We’ve Got to Do Something about Glyphosate
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According to the well-respected and peer-reviewed scientific journal called Toxicology, a study sponsored in part by the National Institutes of Health concluded that “glyphosate-based herbicides are toxic and endocrine disruptors in human cell lines.”
Let’s unpack this statement. Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Roundup, Monsanto’s herbicide. Despite Monsanto’s assurances of Roundup’s safety, this study conclusively shows its toxicity. In addition, the chemical is an endocrine disruptor. The endocrine system is the master hormonal system in humans and many animals. Hormones are the molecules that instruct the body’s other systems what to do, when to do it, how to act, and—most importantly—how to develop. To disrupt the endocrine system is to turn a smoothly running system with all communication lines open and functioning into a Tower of Babel.
How serious is this? I urge you to find a copy of a book entitled, “Our Stolen Future,” published by Plume Publishing (an imprint of Penguin), and written by Dr. Theo Colborn, senior scientist at the World Wildlife Fund and a world-recognized expert on endocrine-disrupting chemicals; Dianne Dumanoski, a journalist for the Boston Globe and recipient of the Knight Fellowship in Science Journalism at MIT, and John Peterson Myers, director of the W. Alton Jones Foundation, which supports efforts to protect the global environment. Al Gore wrote the introduction.
Of this book, The New York Review of Books wrote, “Its subject is so important and its story so powerful that it deserves to be read by the widest possible audience…The authors refuse to let the profound implications of their work propel them into intellectual sloppiness or theatrical overkill.” In other words, it’s a fine piece of fact-based journalism about the poisoning of our endocrine systems by agricultural and food processing chemicals.
So glyphosate is an endocrine disruptor. And Monsanto, of course, has created “Roundup Ready” crops that can withstand applications of glyphosate that kill other plants such as weeds. How much glyphosate is being used these days? Well, glyphosate is the word’s best selling herbicide, used on over 150 crops in over 90 countries. Today glyphosate can be found in products like Roundup, Touchdown, Rodeo, and others. Worldwide, over 60,000 TONS of the chemical are spread on crop fields.
But surely the Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t allow harmful amounts in our food, right? Wrong.
The EPA recently upped the allowable levels of glyphosate residue in many food crops. Last spring, when the media was focused on the Senate’s passing of the so-called “Monsanto Protection Act,” the EPA, at Monsanto’s bidding, quietly promoted the rule change that doubles allowable glyphosate levels in oilseed crops–sesame, flax, and soybean–from 20 parts per million to 40 ppm. It also raises the permitted glyphosate contamination level for sweet potatoes and carrots from 0.2 ppm to 3.0 ppm for sweet potatoes and 5.0 ppm for carrots–15 and 25 times the previous levels.
Glyphosate is not just another scary thing to be afraid of. It—like genetic modification biotechnology, another Monsanto brainchild—messes with the control panel of life, especially of life developing in the womb that must rely on the correct hormones at the correct levels to develop safely into a healthy human being.
It seems that Monsanto has our federal government in its pocket. The list of revolving door suits switching from Monsanto to the government and back again, with stops in between to haul in some big money by lobbying legislators is quite long. Michael Taylor, formerly Monsanto’s public relations flack, is now Deputy Commissioner for Foods at the Food and Drug Administration, charged with keeping our food supply wholesome and safe. He has worked tirelessly to gut the Delaney Amendment, a 1958 law that says no substance known to cause cancer can be put into the food supply. He has prompted both courts and regulatory commissions to agree with him that if a substance only causes a little cancer, it’s quite all right.
The real problem is Congress, bought and sold by Monsanto. In the coming elections for House and Senate, we should make sure to ask every candidate where he or she stands on the question of the safety of glyphosate and GMO crops. Unless that candidate is firmly against these life-destroying chemicals and lab processes, don’t vote for him. Or her, although it’s hard to see why any woman would want to protect a chemical that interferes with the normal development of babies in the womb.
Glyphosate is everywhere, but it still pays to fight this plague by eating organic. Organic food has been shown to have far less residue of this poison than conventional crops. That’s especially important for women of child-bearing years who either are pregnant or plan to become pregnant.
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