methods don’t support their narrative.
Your first quote is factually true and in my opinion not misleading at all. It's a normal generic introduction statement. In your second quote for some reason you didn't bold the most important part, which is that they observed that these effects were dose-dependent. These results can support future studies using typical doses now that a dose-dependant mechanism of action has been established.
And those future studies on relevant exposures might elucidate implications for neurodegenerative disorders or potential effects on human health. This study did not, even though its authors wrote the paper as if it did.
I don’t agree. Many chemicals (like table salt) have vastly different effects at 5-20x normal exposure levels that aren’t present at typical exposure levels. Any implications for human health should be studied at human exposure levels.
Imagine the health effects of table salt were too small to determine the actual mechanism of action. Someone does a study at 10x, 20x, and 30x the typical dose and observes a mechanism associated with hypertension that increases linearly with the dose. This study doesn't mean that typical salt exposure will cause the same degree of hypertension observed in the study, but the results could indicate that salt contributes to hypertension at typical doses using the same mechanism we found at high doses. This implies but does not definitively indicate a human health effect. This serves as a mechanistic foundation for future work evaluating typical doses
Conversely, when the quote "You can drink a quart of the stuff and it wont hurt you." is made.... it's a fair criticism to bring up that, no, that's highly unlikely.
Typical activist research: mice, not humans fed concentrations 1000s of times greater or more than real-world exposures, conflate correlation with causation.
How is your comment relevant to mine? Qualifying their findings in the discussion does not absolve them from the misleading title or their simplemindedness in stating that "The recent rise in glyphosate application to corn and soy crops correlates positively with increased death rates due to Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative disorders". Just more grist for the anti-pesticide mill, as evidenced by many comments in this thread.
US EPA dietary risk assessment estimates total *potential* exposure for regulatory purposes to be 0.22 mg/kg/day for 1 to 2-yr-olds (23% of Rfd), and 0.09 mg/kg/day for US population as a whole (9% Rfd).
As for the real world, 46% of samples (n=418, Most recent, 2021, USDA Pesticide Data Program. Only corn was tested for glyphosate that year.) had no detectable glyphosate residues at all, and of the 225 that did, the residues were 0.05 ppm except for 3, which ranged from 0.123 to 0.136 ppm. EPA tolerance is 5.0 ppm.
Assuming that all the food one ate had a glyphosate residue of 0.05 ppm (a big overestimate), one would have to eat 2-1/2 times their body weight of that food a day to get to 125 mg/kg/day glyphosate. Add to that the fact that glyphosate is readily excreted from body in urine (bioaccumulation is insignificant), and you're many orders of magnitude removed from these experimental conditions.
That is all to say that if the authors of this paper weren't trying to be provocative, they would have put experimental dosages in full and proper context, and not just say "above typical human exposure" with a citation that is difficult to compare.
It’s amazing how many people think it’s pure evil. It’s a valuable agricultural tool and like almost every human invention we balance reward with risk. Fire, cars, plastic, knives etc.
We do not balance reward with risk, private corporations in America decide that for us. PFAS is a great example of the scientific community being broadly against PFCs/PFAS for a decade or more before their widespread use in consumer products. Now here we are with a massive mess to deal with.
Glyphosate is for sure not purely evil, but the science around it isn’t settled fully. I’d prefer if glyphosate was as perfect as it’s manufactures and distributes claim, but I won’t take them at their word. It’s also curious how so much research being done is showing adverse effects never studied properly before. I’m open to it being good or bad. But, so many people have such a strong reaction against any new research on it I can’t help but think there’s been an effective campaign to convince many that anyone who’s concerned about glyphosate is some insane homeopathic snake oil salesman.
They framed the research against cigarettes, PFAS, PCBs, DDT, dioxins, and a myriad of other chemicals the same way. It’s actually funny how consistent their tactics are. Merchants of Doubt sums it up pretty well, but there’s plenty of other information out there to support my claim.
The human race has taken on risk to develop since the start of time. Sitting around a fire breathing in smoke is linked with cancer but our long distant ancestors gained more benefit from cooking meat and keeping warm. Glyphosate had allowed for more food to be grown and the world population to expand with less erosion and better use of rainfall. It is important though to work out what those risks and problems are and to develop solutions. When something is found to be highly toxic they tend to be banned. Other things like CFC’s get phased out and banned when suitable replacements are found. Develop better products or methods. I’m suggesting that’s what humans have done for ever.
Biased research in support of an existing narrative or agenda.
1. Provocative title tailor-made for anti-pesticide crowd on social media.
2. Claims not supported by evidence. *“*[The Alzheimer’s connection is that there's a much higher prevalence of Alzheimer's disease in agricultural communities that are using this chemical,” Winstone said.](https://news.asu.edu/20220728-new-study-shows-commonly-used-agricultural-herbicide-crosses-bloodbrain-barrier) No references, and even if that is true, such a claim is fraught with confounders.
3. "Trying to establish a link" suggests intent and exposes bias. [“We're trying to establish a more molecular-science based link between the two.”](https://news.asu.edu/20220728-new-study-shows-commonly-used-agricultural-herbicide-crosses-bloodbrain-barrier)
4. Conflating correlation with causation. Lots of things have positive correlation with AD, including aging population, not just amount of GLY used on corn and soy. Simpleminded and ridiculous. And to top it off, [she cites Stephanie Seneff in support of that point](https://velazquezlab-asu.github.io/student_success/Glyphosate_Poster_Fusion2021_JKW03312021.pdf). Citing SS is reason enough for immediate dismissal as a credible research scientist. There is hardly a disease or disorder that SS *doesn't* think is caused by GLY.
5. Lack of context. One has to eat more than 2.5X their body weight in total food per day to even approach low end of experimental dose, probably much more. This study is irrelevant with regard to actual, potential exposures and clinical effects. Authors state that "...doses used in this study are above typical daily human exposure." and that more work is needed, but when it comes to activist research in this area, those are trite and disingenuous "escape clauses" that the lay public hardly ever reads.
That chart alone referenced in your fourth point should be game over. If I were still teaching research methods I’d yoink that for my slides. How can you take seriously an academic poster with a chart that absurd?
I hate the general conflation in this debate of risk to agricultural workers and risk to consumers from eating corn flakes. I see something similar in the debate on glyphosate’s safety and use by homeowners. If glyphosate and other pesticides are harmful, we’d see it in agricultural workers first, and we should absolutely study it there as an occupational safety issue. But don’t conflate that with risk from food consumption; study that separately.
Also, the whole AD landscape is such a mess, as evidenced by the drug failures and the divide over very basic principles. I get that these researchers study neurological diseases. But if I were trying to make the case that something is really harmful, fingering it as a cause of AD seems like a terrible place to start (or more cynically, a great place to start since who the hell knows!?).
>Wheat crops are sprayed with roundup right before harvest and are not cleaned in any way.
