
Roundup’s Risks Could Go Well Beyond Cancer - sahin-boydas
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-04/roundup-cancer-risk-is-only-one-danger-to-humans-animals
======
manifestsilence
Here is the paper that made me start to take organic food seriously a few
years ago:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3945755/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3945755/)

I don't have the skills to evaluate it in depth but it seems to indicate a
plausible connection between glyphosate and leaky gut, which could explain why
a lot of people who don't actually have celiac's have troubles with wheat.

This is conjecture on my part, but it's possible that many people with trouble
with wheat would be fine if they were able to avoid pesticides and repair
their gut bacteria and general gut health.

The other thing I learned alongside reading that paper (or maybe it was
mentioned in it, I forget), was that they use glyphosate not just to kill
weeds, but as a dessicant applied directly to wheat to aid in the harvest, and
a "ripening agent" applied directly to sugar cane.

Finally, although the risks are not well understood, it has been demonstrated
that glyphosate does appear in detectable amounts in human excretions (urine
and milk), which goes against some of the claims that were made in approving
its safety (they claimed it does not bioaccumulate).

Sorry I don't have sources handy for the rest of this stuff, but it's enough
to perhaps encourage others to run some searches too.

Edit: a final concern is not to humans but to soil biology. This new and
growing field has been finding that there are symbiotic relationships between
plants and fungi in the soil and that pesticides may disrupt this,
dramatically reducing effective soil quality and the nutritional content of
the plants grown there.

~~~
chicob
I wouldn't decide for organic because of that.

Like I said in another comment in this thread, organic farming still uses
pesticides, just not the synthetic ones.

In my opinion as a farmer, the foundational principle of Organic Farming is
not a path towards better farming practices, but one that divides what is
supposedly natural and organic, and what is artificial and synthetic.

This has more to do with a romantic ideal of purity regarding agriculture and
food production than guiding farming with principles of science-based agronomy
or efficacy/efficiency decision making.

~~~
crdrost
I think you don’t give yourself enough credit by calling it a “romantic ideal
of purity;” it really does make a difference.

A little pesticide is fine for cosmetic value: people buy more of the prettier
fruits and veggies, great. But when you start to apply modern engineering to
it, you get extremely powerful pesticides which are able to do something much
more dangerous.

The most talked-about example of what I am talking about is to consider that
McDonald’s has uniform french fries throughout the US. They are able to do
this because the potatoes that make the french fries are genetically
identical; there is exactly one McDonald’s French Fry Potato plant.

As a consequence we are freezing the evolution of part of our food supply
while the pests continue to evolve to be better and better at eating those
bits. The absolute precondition to do this is that human engineering clears
out the pests with advanced pesticides, so that the plants don’t need
evolution to stand on their own. And that is really dangerous as it pits human
wits against the laws of nature for the long-term.

This is also another reason why that label of “organic” is somewhat wrong. It
labels whether something happened in the production of some produce. That is
very helpful, say, in response to the OP’s article about avoiding a particular
pesticide for health reasons. But it doesn’t say anything about doing the
historical deeds of farming where you take your best performers and plant them
again for the future: and, worse, there’s a “security vulnerability” here
where I can deliver a bunch of organic produce but not support evolution. I
can just plant the same crop, look for signs of pests, douse only those fields
with advanced pesticides, and the other fields get delivered “organic” even
though their survival had only to do with random chance in how they were
cultivated, not whether they were tougher in the presence of (weakened) pests.

Thanks for coming here and arguing for Integrated Farming... are there any
certifications we can look for that indicate this? (I am under the
understanding that anyone can call something "integrated" and it's all on the
honor system.)

~~~
rootusrootus
> McDonald’s French Fry Potato plant

I'd love to see any info you have on that, because I'm not seeing anything at
all. My Google Fu may be weak, but all I find is that McDonalds continues to
deny using GMO potatoes.

Also, anecdotally, McDonalds french fries are far from all identical.

