If the EU were to officially ban glyphosate, their food supply would increase in quality as a result, since these worse pesticides are not available.

The US needs to catch up. Eliminating glyphosate is not a one-shot kill for human health and never meant to imply that

Here is a list of plants that have glyphosate tolerant varieties: soybeans, alfalfa, corn, canola, sugar beets, and cotton. There is no glyphosate tolerant wheat plant.

These plants are used to make ethanol, sugar, soy animal feed, canola oil, cotton fabric, and feed corn. Humans consume canola oil and sugar, both of which are refined in a distillation process. Possibly some of the corn ends up as cornmeal or corn flour. All of the soy and alfalfa are sold as animal feed.

I’m not afraid of glyphosate or microplastics until the evidence shows otherwise.

Edit: I am out of replies, I hadn’t considered either of those routes for glyphosate to enter the human food supply. The concentration of glyphosate in a cow that eats feed grown with glyphosate has to be much more concentrated as well. Thanks for replying, my apologies for making a bad assumption.

Personally, I suspect that many people who present as wheat/gluten sensitive may in fact be reacting to the herbicides present in the wheat.

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_desiccation

Do you know of any study that is able to detect glyphosate in the flour or end product ? If they can't find it, it's probably a nothingburger.

And glyphosate is also used for burndown and/or dessication on a number of non-glyphosate tolerant crops such as wheat, oats, beans, potatoes, etc that go directly to the grocery store

"The doses of glyphosate that produce these neurotoxic effects vary widely but are lower than the limits set by regulatory agencies. Although there are important discrepancies between the analyzed findings, it is unequivocal that exposure to glyphosate produces important alterations in the structure and function of the nervous system of humans, rodents, fish, and invertebrates."

Costas-Ferreira C, Durán R, Faro LRF. Toxic Effects of Glyphosate on the Nervous System: A Systematic Review. International Journal of Molecular Sciences. 2022; 23(9):4605. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms23094605

"Today, a growing body of literature shows in vitro, in vivo, and epidemiological evidence for the toxicity of glyphosate across animal species."

Rachel Lacroix, Deborah M Kurrasch, Glyphosate toxicity: in vivo, in vitro, and epidemiological evidence, Toxicological Sciences, Volume 192, Issue 2, April 2023, Pages 131–140, https://doi.org/10.1093/toxsci/kfad018

"Utilizing shotgun metagenomic sequencing of fecal samples from C57BL/6 J mice, we show that glyphosate exposure at doses approximating the U.S. ADI significantly impacts gut microbiota composition. These gut microbial alterations were associated with effects on gut homeostasis characterized by increased proinflammatory CD4+IL17A+ T cells and Lipocalin-2, a known marker of intestinal inflammation."

Peter C. Lehman, Nicole Cady, Sudeep Ghimire, Shailesh K. Shahi, Rachel L. Shrode, Hans-Joachim Lehmler, Ashutosh K. Mangalam, Low-dose glyphosate exposure alters gut microbiota composition and modulates gut homeostasis, Environmental Toxicology and Pharmacology, Volume 100, 2023, 104149, ISSN 1382-6689, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.etap.2023.104149. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138266892...)

It relies on studies in rodent that get exposed to amounts of glyphosate that are absurdly high. Equivalent human absorption would be in the gram range, to the point where someone eating 250g of bread everyday would have 1% of this mass ingested as glyphosate.

By this standard, things like vitamins and minerals are toxic as well.

It makes no sense, to me it looks like bad science.

In fact the purpose of meta analysis is to compare and contrast the conflicting research and results on a topic. It's very useful when forming a scientific view.

I don't have time to check in detail; can you link the study finding issues at relevant doses?

Anyway, my thinking is that if there was such a big problem, we would have found it already. It affects the food supply of so many; it seems unlikely that there are significant issues that wouldn't show up in the population at large.

The real concern is environmental impact and, particularly, effects on insects. But since they are going to use something else that may or may not be worse, it's probably better to not ban the stuff until it can be proved that the damage is worse than the benefits…

The comparison with vitamins is not relevant, and to bring it up suggests you are not thinking clearly.

On the pathway argument, you are just rambling; I'm clearly not talking about that. Whether there is a pathway is largely irrelevant if you cannot prove that it is toxic at expected ingestion levels.

You are just fearmongering and grasping at straws. Same bullshit as the anti-vax that would have you believe vaccines are toxic because they use aluminum (yes, in amounts completely benign).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_desiccation

Unrelated:

I really enjoy "Security, Cryptography, Whatever".