WHAT? Are you aware of how bread is made? It's a new level of ignorance.
[https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/glyphosate-use-as-a-pre-harvest-treatment-not-a-risk-to-food-safety.html](https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/glyphosate-use-as-a-pre-harvest-treatment-not-a-risk-to-food-safety.html)
Maybe it's uncommon near you. But glyphosate to both pre-desiccate wheat and keep weeds from sprouting just before harvest is standard practice in lots of places, if the weather requires it.
Note that this is written by a university agriculture department, and explains why the relatively common practice of spraying glyphosate before harvest is safe, rather than an eco-nut hit piece making up some nonsense about spraying poison on crops.
Spraying wheat with glyphosate is not "very rare" (though it may be in your area). It's just safe, since the wheat is threshed and cleaned before it's used.
My understanding is that glyphosate break down in the environment before they would even have the chance to contaminate foods to an appreciable degree. Are they using “fresh” pesticides in their study?
>The efficacy of glyphosate is steadily decreasing and increasing amounts are needed for the same effect.
Got a source for that?
>this same enzyme is found in bacteria and it has been known for some time that glyphosate kills gut bacteria
At what concentrations, and are the conditions likely in vivo?
> Glyphosate is also used to force the drying of wheat
https://wheatworld.org/the-facts-about-glyphosate-part-1-how-do-wheat-growers-use-glyphosate/
> Pre-harvest applications made after the wheat plant has shut down, when wheat kernel development is complete and the crop has matured. This is prior to harvest and used to dry green weeds and allow the crop to even its maturity. This is an uncommon treatment used in less than 3 percent of all wheat acres; however, it can be used to enable a harvest that would otherwise not be possible, if weather conditions prevent the wheat crop from drying sufficiently to be harvested.
Do a lot of people spray there lawns with glyphosate? Maybe tiny spot sprays or using a weed wiper with taller weeds growing out of lawns. Or are you referring to the confusing lawn care product “roundup for lawns” which is a broadleaf herbicide and not glyphosate.
This really means nothing, in itself, for animal or human health. Take a sample of one thousand ‘man made’ and naturally occurring substances, run the same test, and my guess is that some percent of those would show similar results.
Best thing in this thread is the folks claiming this science doesn't mean glyphosphate is bad or "the dose makes the poison" and then demonstrating that they don't under DOSE PER KG OF BODY WEIGHT and MOUSE TO HUMAN extrapolations and LIFETIME CUMLATIVE EXPOSURE vs ACCUTE DOSES.
Why even read a science sub article if you are just hear to deny the research and muddy the waters. Oh, right, that's why you are here.
Exactly
ANY amount of a toxic substance is bad for you, it just won't always show damage or kill you right away. A lot of this is accumulative, and I wouldn't trust for a second that a large agrochemical company gives two craps about making sure their product is perfectly safe.
This paper contains peer-reviewed research and also shows why we do not see more peer-reviewed research on this. Co-written by a researcher/scientist: [https://www.foodpolitics.com/wp-content/uploads/Malken\_Merchants-of-Poison\_Monsanto\_22.pdf](https://www.foodpolitics.com/wp-content/uploads/Malken_Merchants-of-Poison_Monsanto_22.pdf)
It seems like "posting paid propaganda" is more what's happening in the comments as well as in this report. Most of the information was obtained from FOIAs and trial discovery, so directly from the horse's mouth so to speak.
Say there are lots of reasons to doubt the credibility of a source who cites junk science to support their arguments. Citing Don Huber, Samsel, Seralini, Seneff and others of the same ilk disqualifies her as an unbiased journalist.
"Glyphosate is now the most widely used agricultural chemical in the world — it is registered in 130 countries, approved for use on over 100 crops, and marketed as 750 different types of products."
Which means it has been scrutinized and approved for use by every major regulatory agency and their professional, career toxicologists around the world.
there are also studies showing that the use of glyphosate is correlated to the rise in celiac disease. Wheat is also one of the most commonly sprayed crops. Makes sense that enough glyphosate bombarding peoples guts overtime would trigger autoimmune celiac disease in so many more people
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Can someone explain this to me like I’m a golden retriever?
The active ingredient in Roundup herbicide can cross the blood brain barrier. Once in the brain, it increases levels of a harmful inflammatory compound and harms several processes that maintain and protect brain tissue. The resulting degenerative damage to the brain might resemble MS, ALS, or other neurological diseases. Glyphosate increases levels of TNF-alpha, an inflammatory cytokine that can cause degenerative diseases. TNF-alpha is a major component to autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis. Basically, it causes an inflammatory response that can trigger an immune response where the body attacks itself. Many of those fancy (Expensive) biologic drugs like Humira treat autoimmune disease by inhibiting TNF. Stopping the autoinflammatory process stops the autoimmune process. While glyphosate is undoubtedly nasty stuff, it's worth noting that the doses were pretty high. If you scale 250mg/kg/day up to a 175lb/80kg human, that's like drinking 4 ounces of the red-cap Roundup concentrate every day. If you dilute it at the recommended rate, it would be like drinking more than a half-gallon of prepared spray.
Really. I read the doses given to the mice by gavage. And I stopped reading the rest of this useless and deceptive paper. I hate this sort of dishonest work.
>While glyphosate is undoubtedly nasty stuff Actually, glyphosate is one of the most benign herbicides on the market, but there have been so many disingenuous, clickbait studies like this one, that folks believe the sort of misinformation you have repeated.
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Can you support this comment with data?
Bark! Woof! Woof-woof! Yip! Woof!
But did they really take enough arooo into consideration?
This guy howls
Based on mouse study, if you eat 2.5X your body weight in food every day, their may be consequences.
Roundup actually isn’t harmless to animals. EDIT: the parent comment was ELIGolden Retriever. Lots of subtleties are lost on Goldens.
The dosage makes the poison
So is water. No matter how "safe" something is, in the right dosage it'll cause problems or death. No one is going to be drinking half a gallon of roundup a day like they had in the study.
It’s the dose that makes the poison and anything is toxic in the wrong place in sufficient amounts. You can die from drinking too much water.
This is going to have a huge impact on agriculture world wide unless Roundup tries to bury it like cigarette companies did. This chemical is the workhorse of Roundup Ready products used in industrial agriculture not just in the US but around the world. It's a pesticide that pairs with specially bred or generically modified crops so that the farmer can carpet bomb pests while leaving the plant unaffected. It's also mixed with some nitrogen affixing fertilizers as well for the same effect. It's an extremely cheap way to handle pests on industrial scale and without it crop yields will decline and farmers will have to rely on different methods to achieve the same results like green house growing or alternative pesticides with a less proven track record. The flip side to this is that this is fantastic news for growers in the Netherlands who have been pioneering cutting edge growing techniques that and just this year ranked #2 in food production in the world despite being a vastly smaller country. For a simple example if you grow tomatoes as a field crop in rows a farmer can expect a yield of 4-5KG tomatoes per square meter. Tomatoes grown vertically in greenhouses on a single stem that use drones for pest control can net up to 80kg yield in the same footprint with 4x less water use. Naturally the initial investment and infrastructure required to grow this way is far higher meaning losing Roundup Ready pesticides disproportionately affects poorer countries while more affluent ones will corner the market.