~~~
crdrost
Yeah, if you want to search more on it, the technique is called vegetative
propagation, it is a procedure by which potatoes are cloned rather than bred.
It happens to be really easy for potatoes. Searching for "mcdonalds
genetically" is bound to be saturated with GMO articles.

The lack of identicality of the fries themselves turns out to be a part of
McDonald’s’ broader engineering, as a matter of fact. (You could have expected
this—this is the same company whose chicken nuggets come in well-defined named
shapes—but it’s not terribly well talked about.) If all the fries at
McDonald’s were uniformly long they would have bad stacking properties and
would give you too much in your fry cup when filled, etc., so any new potato
brand that they accept, or any change to their procedures for cooking their
fries, must pass a bunch of stringent tests including having a certain
distribution between shorter and longer fries.

In this case there is a page on McDonalds.com which specifies the only four
monocultures which they exclusively farm to make McDonalds fries.

~~~
lordlimecat
>it is a procedure by which potatoes are cloned rather than bred.

I might be wrong, but this is how _many_ edible crops are propagated. Apples
for instance are generally clones, because the alternative is getting a new
kind of apple every time.

~~~
rootusrootus
I agree, it seems common. Tomatoes (at least the good ones) and bananas also
come to mind.

------
beat
I am really looking forward to the day we can replace chemical herbicides with
weed-hunting robots. It seems such a huge market opportunity... little,
inexpensive bots that can roam a field, picking out weeds the moment they
appear as seedlings, never touching the crop itself, not putting anything in
the soil.

When I was a kid growing up in central Illinois in the 1970s, before Roundup,
"walking beans" was a common summer job for kids. You'd go out into soybean
fields with some tools and rip out everything that wasn't a soybean plant. Of
course, spraying chemicals is cheaper than hiring a busload of kids, so that's
just a memory now.

~~~
gist
What is the energy source for that? Solar? Is it therefore possible to have
enough solar energy to operate the machinery with enough to pull out and keep
on going? And wouldn't you need a tremendous amount of batteries as well?
Would seem there would be an environmental impact that could far exceed some
kind of potential 'safe' chemical solutions.

~~~
beat
It actually seems like a straightforward problem for solar energy. Just have a
little "bot barn" with a solar roof and local storage, and the bots return to
the bot barn for a recharge. That's almost a trivial problem.

Keep in mind the bots don't have to be very large; certainly not human-sized.
Something the size of a roller skate, maybe, with specialized weed-killing
tools. And if it encounters something too big or weird to handle on its own,
it can mark it on a map and send an alert for human intervention.

------
beat
This topic is so aggravating. On one hand, you have the "Don't eat science
words, they give you the autism cancer!" reactionaries, and on the other side,
you have the "Everything is completely benign, because science!"
reactionaries.

~~~
manifestsilence
Yup, I hear you. I try to put my faith on the in-between folks, who say, "we
can't prove in a court of law that this is harmful, but in this case there is
a plausible mechanism and the risks don't seem justified. In this other case,
there's no plausible mechanism for harm or the benefits outweigh the risks."

The people who show some kind of doubt are, as always, the ones to actually
listen to.