Maybe I'm a little sensitive to this since I've rotated HN screen names a couple times after someone tried to track me down off-site to argue a (rather benign) comment I made about something.

A few of them seem to be pretty active in GrapheneOS related threads here. strcat for example.

Just because the chemical in question is safer than the previously existing alternatives doesn't mean that the way that Monsanto promoted it and marketed it for use and the way people ended up using it because they believed that marketing didn't result in a net greater detriment to society and the ecosystem than if we had adopted totally different pest management protocols that didn't require as many chemicals that a company like Monsanto conveniently sells.

I had a boss at a greenhouse tell me once that his old-timey agriculture prof at a big university would swear by the safety of glyphosate and he would literally drinking a shot glass of the stuff in every first year class like he was that dude who drank H. pylori to prove ulcers were caused by an infection.

This kind of insane grandstanding where a professor openly drinks herbicides for years in university classrooms came from absurd marketing from Monsanto and neither of these things have any place in our society.

Monsanto had a financial interest to make that professor into a fervent Jonestown-esque believer of their product and the end result was that spread that fervour to thousands of students who went out into the industry and figured that if it's alright for that guy to drink it then it must be alright to spray that shit everywhere as often as they want.

The downstream effect of that is you're on HN in 2018 advocating for glyphosate and then again in 2025 when someone points out how ubiquitous confidentially incorrect opinions about glycophosate are.

Speaking of motte-and-bailey fallacy, pivoting from "Dr Oz was right about glyphosate" to this run-on claim:

> Just because the chemical in question is safer than the previously existing alternatives doesn't mean that the way that Monsanto promoted it and marketed it for use and the way people ended up using it because they believed that marketing didn't result in a net greater detriment to society and the ecosystem than if we had adopted totally different pest management protocols that didn't require as many chemicals that a company like Monsanto conveniently sells.

Is a textbook motte-and-bailey play. The original argument wasn't that "society and the ecosystem would be better if everyone didn't use chemicals". The claim above was that anyone who said there wasn't evidence that glyphosate caused cancer was wrong and Dr. Oz was right.

And that argument was a fallacy in itself. The retraction of a single paper is not equivalent to saying that glyphosate is dangerous, that it causes cancer, or that Dr. Oz was right.

These threads are frustrating because a small number of people are trying to share real papers and talk about the subject, but it's getting overrun with people who aren't interested in discussing science at all. They've made up their minds that chemicals are bad, glyphosate causes cancer, and Dr. Oz was right and they're here to push that narrative regardless of what the content of the linked article actually says.

I didn’t say glyphosate definitively causes cancer, I didn’t say Dr. Oz was right, and I’m certainly not arguing that 'all chemicals are bad.' My point was about the credibility of the evidence around glyphosate -- specifically the ghostwritten papers, the regulatory capture, the marketing practices and how that stuff shaped industry and academic attitudes.

That’s a critique of how scientific consensus gets constructed and how it trickles down to sites like HN. It is absolutely not some anti-chemical crusade like you're making it out to be.

If you want to disagree with that argument that would be great but engage with what I actually said, not this Dr. Oz strawman.

That environment shaped the baseline assumptions many of us including farmers, scientists, regulators, journalists, and yes even minor-celebrity HN commenters such as yourself.

My point is that the issue isn't whether glyphosate is 'safer than alternatives' but whether the entire ecosystem of evidence and perception surrounding it was manipulated. This paper that we're talking about is but one example of that. So the question isn't about your personal motives but how you came to believe what you believe about Monsanto products and who stands to gain from you believing those things and expressing them on social media.

No it isn't.

Kind of crazy that this isn't just obvious to everybody.

Precautionary Principle thinking, taken on its face, would have immediately halted the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines (VAERS data almost immediately showed things like blot clots), because Precautionary thinking tends to fixate on individual risks rather than a global risk picture; fortunately, Precautionary thinking failed to win the day and vaccines saved millions of lives instead. Note that this example flunks your Extended Precautionary Principle logic: there were certainly big companies that stood to profit from the right decision there!

You can put together a coherent and persuasive defense of the Precautionary Principle, but if you just cite it in passing and say things like "crazy everyone doesn't agree with me about this", expect pushback.

Is that something you consider to be deeply problematic and false?

Of course you can dispute both the risk and amount of certainty present, but claiming that the principle is fallacious seems absurd to me.