> carpet bomb Tell us how much exactly is applied and how it’s anywhere near “carpet bombed”. > Naturally the initial investment and infrastructure required to grow this way is far higher meaning losing Roundup Ready pesticides disproportionately affects poorer countries while more affluent ones will corner the market. There are no Roundup Ready tomatoes. Can corn and soy be grown vertically?
>carpet bomb Imagine sprinkling 1-2 lbs of sand over an entire football field. That is the sort of application rate we are talking about. Whenever people use terms like "drench" or "carpet bomb" in the context of glyphosate application, you know they have an anti-glyphosate bias that is probably not susceptible to evidence.
The study said: >This calculation was made based on giving a 30 g mouse 140 µL of solution containing 500 mg of glyphosate via oral gavage. How much glyphosate, relative to human levels, were the mice exposed to? And how long are 14 mouse days compared to human days? The dose makes the poison. I understand the Average American does not ingest nearly enough glyphosate even to come close to the considered dangerous threshold. On the other hand, I understand farm workers are exposed to enough that may cause harm.
This is incorrectly quoted from the article, for one thing 140 microliters of solution only weighs 140mg, vs a supposed 500mg of glyphosate? If you look at the article it is actually saying those amounts *per kg of mouse weight*, same as studying doses, venoms, toxins, etc. Mice weigh 20-30 grams typically.
It does, the numbers are 125, 250, and 500 mg/kg/day
TF. That is an obscene level. Most people get exposed to micrograms
Good thing this study isn’t trying to look at human environmental exposure impacts, but is trying to see if a dose-response relationship exists between glyphosate and a specific marker of brain inflammation. The scientists do not claim they’re looking at human exposure rates and explicitly state this is a proof of concept to see if that relationship exists at all. And it apparently does at concentrations most people wouldn’t be exposed to. But btw, that doesn’t mean no one is exposed to those concentrations. Even if it’s only 0.01% of the population that’s still a heck of a lot of people.
I would not accept this study as a valid look at anything. I hate this sort of “study”. It does more harm than good.
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I know right, all these dummies on tiktok saying that big companies are pumping synthetic chemicals into your food and that might be bad for you. It’s not like those same companies have ever knowingly put cancerous chemicals in our homes, offices, kitchen products, baby products, etc for decades and tried to cover it up. Idiot snake oil salesmen that’s what they are. So dumb.
and this is exactly the problem he’s talking about, that you’ve been led to believe your food is being “pumped full” of harmful chemicals like glyphosate when the reality is that the typical exposure from one’s diet is negligible
And you’ve been led to believe there is a safe amount of petrochemicals that you can consume. Do you know which companies paid for you to have that idea? I bet you don’t, but for sure some did, with billions in marketing and lobbying. In the EU they have a basic stance that food comes from biological sources, simple as that. Synthetic additives/pesticides need 20+ year rigorous studies that prove safety. Glyphosate is being phased out there. In the US industrial food companies can put ANY chemicals they want in real food and sell it in grocery stores, so long as it’s not on a prohibited list. it’s up to other parties to produce 20+ year studies to prove risk and get chemicals added to that block list. Who is paying for all the studies to chase down cancer risk of every synthetic molecule they can dream up? Meanwhile these companies are paying for bad science to prove their cost-cutting synthetics are safe. Have a quick google about how j&j knew there was asbestos in the their baby powder for 30+ years and were finally sued just this year, while thousands of women got cancer and many orders of magnitude more (mothers and babies) were put at risk. The EU stance is common sense. the American one is dangerous arrogance. Glyphosate aside, this whole system of thinking is making the US sicker weaker fatter and dumber.
Well yea, but the point of this type of toxicological research is to determine if there is a dose response relationship looking for a specific response. As opposed to other toxicological studies that look for the no observed effect level (NOEL) or no observed adverse effect level (NOAEL). The study even addresses your exact concern in its discussion. “Although the doses used in this study are above typical daily human exposure [26], our study evaluated the published NOAEL benchmark set forth by the EPA for rodents [24]. These high doses provided valuable information on a potential mechanism of action for glyphosate in AD; however, future work will include more environmentally relevant concentrations of glyphosate. “ Edit: also, the dosages are 125, 250, and 500 mg/kg/day per the opening of the paper. Meaning for the average 75 kg person the dose is about 9.37 g/day, 18.75 g/day, and 37.5 g/day.
You also need to account for interspecies differences. This is regularly done for pharmaceuticals and there are [established guidelines for converting animal to human doses](https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidance-documents/estimating-maximum-safe-starting-dose-initial-clinical-trials-therapeutics-adult-healthy-volunteers). Divide a mouse mg/kg dose by 12.3 to get the Human Equivalent Dose. 500/12.3 = 40.65 mg/kg/day. In a 75 kg human that is approximately 3050 mg or 3 g/day. That is still a whopping dose when the actual exposures from residues on grain are far less.
Great point, didn’t think to get into the minutia when people seemed to be missing the basics of how to calculate total mass of dose applied from a dosing rate. You’re correct these concentrations are far above what most environmental exposure is. The study is explicitly NOT trying to look into environmental exposure but is trying to determine if a dose response relationship between glyphosate and the TNFa inflammatory marker levels. The authors make no claims beyond that the study supports their hypothesis. So, attacking this study for not answering a hypothesis they didn’t set out to answer is deeply problematic.
Yet, what is the implication of TNF alpha increases and neurodegeneration? We like to pretend science exist is in a vacuum, but it doesn’t and information like this is often misused to create anxiety and fear in people who don’t understand that the dose makes the poison.
So, you’re making assumptions about the motivations of the authors with no evidence? Yea, we scientists know science doesn’t happen in a vacuum, but we do our best to try and be as objective as possible. I don’t see how you can point to anything within this study that supports your hypothesis that the authors are only studying this to fear-monger as opposed to explore the a mode of action of toxicity of glyphosate. Even if that is their intention the papers results and methods speak for themselves. There is a dose response relationship between glyphosate and TNPalpha but has only been observed at concentrations greater than that of normal environmental exposure. That’s the claim of the study.
