What's Making Our Children Sick? by Michelle Perro

Author:Michelle Perro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Published: 2017-11-14T18:41:58+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

Going with Our Glyphosate-Filled Gut

Glyphosate is the DDT of the 21st century. When future historians write about our time, and about our use of glyphosate (Roundup), they’re going to write about our willingness to sacrifice our children, and to jeopardize the very basis of our existence and the sustainability of our agriculture.

DON HUBER, PhD, emeritus professor of plant pathology, Purdue University1

Given the controversy over GM technologies, it is no wonder that contemporary researchers have tried to focus on a few key scientific concerns that have to do not with all GM foods, but with only the main ones currently on the market and in our food supply: Roundup Ready (i.e., glyphosate-tolerant) and Bt crops. In this chapter, we will focus on glyphosate, starting with the important questions: How much glyphosate gets into the typical body in those geographic locations where it is used, and is it harmful or harmless once it gets there?

As we laid out in chapter 11, there are industry reports on the safety of glyphosate. Many of these were done several decades ago, as genetic modification techniques were just starting. The potency of glyphosate as a weed killer goes hand in hand with the genetic modification to seeds that allows them to withstand the use of this chemical. Glyphosate has long been considered one of the safest weed killers available, and even now many agencies attest to its safety, such as the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization and the European Food Safety Authority. These conclusions go up against new reports that state the opposite, namely that glyphosate and/or its commercial formulations (such as Roundup), even in small doses over a long period of time, is harmful to health. We’ll look at that evidence here.

Glyphosate Is Everywhere, Including in Our Bodies

There are claims and counterclaims about how much glyphosate is actually getting into humans and how much might be needed to produce negative health effects. Some scientists are concerned with the fact that previous studies do not account for the higher levels of exposure to glyphosate herbicides that are now being experienced in real-world settings. But, as we will see, apparently even small doses might have health effects.

In the United States, glyphosate use increased by a factor of more than 250fold—from 0.4 million kilograms in 1974 to 113 million kilograms in 2014.2 One report noted that: “in 2015, US farmers and ranchers applied enough glyphosate to spray about three-quarters of a pound of active ingredient on every acre of cultivated cropland in the country. Levels of glyphosate . . . are rising in soil, water, food, and the atmosphere. People are being exposed through multiple sources.”3 Increased use of glyphosate is principally the result of increased cultivation of glyphosate-tolerant GM crops and the resulting spread of resistant weeds. Whereas prior to use of GM foods, plant crops might have been exposed to spray once, early on, as weeds were eradicated, with GM foods, farmers can spray multiple times throughout the life course of the crops. On

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