| | Water Fasting

Wondering about glyphosate

Idk if anyone will know about this stuff, but if they do: How many crops do people usually use it for? Estimated percent, if you can. And is there any general rule of thumb when it comes to determining whether products have it or not? How bad is it for you? Is it bad enough to outweigh the benefits of high fiber foods? Mainly wonderng about oats and lentils. Thanks.

Answer

The detected residue levels are tiny, about 100-1000x lower than the established already conservative levels.

Here’s a comment I made regarding oats. Summary - it’s nothing to worry about.

Answer

Pesticides generally don’t pose a health risk to consumers. Most of the pesticides you eat are compounds produced by the plant you’re eating - it’s their immune system.

Dietary pesticides (99.99% all natural):

>We calculate that 99.99% (by weight) of the pesticides in the American diet are chemicals that plants produce to defend themselves. Only 52 natural pesticides have been tested in high-dose animal cancer tests, and about half (27) are rodent carcinogens; these 27 are shown to be present in many common foods. We conclude that natural and synthetic chemicals are equally likely to be positive in animal cancer tests. We also conclude that at the low doses of most human exposures the comparative hazards of synthetic pesticide residues are insignificant.

Levels of pesticide residues on consumer food are extremely low.

Dietary Exposure to Pesticide Residues from Commodities Alleged to Contain the Highest Contamination Levels:

>All pesticide exposure estimates were well below established chronic reference doses (RfDs). Only one of the 120 exposure estimates exceeded 1% of the RfD (methamidophos on bell peppers at 2% of the RfD), and only seven exposure estimates (5.8 percent) exceeded 0.1% of the RfD. Three quarters of the pesticide/commodity combinations demonstrated exposure estimates below 0.01% of the RfD (corresponding to exposures one million times below chronic No Observable Adverse Effect Levels from animal toxicology studies), and 40.8% had exposure estimates below 0.001% of the RfD.

Farmers have been switching to the safest and least toxic pesticides.

Long-term trends in the intensity and relative toxicity of herbicide use:

>Although GE crops have been previously implicated in increasing herbicide use, herbicide increases were more rapid in non-GE crops. Even as herbicide use increased, chronic toxicity associated with herbicide use decreased in two out of six crops, while acute toxicity decreased in four out of six crops. In the final year for which data were available (2014 or 2015), glyphosate accounted for 26% of maize, 43% of soybean and 45% of cotton herbicide applications. However, due to relatively low chronic toxicity, glyphosate contributed only 0.1, 0.3 and 3.5% of the chronic toxicity hazard in those crops, respectively.

Glyphosate in particular is practically nontoxic to humans.

Dietary (food and drinking water) exposure associated with the use of glyphosate is not expected to pose a risk of concern to human health.

After almost forty years of commercial use, and multiple regulatory approvals including toxicology evaluations, literature reviews, and numerous human health risk assessments, the clear and consistent conclusions are that glyphosate is of low toxicological concern, and no concerns exist with respect to glyphosate use and cancer in humans.

“There are over 60 genotoxicity studies on glyphosate with none showing results that should cause alarm relating to any likely human exposure. For human epidemiological studies there are 7 cohort and 14 case control studies, none of which support carcinogenicity. The weight of evidence is against carcinogenicity.”

Answer

I am an Agronomist in North Dakota. Here glyphosate is not labeled for pre harvest dessication of Oat. It can, and is often used for killing weeds before crop emergence. Glyphosate is labeled for pre harvest dessication of lentils and I while I do not monitor any lentil fields I would guess that it is used regularly to facilitate harvest efficiency. By label a farmer must wait 7 days after spraying glyphosate to harvest lentils and since plants killed with glyphosate are slow to dry down I think harvest probably occurs more like 10-14 days after application with good weather.

In either of these two crops glyphosate cannot be used during the growing season since it would kill oats or lentils.