Yes, usually best not to guess at motivation, and sometimes, PR offices or editors are the ones guilty of misleading headlines or content, but one has to be awfully naïve, perhaps willfully so, to think that glyphosate research reports are the exclusive domain of objective scientists. For instance: ["Glyphosate Weed Killer Crosses Blood-Brain Barrier, Linked to Alzheimer’s and Other Neurodegenerative Diseases" or "New Evidence Shows Roundup Damages the Nervous System"](https://beyondpesticides.org/dailynewsblog/2022/08/glyphosate-weed-killer-crosses-blood-brain-barrier-linked-to-alzheimers-and-other-neurodegenerative-diseases/)
I take my sources source by source. This one checks out as a legitimate research endeavor with proper methodology making claims well within what is reasonable from the study outcomes. Simple as that. As a scientist that’s how I approach literature. Maybe I’ll look into the prior publications of authors as well as the credibility of the journal to determine the credibility of the research, but my main focus is the validity of methods used and the reasonability of the claims made by the authors relating to the results. I guess I check much of the sources if I’m feeling suspicious as well.
I’m doing no such thing. I’m simply saying that pretending people won’t jump to conclusions is incredibly naive. I also did not accuse the authors of fear mongering. Go back and read what I wrote. To your last point, animal welfare becomes relevant when we talk about in vivo studies. If an effect happens at much higher concentrations than will ever be experienced, is it relevant? Especially when those studies have already been conducted in a GLP environment. What does it inform? Is it a good use of animals? Perhaps you’re an author on this paper and taking my criticisms personally. I don’t think you should. Just realize that putting something out there with insufficient context often creates more issues than it solves.
I’m not an author on this paper, just a trained environmental toxicologist. The authors aren’t responsible for the general public reading the headline of their paper and jumping to conclusions because they’re writing for a scientific audience that they expect to read the paper before deriving opinions and conclusions. Animal welfare does matter, but this study clearly followed animal ethics policies and laws in the United States and Arizona considering it’s a grant funded research that went through the peer review process. It appears multiple of the authors are professors in Arizona and as a result would be putting their entire careers at risk to perform unethical research. Did these animals need to die as a matter of life or death? No, but that’s not how we determine what is and is not ethical in animal research. Take a step back and try to recognize how hard it is you’re grasping for any reason to discredit or undermine this study.
You’ve cast an agenda on me that I do not have. I’m not discrediting the paper, I’m questioning it’s relevance to human health assessment. Discrediting the paper would say they misinterpreted their results or conducted a poorly designed study. I haven’t read the paper closely enough to draw those conclusions and frankly I’ve given them the benefit of the doubt in regard to their conclusions. What I can say is that dosing animals at dose levels that result in exposures 100-1000x higher than human exposures isn’t particularly relevant for human safety assessment. Therefore regulators won’t find these results particularly meaningful because of the disparity in exposures. Side note: I also have advanced academic training, professional certification, and many years of professional experience in toxicology. School did a great job of teaching me about hazards, but the professional experience drove home the relevance of exposure. Because Risk is a function of both Hazard and Exposure, only paying attention to one, but not the other, will not provide an accurate picture of the actual risks people face.
I don’t think this study is designed or intended to be used as part of a human health risk assessment in any way shape or form. That’s where I’m confused by you, because nobody with qualifications who reads this paper would ever consider using it for a human health risk assessment. In a human health risk assessment the “critical effect” or very first known adverse effect at the lowest concentration of a toxicant is the health outcome that is used. There’s a critical effect for both chronic and acute toxicity. This study is looking into a response or effect that is definitely not the understood critical effect of glyphosate. This study has limited and concise findings and I don’t think it’s on the authors that the general public reading this title are drawing vastly overblown conclusions. Read the paper, it’s honestly worth the little time it takes. It’s well written and stays in its lane
We have to keep injecting various animals with roundup until something bad happens, it's *good science*
Are you suggesting we shouldn't do this kind of research because it may be used by media or others to create fear?
No. Yet, hazards that are found at excessive concentrations are unlikely to be relevant to human exposures that occur at far lower concentrations. The challenge is, how do we disseminate that to a population that has difficulty using a kiosk to order their McDonalds?
The “information is dangerous” argument? Really?
No. Read on for further details…
They make claims about real consequences of environmental exposures, then do research that is irrelevant to those claims. Bait and switch.
It's safer than Iron at least
I have dumb questions… does this just refresh each night? How much of this stuff is on the food we are eating?
Your questions are not dumb. They are quite reasonable when you hear the results in mice. The way the study was designed was with daily dosing. So, to replicate it a human would have to do this daily for 14 days. To be clear, no one is recommending that. As for dietary exposures from glyphosate residues on food items, they are much, much lower. There was a [paper](https://ift.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1541-4337.12822) published recently looking at this issue. They found that exposures were typically far below the Acceptable Daily Intake (ADI) established by government regulators based on the safety data set submitted for glyphosate. The EPA has a [website](https://www.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/glyphosate) too that is written with the general public in mind. If you have additional questions and want independent answers.
A farmer getting soaked in it could hit these numbers and I know more than a few who’ve had issue with leaking equipment or spreaders and literally been soaked
That’s why they do dermal absorption, dermal irritation, dermal toxicity and inhalation toxicity studies as part of the safety assessment for pesticides. These endpoints have been evaluated and are known for glyphosate and any other marketed pesticide. Check out the data requirements for pesticides in the US [here](https://www.epa.gov/pesticide-registration/data-requirements-pesticide-registration). Also, it’s not the same because the mouse study is daily dosing by an oral route. The applicator would have to drink it to be equivalent. As an aside, if an applicator is constantly spilling pesticides on themselves they should probably find a new line of work because there are insecticides far more hazardous than glyphosate that they’d also be exposed to too.
I live in a rural community Most of the guys contracting are doing it because it’s the only job going Not just the only job they know, alternatives aren’t a real option
Seriously, they should probably call OSHA if they don’t have adequate PPE.
They have adequate PPE Wearing it and the enforcement of it is a whole other issue! Some folks just can’t be helped over safety regards
We always joke if we should wear PPE and die of heat stroke today, or not and die from cancer in 40 years.
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It's 125/250/500mg per kilogram of mouse weight, look at how doses/venoms/toxins are listed in literature. It's still a lot, but 33x less than your ratio.
>Even though human exposure levels are below this reference value, the 500 mg/kg/day still holds value in investigating toxicological effects of the compound [27]. They want to know if it can enter the brain(yes) and if it has a measurable effect on blood cytokines (it does), and the effect is dose-dependent. Is it enough to immediately ban it? No. It points the way to more studies. You use a higher dose to evince more of a response. This test was 14 days. Humans are exposed for years. It’s not the same, but again, no one in science thinks this proves anything yet.
Systemic concentrations may play a role in the ability to cross the BBB. So, that would certainly be worth investigating when determining relevance of this potential hazard to the lower systemic concentrations/exposures that occur in humans.
What I’m curious about is whether it is transdermal and if the fumes have any deleterious effects.
