Sounds like you might be confused as to which crops use glyphosate as an herbicide, it’s not being used on vegetables and fruits being sold in the produce section, so it would do nothing for the quality of European produce. It’s possible that glyphosate overspray touches some human foods crops, but I wash my produce before eating it, I hope you do too.

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.

While there isn't a commercially grown glyphosate tolerant wheat; there is a significant pathway for glyphosate into the wheat you eat through the process of desiccation[1]. It is common practice to kill the plant with an herbicide shortly before harvest, which helps to maximize yield.

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

Thanks for the additional information, I wasn’t aware of glyphosate being used for burndown/crop desiccation on wheat fields until CGMthrowaway mentioned it. Makes perfect sense, given no wheat is glyphosate tolerant, but it’s a (seemingly) more direct pathway to human glyphosate consumption than say, eating sugar derived from sugar beets grown using glyphosate.

But we eat very little wheat as is. Most of the wheat is eaten in transformed products made with wheat flour. How much glyphosate realistically end up in those products. It can't be a very large amount considering how refined/processed the flours are.

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.

Confused where you think I said fruits and vegetables. There is glyphosate in beef and other meat, just because an animal eats it does not wash it away.

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

By the logic you're using here, the epidemiological impact of glyphosate should be widely observed across the population (you're going so far as to look at traces of it left in the meat supply). And yet the correlations we have all tend to focus on agricultural workers dealing with it in large volumes directly. Can you square that circle?

Study funding (or lack of)

Ahhh, of course. Nobody in academia studying herbicide toxicity can get the funding to investigate whether one of the most famous and widely used modern herbicides has human health impacts. After all, there must only be a couple people in the world working on this, and not a couple people in every R1 and R2 research institution in the world, all of whom would become famous if they published a dispositive connection on this.

Unfortunately science just isn't as glamorous as you portray it. Many researchers at many institutions have demonstrated the toxicity in question but it turns out that this does not make you rich and famous. It is quite difficult to become famous by conducting scientific research carefully and responsibly (much to my chagrin). It is the popularizers who receive notoriety, and those are a mixed bag. Few scientists care to enter that field.

"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...)

I quickly checked the first study linked and it's a meta analysis.

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.

I thought that from reading the first part of the first meta sample too, but in that same paragraph is mention of a second study that apparently did find relevant issues at low doses in vitro of human cells at environmentally relevant concentration levels.

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'm not against meta-analysis, but if those analyses rely on studies that have flawed methodologies, it is just an exercise in statistical hacking. With enough massaging, you will find something eventually.

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…

You have not assessed the facts critically. The argument in favor of glyphosate's safety is that, as the herbicidal action is the result of disrupting an amino acid synthesis pathway that in animals does not exist, it is therefore harmless to animals. This argument is already fallacious: all it does is establish the mechanism by which it is harmful to plants. These studies evidence that glyphosate is harmful to animals and investigate the mechanisms underlying the harm. The fact that these experimental conditions are not the same conditions under which glyphosate is consumed in the food chain does not make it bad science, because science is concerned with knowledge that generalizes (e.g. biological mechanisms and pathways) and these mechanisms cannot be gleaned by reproducing the conditions already in place.

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

To me it is you who is clearly confused. The vitamin parallel is very relevant; at the concentration used in the studies, vitamins would be toxic as well. The poison is the dose. Using dosages far above what could realistically be ingested makes the studies irrelevant. By the same logic I could prove that salt actually kills you.

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).

I always hear Oatmeal uses glyphosates heavily. Is that true?

Glyphosate is used prior to harvesting oats to desiccate the plants to make them more uniform for harvesting as they ripen at different times, desiccating the plants makes threshing the grain easier, as the greener plants will dry out from desiccation.

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

You don't buy fresh alfalfa or corn?