~~~
tcfunk
Sort of a tangent here, but I find very often in the workplace that my
managers want me to tell them about how I "know" something will work. I
_never_ know if something will work. I can only be mostly sure that it will.
It goes against my nature so much to respond to these questions the way that
they want.

~~~
crdrost
If it helps you out personally, it may be nice to impose a translation filter
between the rest of the world and yourself here?

These other folks say “know” when they mean “have confidence in” and they are
looking for you to similarly say “know” meaning that. Your internal meaning of
knowledge can be much stronger, but they are just asking for you to give your
reasons why you think that would be the case. You can feel free to hedge as
well.

“I think we can resolve all of these things if we just make a UserInteractions
table on our end, rather than proxying all of this to the upstream API. We
will still proxy the interactions, but our source of truth can be our table.”

“How do you know that will work?”

“Well, it involves taking on some risks, like when they update things and
never tell our source of truth about them, then our two systems are out-of-
sync. I think that probably the problem of synchronizing our table with their
system is simpler and more tractable than getting their system to behave in a
normal way where we don't get successful responses until we're sure that the
interaction has happened. It would be different if everything was changing
every second of course, but that isn’t what we’ve been seeing happen on our
staging server. The rest of it is not too bad, there are three API endpoints
which generate these UserInteractions and they all touch it but rewriting them
can’t be more than a day’s work, so the only hard problem is populating this
UserInteractions table in the first place, but that’s not an ongoing risk,
just a one-time cost for a developer to pay. That’s why I’m confident that
this is a good choice moving forward.”

“How do you know that interaction times won’t suffer?”

“Well, I cannot say 100% for sure but usually requests over the local network
to the local database are going to be faster than general network requests,
unless things are really unusually smooth between the two. But at our present
number of users and our projected go-live numbers, I have seen MySQL setups
handle that with no problem and if it is a problem then we’ll have to face
that scaling difficulty either way, as MySQL is not just used for these
UserInteractions but also for X, Y, and Z.”

You see? I don’t need to claim absolute knowledge here, I just need to
express:

1\. There is some sort of cost-benefit analysis of trade-offs happening here,

2\. someone has done this analysis, and,

3\. more info can become available and I can be held accountable for this
trade-off if this choice later becomes problematic.

It’s sort of a part of negotiation rather than part of technical
responsibility. If you can appeal to an outside authority (“The OWASP security
guidelines _clearly_ state...”) or at least an unbiased one (“I ran this by
Susan, who is a developer at our contractor that we work with, and she agreed
it was worth a shot and gave me some good feedback about a potential pitfall
that I should avoid...”) or otherwise communicate that some sort of expertise
has peeked in to a problem, then people feel naturally more confident and
trusting about it. If you don’t do that then it starts to sound more like “we
should do this because I say so” even when the problem is legitimate and
painful.

I guess I’m saying, think of yourself as a doctor talking to a patient about
an upcoming surgery. They are right to have nebulous general concerns and they
talk in funny ways that technically do not have much scientific value, but it
is important to reassure them when needed, provide them options when needed,
and just trust that if they lose trust of you and want to get second opinions,
they are acting in good faith and have every right to be concerned about these
things that are probably innocuous but have a tiny probability to kill them.

~~~
beat
I read this, and immediately thought of one of my maxims... "Data duplication
is the source of all bugs".

~~~
crdrost
Your maxim is already in common parlance as Karlton’s principle. “There are
only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation and naming
things.”

(Some add “and off-by-one errors” but arguably that is the same problem of
some ‘cache’ being ‘invalid’ and never suitably repopulated…)

With that said downstream caches are often solid, _if_ one treats them as the
source of truth. “We just pretend this has not happened until we see it.” Same
thing with denormalized data in a database, sometimes that's the only way to
build the appropriate index which speeds things up.

~~~
beat
Yeah, I wrote about that exact thing a while back.
[https://hackernoon.com/the-two-hard-problems-in-computer-
sci...](https://hackernoon.com/the-two-hard-problems-in-computer-
science-2a42ec008eee)

------
gdubs
There’s a second order conclusion here that seems to get constantly lost in
the conversation. On a bumper sticker it’d be, “It’s the monocultures,
stupid.”

When we talk about things like glysophate staying around in the soil or making
it’s way into the water supply, what we really should be questioning is why so
much is being used in the first place. And that’s because we grow fragile
annual crops in enormous monocultures making the use of chemicals a necessity.

I’m for alternative methods of farming, like permaculture, but I’m not so
ideological to be against chemicals in the absolute. Based on the evidence
I’ve seen, pragmatic use of sprays isn’t terribly dangerous. I’m talking spot
spraying as part of conservation and restoration work, etc.