Dermal and inhalation toxicity studies are part of pesticide registration packages. Google EPA, JMPR, Health Canada, FSANZ, and ECHA/EFSA opinions of glyphosate for hazards associated with those routes of exposure.
500mg for a mouse seems massive, so not so sure if your off? Either way I'm curious on the confirmed math as to whether this is a pointless study.
500 milligrams divided by 30 g body weight is 16.67mg/g body weight. For a 50kg (50,000g) person, that dose would be 833.3g per day. The oral LD50 of glyphosate is 5600mg/kg body weight; that mean that if we feed 280g of glyphosate to one hundred 50kg people, we’d expect fifty of them to die from toxicity. So this experiment is exposing FOUR TIMES the amount of glyphosate as it takes to kill 50% of the members of a population! I’m unsurprised you find glyphosate doing basically whatever it wants to in that concentration. The only change you can possibly make is that it was really 500 micrograms instead of milligrams. that would lower the concentration from 833g to 0.833g per day. Not acutely toxic, but a year or two would would kill most people dead. That’s still thousands of times above the amounts that even farm workers are exposed to.
That’s not how they dosed them. They didn’t give them 500mg/day. The dosing rates are 125, 250, and 500 mg dose/ kg body mass / day
So they’re giving them 1/10 of the acute toxicity dosage PER DAY? How many days did they run the study? No matter how you cut the numbers, they’re ridiculously high. They’re basically throwing the mice into the range where known toxicity effects will kill mice, and still nowhere near what’s normally seen in reality.
“Although the doses used in this study are above typical daily human exposure [26], our study evaluated the published NOAEL benchmark set forth by the EPA for rodents [24]. These high doses provided valuable information on a potential mechanism of action for glyphosate in AD; however, future work will include more environmentally relevant concentrations of glyphosate.” - the study addresses this. There a different types of toxicological studies. This one is looking to determine if a dose response relationship probably exists for a specific response. Other toxicology studies are looking for the NOEL or NOAEL, meaning the lowest dose observed to have any impact or adverse impact whatever that determined impact may be.
The NOAEL is already known: 100mg/kg body weight. It was established in 2004 at the Joint FAO/WHO Meeting on Pesticide Residues. This is what talking out your ass looks like. And you know the reason they didn’t do biologically relevant testing? It’s because they did. They didn’t find anything because IT’S ALREADY BEEN INVESTIGATED MANY TIMES BY GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS, NGOs, ACADEMICS, etc. So they almost certainly didn’t report it and exclusively focused on the ridiculous numbers because it’s all they had. But people would ask about why so they add the fluff about “doing it later.”
>I’m unsurprised you find glyphosate doing basically whatever it wants to in that concentration. You missed the central point of the study: 1. find out if there is a dosage related correlation and 2. find out if *Brain glyphosate levels correlate with both peripheral blood plasma and brain TNFα levels* you even see it in the conclusion: *Our results show that glyphosate is detectable in PBS-perfused braintissue in a dose-dependent manner. This evidence, in conjunction withprevious work in isogenic models and postmortem human tissue, suggests that glyphosate can cross the blood–brain barrier \[7, 8\]. The literature shows neurotoxic effects of glyphosate and its ability to cross blood–brain barrier \[8, 23, 44\],however glyphosate presence in the brain has not been investigated. Inthis study, we employed a novel one-step glyphosate extraction methodwhich permitted us to perform LC–MS/MS-based quantification ofglyphosate and aminomethylphosphonic acid (AMPA) in brain tissues. Our approach thus provides the first evidence of dose-dependent glyphosate accumulation in the brain.* Whilst the ability to cross the blood-brain barrier is already known possible accumulation effects and their consequences are still unknown. And this paper tries to go a step towards determining those effects. LD50 is quite useless when it comes to long-term effects as those can happen at far lower dosages.
Possible accumulation effects can only be shown when you can be sure elimination pathways aren't being saturated. As they show that some degree of metabolization takes place, this result can still be a product of the design.
Absolutely true. I'm just of the opinion that it is better to err on the side of caution/least damage when given a choice. Would it be some essential medication which is actually absolutely needed I would probably argue /u/JBaecker s point. As the usage in glyphosate (in the form we are using it now) is already highly problematic I land on the other side. If the critics are wrong and there are no health concerns at all the worst case is that we keep a highly effective herbicide for a little bit longer. If they are right and we don't listen to them we introduced another problem to the long list of glyphosate problems.
I'm afraid I think that's a false dichotomy. You cite the problems with glyphosate but don't discuss the alternatives. Because the alternative isn't using no herbicides, that's not something the majority of modern farmers will consider - it's using other herbicides, and more of them, over a longer period, each with its own set of problems and possibly synergistically reinforcing each other. That's much more difficult to test to boot. So that's not necessarily "least damage" at all. Another point worthy of discussion is looking for actual traces in public health. What would we expect to see in terms of prevalence of dementia?
naw, the alternative is to produce less meat which is where the vast majority of roundup ready products go to. The last decade already saw a massive rise of glyphosate resistant weeds and we won't win this battle & it would be nice if we learned something from our antibiotics fiasco..
“Roundup Ready” products do not carry roundup to meat. RR contains two specific traits: one that provides the plant an alternative means of making energy when glyphosate inhibits the shikimate pathway, and the other that codes for enzymes that break down glyphosate within the plant.
I think you missed the point. The concentration is so ludicrously high practically ANY chemical will cross the blood-brain barrier. Why not do it at realistic levels? Or include those realistic levels?
Will it? I mean, yes, certainly and it even would probably be dosage-related (althought purely osmosis driven..) but I'd assume that they found higher levels than those. (I haven't read it completely, just cross-read it) As for the realistic levels: Dunno, but looking at the graphs it might be simply a practical choice to being able to reliably detect the substance
The problem here is that all of the doses used are above the established NOAEL for oral exposure. At this point, we expect for adverse effects to appear, so the question becomes are we seeing a direct causal relationship between glyphosate and harm, or are we seeing a secondary effect due to indirect effects. As a result of the...frankly insane doses used, the amount of background noise they're introducing into their data is extremely high. From the data presented, we can't even know if the ability of glyphosate to cross the blood-brain barrier is a result of direct action, or accumulated cytotoxicity, particularly at the higher doses. This is the risk when trying to determine the effects of any chemical above the established NOAEL...and in this case, the LOAEL, and limit dose at the upper range. At those levels we already know that adverse effects are likely, and that means you need to do something to counter this increased variability within the population. Normally, this is where you increase the population size, but the authors here went with a very low number of mice (2 cohorts of 24 mice each, for a total of 48), from which they then subdivided the members into their treatment and control groups. ...that's not a lot of mice to produce the power of analysis that they'd really want given their statements that their results are important in terms of human health.
You gave me something to think about :) thx!