> "The precautionary principle (PP) states that if an actionor policy has a suspected risk of causing severe harm to the public domain (affecting general health or the environment globally), the action should not be taken in the absence of scientific near-certainty about its safety. Under these conditions, the burden of proof about absence of harm falls on those proposing an action, not those opposing it. PP is intended to deal with uncertainty and risk in cases where the absence of evidence and the incompleteness of scientific knowledge carries profound implications and in the presence of risks of "black swans",unforeseen and unforeseable events of extreme consequence"

I very specifically did not say that PP analyses were dead on arrival, or that problems with PP thinking were dispositive. I said rather that it is not enough to simply invoke the PP in policy debates; that rhetorical habit has bad outcomes. Again: the idea is not that "precaution" is bad. It's that you can't mechanically shift the burden of proof to anything "new" and assign a lower risk to the status quo by default --- you have to make that argument on the merits.

There's a good Cass Sunstein thing about the PP if you're interested in understanding critiques of it:

https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...

Not quite - it is true that you cannot assign a lower risk to the status quo by default, but the burden of proof is on the new intervention to prove that it's safe, not on detractors to prove that it isn't.

In other words, if the world is functioning today, you need to prove that your intervention won't cause ruin, no matter how small the chance or how big the upside.

I still think we are talking about two different things here.

I can't say enough that this is not random message-board dorm-room logic, and that lots has been written about this flaw in the simplistic application of the Precautionary Principle. I already gave a link upthread; I feel like I've done my due diligence at this point.

We're talking about the same thing. I wonder if you've just never read anything deeper about the Precautionary Principle than activists weaponizing it to make points about glyphosate (or vaccines or nuclear power).

Not necessarily. The PP is interpreted so many different ways, it was actually invoked by people like Nassim Talib to not only justify the vaccine rollout but to call for strict lockdowns among other measures.

There are many arguments made against the precautionary principle, just like there were many arguments made in favour of leaded gasoline. We all know who ended up on the right side of history on that one, and I expect it will be the same for roundup.

In the context of this article, we are discussing the PP as relevant to regulatory agencies. The EU employs the PP while the USA takes something called the Scientific Approach - in other words, the EU requires evidence that an intervention carries no risk, whereas the US requires proof that an intervention has significant risk in order to ban it. Idk about you, but I feel a lot better eating food grown in Europe.

Your position isn't unique, there are many very intelligent people who nonetheless overestimate their capacity for understanding the world and predicting the future.

As always, it comes down to the risk of X vs the risk of not doing X. And history has clearly shown we made the right choice.

We are reasonably confident that no likely gamma ray bursters are pointed at us and within lethal range. We know dinosaur killers are out there--a failure to map every such object in the solar system is a small probability of an infinite risk. Why are there no ICBMs fitted for point defense against a city killer asteroid? You have the rocket, you have the boom. You need a seeker that can guide it to impact (there are other radars that could illuminate, it just needs to home on the reflection) and a standoff fuse that will fire it at the last possible millisecond.

In the real world you should not be looking at the risk of X. Rather, you should be looking at where X stands amongst the competing options.

Nuclear power is an extreme example of this going wrong. The US effectively legislated it out of existence by decreeing that reactors should be as safe as reasonably possible. The problem is "reasonably" is fundamentally fluid. In theory at least you can always make things safer by throwing more safety systems at it. And if nuclear power is cheap enough you can afford to throw more safety systems at it. Thus nuclear power is by definition too expensive. And that's before the NIMBYs abuse the regulatory system to drive the costs way up.

Look at the reality: Depending on your yardstick nuclear is either safer than any other large scale power source, or nearly as safe as anything else and far safer than where most of our power comes from.

(The yardstick problem comes down to Fukushima. That's more than half of the "nuclear power" deaths right there--entirely because the politicians messed with things. Listen to the engineers, there would have been an expected death toll of zero. But nuclear power is blamed for the political decisions that killed hundreds.

And the yardstick comes down to a dam failure in China--ascribe the deaths from their hydro power dam failure to hydro and it's out of the running.)

But in the real world natural gas has about 10x the risk of nuclear before looking at climate effects. And oil has about 10x the risk of natural gas, plus a bit more in climate effects (a greater percentage of an oil molecule is carbon.) And coal has about 10x the risk of oil, plus considerably more climate effects.

We don't have the power, civilization (and virtually everyone in it) dies. The plants must run, the question is what runs them. Society would be safest if we took the existing rulebook and threw it in the trash can, replace it with a standard that expects a given risk per terawatt-hour, it's the job of the regulators to devise rules that accomplish this and any company is allowed to present evidence that a different approach is better. (If we focus less on risk X and more on risk Y we can get more safety for less cost.)

That's at least half a million American deaths in the last three decades on the altar of the precautionary principle.