The fixation on particular chemicals like glysophate is a distraction from the
root issue, which is that industrial scale agriculture is — on the whole
—damaging to the planet.

~~~
dan_quixote
Alternative ideas like a robot weeder [1] are interesting. This could be
pretty effective on some crops. Doesn't solve the pesticide problem though.

[1] [https://www.ecorobotix.com/en/autonomous-robot-
weeder/](https://www.ecorobotix.com/en/autonomous-robot-weeder/)

------
stickfigure
I sprayed a bunch of glyphosphate yesterday and I'll spray a bunch more today.
I live on country property that is infested with yellow starthistle, an
invasive noxious weed. Right now is it's growing season. There's absolutely no
practical way to beat it back without chemistry.

I'm sympathetic to concerns about our food chain but to the folks hoping for
the downfall of Monsanto/Bayer: You are hereby invited over to pull weeds in
100 degree weather. I'll supply the beer.

~~~
snarfy
There are alternatives. Vinegar works pretty well.

~~~
stickfigure
From [https://www.post-
gazette.com/life/garden/2009/06/13/Carefull...](https://www.post-
gazette.com/life/garden/2009/06/13/Carefully-apply-vinegar-to-eliminate-
thistles/stories/200906130126)

 _[Vinegar] works as a contact or burn-down herbicide, which means that it
only kills the portion of the plant it contacts. The thistle will re-grow from
the roots, and you will have to make repeated applications until you exhaust
the carbohydrate reserves in the roots. There is probably a lot of seed
present in the soil, and new thistle plants will sprout that you will have to
treat in future years._

Just picture yourself doing this on 90ac of hills!

~~~
whenchamenia
Its not that bad for anything under 5-10 acres. Just mix in a dash of soap and
a lil salt, and fill a backpack sprayer. Soak the plant, specifically the
leaves, and you have a very selective, very benign herbicide. Full grown
plants take more than 1 treatment many times, but with thistles, you can just
carefully remove the heads.

------
loganfrederick
The book "Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of
Science" by Carey Gillam is a very thorough take-down of Monstano, Roundup,
glyphosphate, and the government agencies that have historically looked away
from the evidence. She has done incredible work bringing these issues to
light.

[https://www.amazon.com/Whitewash-Killer-Cancer-Corruption-
Sc...](https://www.amazon.com/Whitewash-Killer-Cancer-Corruption-
Science/dp/1642830429)

------
georgehayduke
"Evidence of the cheap herbicide’s danger to biological functions and the
environment continues to mount. Why are U.S. regulators not listening?"

Why are regulators not listening is a great question. Perhaps they are
listening, just to well paid lobbyists on Bayer's side.

------
dls2016
My wife used to administer Medical services in Santa Barbara country:
coordinating translators and a program providing insurance to undocumented
children. Many of the recipients worked the fields and I was always astonished
to hear the frequency of occurrence of certain birth defects in these
populations.

It's entirely possible the occurrence wasn't elevated relative to populations
she didn't work with or I didn't hear about... but I've long suspected that
there's a story hiding in plain sight that's bigger than even the recent
cancer-related damages. Especially given that many of the workers are Mixtec
and so are incredibly isolated from society-at-large (many would pretend to
understand Spanish and didn't realize they could request Mixtec-speaking
translators).

~~~
feld
They were probably exposed to 2,4D, not glyphosate

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic_acid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic_acid)

If they're using undocumented workers do you think they're going to prevent
them from being exposed to a key ingredient in Agent Orange?

~~~
sdinsn
It's also worth noting that 2,4-D, in addition, to being dangerous, is
organic.