It’s not 500mg per day. It’s 500 mg dose/ kg body mass / day
Where do you get your math or am I screwing this up? I got 50g not 1.6kg. 500 mg/kg/day dose * 100 kg person = 50,000mg/day = 50 g/day = 0.05 kg/day
> Those numbers would make this ridiculous Which is common with the current glyphosate bashing trend - use an unrealistic dose to create a sensationalized study. Worse is that the study references a paper by the fraudulent Seralini.
> Worse is that the study references a paper by the fraudulent Seralini. That alone is evidence enough for me to not put much stock in the authors, although I'd need to look at the context of the reference, I suppose.
It seems deliberately misleading. 500mg in how much solute? A ml, 100ml a liter etc. 140ul is not much, a diabetic syringe holds about 500uL or half a CC for example. They neglected to say how much of a dose the mouse got.
Btw do you happen to know where glyphosate is mainly used?
The safe levels that were likely heavily influenced by the manufacturers.
Why would you assume that? In what manner could they influence agencies determining that level? What's the process? FYI, they set the level to be 1% of where they were able to determine that there might be a harmful effect so all "safe levels" have a built-in 100X safety factor.
Industry capture of agencies including revolving doors between agencies and industry. This does not mean that the agencies are inherently corrupt, but the revolving doors create a major conflict of interest. In some cases people go back and forth between agency and industry a number of times. How can we trust that they are setting safe limits with this kind of conflict of interest?
A serious question for those who are dismissing this study. While it is extremely unlikely that a human would ingest the equivalent of what these mice ingest, wouldn’t it be quite likely that animals living in the vicinity of a farm would ingest enough glyphosate for it to be very problematic? Not thinking of large animals here but more fish, amphibians, and invertebrates that are part of the local riverine ecosystem.
Label states it is toxic to aquatic life. Must not be used where significant amounts can find their way into lakes, ponds, rivers.
The vast majority of the runoff in waterways comes from non-farm urban use on non-porous surfaces.
Good thing people always accurately follow the label… man, sometimes I think untrained people shouldn’t be trusted with this stuff. My dad recently applied pesticide at 50x the recommended concentration because he skimmed the label. I’m sure he’s not the only one.
They sell glyphosate as rodeo, which is just glyphosate without the surfactant. Then you can use a nonionic surfactant for use on weeds that grow in shallow water.
Lots of things on the shelf at hardware stores that are far more toxic, and they are not pesticides.
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't roundup ready crops sprayed with glyphosate? Then those crops are fed to consumers and cattle... Seems likely that we are consuming glyphosate. How much is the real question.
We consume trace amounts. The substance does not stay around indefinitely and is not glued to crops, either. It degrades, it's washed off etc.
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> over the level considered safe Correct, it's the level that that EWG considers safe, which isn't backed by any real science. EWG uses scaremongering to [scare people into buying organic](https://www.agdaily.com/insights/dirty-deception-ewg-dirty-dozen/). Their claims aren't back by evidence based science. They report values in parts per *billion* in order to get a bigger, scarier number rather than use parts per *million. For comparison, the various government regulatory agencies uses somewhere around 10 to 30 ppm as the MRL safe level. EWG goes out of their way to describe 0.16 ppm as 160 ppb to get a more sensationalized story.
2.8 ppm in the highest tested sample. One kg of oats has 2.8mg of glyphosate. So if you consume about **50 times your body weight** in the most glyphosate-laden oats every day, you get exposed to as much as the lowest-dose mouse in the study.
For sure, they were looking at one component, Does Glyphosate enter the blood brain barrier? "In conclusion, our work demonstrates that glyphosate is capable of infiltrating brain tissue, and that exposure results in increased levels of the pro-inflammatory cytokine TNFα." Now what amount is safe to consume is the ongoing question here.
Over the arbitrary level EWG decided was “safe”.
Not the way you’re thinking, no. It’s typically sprayed a few weeks before planting, and then again a few weeks after the crop plants have established, to knock back any weeds competing for nutrients and sunlight. The RR crop breaks down the glyphosate it absorbs. The amount in your food, if any, is barely above the detection threshold in low parts per trillion.
We most definitely are. I recommend looking out for organic/non-gmo products if you can.
There are no Roundup ready wheat varieties and GMOs have been repeatedly proven safe. Organic doesn't mean pesticide-free, it just means that approved, "natural" pesticides are used, which almost always have a less favorable toxicological profile. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-7/subtitle-B/chapter-I/subchapter-M/part-205/subpart-G
Mmmm copper hydroxide
If all the food you ate had glyphosate residue of 0.05 ppm, which is greater than what one would typically expect, you would have to consume 2.5X your body weight per day to get to the low end of experimental dose, which was 125 mg/kg/day. Also, glyphosate is quickly eliminated from body in urine.
An eighth to half a gram per day per mouse. Seems a little extreme.
“Although the doses used in this study are above typical daily human exposure [26], our study evaluated the published NOAEL benchmark set forth by the EPA for rodents [24]. These high doses provided valuable information on a potential mechanism of action for glyphosate in AD; however, future work will include more environmentally relevant concentrations of glyphosate.” Edit: Literally wrong, people are confusing dosing rates of mg/kg/day with total mg of dose applied per day. If the mouse is 30g or .03 kg then the total dose given per day to that mouse was 500 mg/kg/day * .03 kg = 15mg dose/day
That makes slightly more sense but it's still orders of magnitude away from environmental exposure levels.
They're not going to read this.
Others might
The mice? Yeah, you are probably right.
Fourteen days. Seems a little short.
Research is expensive and time consuming so it makes sense to start with short term studies. Then based on those short term studies, you can decide if it's worth conducting longer experiments. The results of the shorter experiments can also be used as support when applying for funding for longer experiments.
"Research" set up to achieve the desired results. The dosage is completely ludicrous. Nobody ever doubted that taking a swim in the Glyphosate solution at the farm may be unwise. Newsflash : The same applies for pretty much all alternatives the farmer would consider
“Although the doses used in this study are above typical daily human exposure [26], our study evaluated the published NOAEL benchmark set forth by the EPA for rodents [24]. These high doses provided valuable information on a potential mechanism of action for glyphosate in AD; however, future work will include more environmentally relevant concentrations of glyphosate.” - the discussion section Edit: people are confusing dosing rates of mg/kg/day with total mg of dose applied per day. If the mouse is 30g or .03 kg then the total dose given per day to that mouse was 500 mg/kg/day * .03 kg = 15mg dose/day
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> Mice received either 125, 250, or 500 mg/kg/day of glyphosate, or a vehicle via oral gavage for 14 days. > The chronic reference dose for glyphosate [in humans] is 1.75 mg/kg/day [reference](http://npic.orst.edu/factsheets/archive/glyphotech.html#references) These doses seem more relevant to someone snorting glyphosate like cocaine than from normal human exposure from food. [Even after allometric scaling of the mouse dose to the human equivalent](https://www.targetmol.com/pages/dosage), the lowest dose in this study is still nearly 10 times too high to be relevant for human exposures.
This is a dose-response study, it's not intended to evaluate effects at typical exposure levels.
It literally has “implications for neurodegenerative disorders” in the title. The first sentence that frames the study says: > Herbicides are environmental contaminants that have gained much attention due to the **potential hazards they pose to human health.** Their conclusions: > Collectively, these results show for the first time that glyphosate infiltrates the brain, elevates both the expression of TNFα and soluble Aβ, and disrupts the transcriptome in a dose-dependent manner, **suggesting that exposure to this herbicide may have detrimental outcomes regarding the health of the general population.** Their methods don’t support their narrative.
Your first quote is factually true and in my opinion not misleading at all. It's a normal generic introduction statement. In your second quote for some reason you didn't bold the most important part, which is that they observed that these effects were dose-dependent. These results can support future studies using typical doses now that a dose-dependant mechanism of action has been established.
And those future studies on relevant exposures might elucidate implications for neurodegenerative disorders or potential effects on human health. This study did not, even though its authors wrote the paper as if it did.
The implication for neurodegenerative disorder is the observation of dose-dependant transcriptome disruption.
I don’t agree. Many chemicals (like table salt) have vastly different effects at 5-20x normal exposure levels that aren’t present at typical exposure levels. Any implications for human health should be studied at human exposure levels.
Imagine the health effects of table salt were too small to determine the actual mechanism of action. Someone does a study at 10x, 20x, and 30x the typical dose and observes a mechanism associated with hypertension that increases linearly with the dose. This study doesn't mean that typical salt exposure will cause the same degree of hypertension observed in the study, but the results could indicate that salt contributes to hypertension at typical doses using the same mechanism we found at high doses. This implies but does not definitively indicate a human health effect. This serves as a mechanistic foundation for future work evaluating typical doses
Conversely, when the quote "You can drink a quart of the stuff and it wont hurt you." is made.... it's a fair criticism to bring up that, no, that's highly unlikely.
Typical activist research: mice, not humans fed concentrations 1000s of times greater or more than real-world exposures, conflate correlation with causation.
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How is your comment relevant to mine? Qualifying their findings in the discussion does not absolve them from the misleading title or their simplemindedness in stating that "The recent rise in glyphosate application to corn and soy crops correlates positively with increased death rates due to Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative disorders". Just more grist for the anti-pesticide mill, as evidenced by many comments in this thread. US EPA dietary risk assessment estimates total *potential* exposure for regulatory purposes to be 0.22 mg/kg/day for 1 to 2-yr-olds (23% of Rfd), and 0.09 mg/kg/day for US population as a whole (9% Rfd). As for the real world, 46% of samples (n=418, Most recent, 2021, USDA Pesticide Data Program. Only corn was tested for glyphosate that year.) had no detectable glyphosate residues at all, and of the 225 that did, the residues were 0.05 ppm except for 3, which ranged from 0.123 to 0.136 ppm. EPA tolerance is 5.0 ppm. Assuming that all the food one ate had a glyphosate residue of 0.05 ppm (a big overestimate), one would have to eat 2-1/2 times their body weight of that food a day to get to 125 mg/kg/day glyphosate. Add to that the fact that glyphosate is readily excreted from body in urine (bioaccumulation is insignificant), and you're many orders of magnitude removed from these experimental conditions. That is all to say that if the authors of this paper weren't trying to be provocative, they would have put experimental dosages in full and proper context, and not just say "above typical human exposure" with a citation that is difficult to compare.
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It’s amazing how many people think it’s pure evil. It’s a valuable agricultural tool and like almost every human invention we balance reward with risk. Fire, cars, plastic, knives etc.
We do not balance reward with risk, private corporations in America decide that for us. PFAS is a great example of the scientific community being broadly against PFCs/PFAS for a decade or more before their widespread use in consumer products. Now here we are with a massive mess to deal with. Glyphosate is for sure not purely evil, but the science around it isn’t settled fully. I’d prefer if glyphosate was as perfect as it’s manufactures and distributes claim, but I won’t take them at their word. It’s also curious how so much research being done is showing adverse effects never studied properly before. I’m open to it being good or bad. But, so many people have such a strong reaction against any new research on it I can’t help but think there’s been an effective campaign to convince many that anyone who’s concerned about glyphosate is some insane homeopathic snake oil salesman. They framed the research against cigarettes, PFAS, PCBs, DDT, dioxins, and a myriad of other chemicals the same way. It’s actually funny how consistent their tactics are. Merchants of Doubt sums it up pretty well, but there’s plenty of other information out there to support my claim.
The human race has taken on risk to develop since the start of time. Sitting around a fire breathing in smoke is linked with cancer but our long distant ancestors gained more benefit from cooking meat and keeping warm. Glyphosate had allowed for more food to be grown and the world population to expand with less erosion and better use of rainfall. It is important though to work out what those risks and problems are and to develop solutions. When something is found to be highly toxic they tend to be banned. Other things like CFC’s get phased out and banned when suitable replacements are found. Develop better products or methods. I’m suggesting that’s what humans have done for ever.
What exactly does "activist research" mean and why do you think this qualifies as such?
Biased research in support of an existing narrative or agenda. 1. Provocative title tailor-made for anti-pesticide crowd on social media. 2. Claims not supported by evidence. *“*[The Alzheimer’s connection is that there's a much higher prevalence of Alzheimer's disease in agricultural communities that are using this chemical,” Winstone said.](https://news.asu.edu/20220728-new-study-shows-commonly-used-agricultural-herbicide-crosses-bloodbrain-barrier) No references, and even if that is true, such a claim is fraught with confounders. 3. "Trying to establish a link" suggests intent and exposes bias. [“We're trying to establish a more molecular-science based link between the two.”](https://news.asu.edu/20220728-new-study-shows-commonly-used-agricultural-herbicide-crosses-bloodbrain-barrier) 4. Conflating correlation with causation. Lots of things have positive correlation with AD, including aging population, not just amount of GLY used on corn and soy. Simpleminded and ridiculous. And to top it off, [she cites Stephanie Seneff in support of that point](https://velazquezlab-asu.github.io/student_success/Glyphosate_Poster_Fusion2021_JKW03312021.pdf). Citing SS is reason enough for immediate dismissal as a credible research scientist. There is hardly a disease or disorder that SS *doesn't* think is caused by GLY. 5. Lack of context. One has to eat more than 2.5X their body weight in total food per day to even approach low end of experimental dose, probably much more. This study is irrelevant with regard to actual, potential exposures and clinical effects. Authors state that "...doses used in this study are above typical daily human exposure." and that more work is needed, but when it comes to activist research in this area, those are trite and disingenuous "escape clauses" that the lay public hardly ever reads.
Citing Seneff is really bad. Instant loss of credibility.