A prime example of why "organic" food is dangerous. We developed artificial
herbicides and pesticides to be safer than organic counterparts. I'm not
exactly sure how people are convinced that "organic" food = higher quality and
safer

~~~
dls2016
> I'm not exactly sure how people are convinced that "organic" food = higher
> quality and safer

Well the obvious answer to "how are people convinced" is "advertising".

------
sschueller
Does anyone have the insight as to why Bayer purchased Monsanto? This to me is
one of the biggest corporate acquisition mistakes in history. To make things
worse Bayer even retired the name Monsanto making Bayer the defendant in all
these cases.

~~~
jMyles
Bayer has a long history of doing the wrong thing on purpose and coming out
the other side with riches to show for it. It appears that people have wisened
up to this style of business practice faster than Bayer realized.

~~~
monsanto

      It appears that people have wisened up to this style of business...
    

More to the point, I think there was a profound amount of attention
scrutinizing Monsanto, more than any other company I can think of.

The concept of Monsanto's business model has been probably the most chilling
example of vendor lock-in ever imagined, and certainly throughout the 1980's
and onward, raised more than a few eyebrows anywhere it was explained.

It really resonates to the core of human values as a concept of highly
calculated evil, executed as a long game. Apologists will shrug their
shoulders, and with open hands, suggest that it's enough to say that a company
motivated to earn money is justified in any behavior, and that the truth is
that natural modes of food supply would strangle and starve civilization, were
it not for innovators creating expanded production volumes by exploiting
powerful technologies under tightly controlled circumstances.

But, it's clear that Monsanto's products and services represent a direct
threat to those who dare to depend on them. Genetic modfication of
herbicide/pesticide resistant food supplies, combined with litigation designed
to destroy unlicensed supplies, all to further sales of proprietary organisms
and their matching chemicals, is such an intuitively horrific system of
practices that it begs disbelief.

And with that, you have the far reaching attention that glyphosphate weed
killer and genetically engineered crops have brought upon those who would seek
to threaten the world with them.

To properly internalize the ideas in play, one can handily imagine what it
means, should anything ever go wrong. Every mouth fed by food grown as
corporate product will starve, if ever there's an incident that precludes the
use of the product.

Thus, if Monsanto's genetic engineering enables crops that feed two billion,
and suddenly, next year, for any reason, farmers are made to cease production,
well... what happens to two billion people?

Except, it's worse than that. Because it's not like you can draw a line around
those two billion people. They aren't living in some enclave, sealed off in a
parallel universe. It's not a hypothetical person that eats RoundUp Ready
food. We've all probably eaten some, and now, we'll all have to cram into the
same life boat if something goes wrong, and the mistake can't be reversed.

~~~
tptacek
The only thing that got farmers sued by Monsanto was the planting of "Roundup-
Ready" seeds _and subsequent application of glyphosate to the crop_ , which
would kill a non-Roundup-Ready crop. You could plant Monsanto's GM seeds all
you wanted without legal risk, so long as you treated them like any other crop
and didn't try to exploit their GM properties.

~~~
zwerdlds
I must be reading the situation wrong. Would you mind describing how
situations detailed in this article jibe with your account?

[https://www.cbsnews.com/news/agricultural-giant-battles-
smal...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/agricultural-giant-battles-small-
farmers/)

~~~
shawndrost
Monsanto did not sue Dave Runyon. The article says they threatened to sue.
Therefore it's not a counterexample to GP's specific point.

Maybe you think Monsanto's conduct re: Dave Runyon makes them evil, maybe not.
I don't -- how would one would run a GM seed business without threatening to
sue left and right? (Or using terminator genes, which seem more evil.) I'd be
interested to hear from anyone that shares my priors and disagrees with my
conclusions.

------
jMyles
> ...10,000 further cases are pending, worrying Bayer investors as well as
> farmers who rely on the product as a cheap, effective herbicide.

> Cancer may only be part of the story. Studies over the past decade suggest
> that glyphosate — the active ingredient in Roundup — pollutes water sources,
> hangs around in soil far longer than previously suspected, and routinely
> taints human food supplies.

I mean... yeah. I'm not formally trained in biology, but I think at this point
it's a sane default to just suppose that any chemical compound that kills
plants so efficiently on contact is likely to also have effects on human
tissue, especially when the contact is as frequent and intense as is the case
for farm workers.

This style of farming (using genetic modification to increase robustness
against a particular chemical, and then dousing the field with that chemical)
is best understood as a mistake and completely set aside as immediately as can
practically be done.

Until it ceases (and after that), if you can afford organic food, buy it (and
I don't just mean USDA Certified Organic, although that's a great start, I
mean food you know to be organic from a farmer's market). Even if you don't
care to reduce your own exposure, it turns out that life is sucking for
thousands of these farm workers who get this shit on their hands and faces and
clothes every day.

~~~
cannonedhamster
Glyphosate has been used for over 60 years. It works in a part of the plant
that controls photosynthesis. No one is even sure how it would impact humans.
Here's a podcast with some more information. They will update if better
information comes in it disproves the previous assumptions.

[https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4676](https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4676)

~~~
jMyles
> No one is even sure how it would impact humans.

But is that relevant? Isn't it more sane to let our first assumption be that
plant killers aren't good for us? Until we have some compelling reason to
believe otherwise?

~~~
cannonedhamster
You do realize vinegar is a plant killer right? Too much water is a plant
killer, too much sun is a plant killer. There are insecticides that kill bugs
that don't have an impact on humans. Starvation probably kills far more people
than Roundup. I mean I hate Monsanto as a company too but literally you could
die drinking too much water. If you cannot even define how something would
impact humans wouldn't the appropriate way to determine that be to perform
science? Just saying we don't know so it must be bad is literally the opposite
of science. People used to think tomatoes were poisonous, they weren't.
Tapioca was poisonous unless cooked. You routinely ingest poisonous metals in
your food. Your argument has no place in a discussion about whether something
is harmful. Evidence does, once we can define the harm, if any, we can
determine whether we can mitigate it, whether it's a real risk factor, and
whether it's risks outweigh the benefits. You must likely drive around in a
vehicle that causes more cancer and harm to the environment than Roundup.
Plastic bags don't decay for generations. We have literal known problems that
we give less focus than a problem that isn't even proven to exist.

~~~
markaz
You do realize vinegar (acid) is a human killer right? Too much water is a
human killer, too much sun is a human killer. Science typically starts with a
hypothesis and tests it. Starting with the hypothesis that roundup is
dangerous for humans is logical because we already know it is not safe for
other forms of life.

~~~
cannonedhamster
Vinegar is only dangerous if consumed above a safe level, same with the sun,
water, etc. Which was the point you seemed to miss. Toxicity is determined not
by how it interacts with plants, but the safe level for humans, which is
different than plants. Your assumption that everything is automatically
dangerous is not founded in anything close to science or even evidence at this
point. Prove that it's dangerous, it's been the most common and least toxic
herbicide for years. Wouldn't you expect more concrete evidence to turn up
similar to smoking, black lung disease, mesthelioma, etc? There hasn't been a
huge upsurge in cancer rates, in fact they've gone down since glyphosate has
been used. There is literally no concrete evidence currently that this is
dangerous to humans at concentrations currently used. Find proof then I'll
believe you.

------
Abishek_Muthian
Even if such substances gets controlled in U.S. and manufacturers penalised,
they will have a free run in developing countries.

Pesticides inc. *cides in agriculture along with antibiotics in poultry, which
helped address world hunger is becoming bane of humanity.

When there are chances of superbug arising from antibiotics abuse such as
colistin from India becoming a pandemic, why treat these issues as local to
the country?

------
feld
If glyphosate is banned we will all starve.

There is no strong evidence of its harm yet. It may be an EDC, but we don't
have the data to prove it.

The fearmongering has got to stop. Why wasn't Bayer/Monsanto allowed to
provide expert witness testimony? Are we going to continue to throw scientific
methods out the window?