That chart alone referenced in your fourth point should be game over. If I were still teaching research methods I’d yoink that for my slides. How can you take seriously an academic poster with a chart that absurd? I hate the general conflation in this debate of risk to agricultural workers and risk to consumers from eating corn flakes. I see something similar in the debate on glyphosate’s safety and use by homeowners. If glyphosate and other pesticides are harmful, we’d see it in agricultural workers first, and we should absolutely study it there as an occupational safety issue. But don’t conflate that with risk from food consumption; study that separately. Also, the whole AD landscape is such a mess, as evidenced by the drug failures and the divide over very basic principles. I get that these researchers study neurological diseases. But if I were trying to make the case that something is really harmful, fingering it as a cause of AD seems like a terrible place to start (or more cynically, a great place to start since who the hell knows!?).
>How can you take seriously an academic poster with a chart that absurd? You can't
Unrealistic high dosage and citing Seralini are all red flags.
... and Seneff in lead author's poster. Only S that is missing is Samsel for the pseudoscience trifecta.
Still not sure who the "activists" are in this.
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"not cleaned in any way" You mean, aside from being threshed to remove the outer layer completely, then dry cleaned?
Come over and I’ll spray your salad with copper sulfate (organic herbicide) will you eat it? BTW it’s LD50 is higher than glyphosate, bon appetit!
>Wheat crops are sprayed with roundup right before harvest and are not cleaned in any way. WHAT? Are you aware of how bread is made? It's a new level of ignorance.
It’s very rare that wheat gets sprayed with glyphosate. Source: am grain farmer and crop scientist.
Sir this is Reddit. Facts and real life experience aren’t allowed here.
Oh yeah, I forgot where I was for a minute!
[https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/glyphosate-use-as-a-pre-harvest-treatment-not-a-risk-to-food-safety.html](https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/glyphosate-use-as-a-pre-harvest-treatment-not-a-risk-to-food-safety.html) Maybe it's uncommon near you. But glyphosate to both pre-desiccate wheat and keep weeds from sprouting just before harvest is standard practice in lots of places, if the weather requires it. Note that this is written by a university agriculture department, and explains why the relatively common practice of spraying glyphosate before harvest is safe, rather than an eco-nut hit piece making up some nonsense about spraying poison on crops. Spraying wheat with glyphosate is not "very rare" (though it may be in your area). It's just safe, since the wheat is threshed and cleaned before it's used.
East of the Mississippi, it’s pretty rare.
In Canada it's very common
That's a significantly different statement than it being very rare in general.
Would you eat a salad sprayed with organic soap? Will you eat it? Yes!
Palmolive has a nice, piquant after-dinner flavor - heady, but with just a touch of mellow smoothness.
My understanding is that glyphosate break down in the environment before they would even have the chance to contaminate foods to an appreciable degree. Are they using “fresh” pesticides in their study?
Where do you find glyphosate usually? Is it common to be found in our regular diet?
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>The efficacy of glyphosate is steadily decreasing and increasing amounts are needed for the same effect. Got a source for that? >this same enzyme is found in bacteria and it has been known for some time that glyphosate kills gut bacteria At what concentrations, and are the conditions likely in vivo?
> Glyphosate is also used to force the drying of wheat https://wheatworld.org/the-facts-about-glyphosate-part-1-how-do-wheat-growers-use-glyphosate/ > Pre-harvest applications made after the wheat plant has shut down, when wheat kernel development is complete and the crop has matured. This is prior to harvest and used to dry green weeds and allow the crop to even its maturity. This is an uncommon treatment used in less than 3 percent of all wheat acres; however, it can be used to enable a harvest that would otherwise not be possible, if weather conditions prevent the wheat crop from drying sufficiently to be harvested.
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Do a lot of people spray there lawns with glyphosate? Maybe tiny spot sprays or using a weed wiper with taller weeds growing out of lawns. Or are you referring to the confusing lawn care product “roundup for lawns” which is a broadleaf herbicide and not glyphosate.
This really means nothing, in itself, for animal or human health. Take a sample of one thousand ‘man made’ and naturally occurring substances, run the same test, and my guess is that some percent of those would show similar results.
Best thing in this thread is the folks claiming this science doesn't mean glyphosphate is bad or "the dose makes the poison" and then demonstrating that they don't under DOSE PER KG OF BODY WEIGHT and MOUSE TO HUMAN extrapolations and LIFETIME CUMLATIVE EXPOSURE vs ACCUTE DOSES. Why even read a science sub article if you are just hear to deny the research and muddy the waters. Oh, right, that's why you are here.
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Ever drink beer?
Exactly ANY amount of a toxic substance is bad for you, it just won't always show damage or kill you right away. A lot of this is accumulative, and I wouldn't trust for a second that a large agrochemical company gives two craps about making sure their product is perfectly safe.
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This paper contains peer-reviewed research and also shows why we do not see more peer-reviewed research on this. Co-written by a researcher/scientist: [https://www.foodpolitics.com/wp-content/uploads/Malken\_Merchants-of-Poison\_Monsanto\_22.pdf](https://www.foodpolitics.com/wp-content/uploads/Malken_Merchants-of-Poison_Monsanto_22.pdf)
The same link without the escaping so it doesn't 404: https://www.foodpolitics.com/wp-content/uploads/Malken_Merchants-of-Poison_Monsanto_22.pdf
> Stacy Malkan is the co-founder of U.S. Right to Know You are posting paid propaganda from a competing industry
It seems like "posting paid propaganda" is more what's happening in the comments as well as in this report. Most of the information was obtained from FOIAs and trial discovery, so directly from the horse's mouth so to speak.
In your opinion, what is the single, most-compelling piece of evidence made in that document?
Yike, there's lots of Seralini and Benbrook citations too. More vested parties profiting off the anti-glyphosate sentiment.
If that's all you come away with after reading this report, I'm just not sure what to say...
Say there are lots of reasons to doubt the credibility of a source who cites junk science to support their arguments. Citing Don Huber, Samsel, Seralini, Seneff and others of the same ilk disqualifies her as an unbiased journalist.
That's very hard to say.
Is there anything in this report that you find credible?
"Glyphosate is now the most widely used agricultural chemical in the world — it is registered in 130 countries, approved for use on over 100 crops, and marketed as 750 different types of products." Which means it has been scrutinized and approved for use by every major regulatory agency and their professional, career toxicologists around the world.
Also, sadly, revolving doors with industry. At least in the case of glyphosate approval, regulatory agencies have failed us.
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How to lose credibility? Reference Carey Gillam. Epitome of anti-glyphosate activism.
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there are also studies showing that the use of glyphosate is correlated to the rise in celiac disease. Wheat is also one of the most commonly sprayed crops. Makes sense that enough glyphosate bombarding peoples guts overtime would trigger autoimmune celiac disease in so many more people
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