> The disavowal comes 25 years after publication and eight years after thousands of internal Monsanto documents were made public during US court proceedings (the "Monsanto Papers"), revealing that the actual authors of the article were not the listed scientists – Gary M. Williams (New York Medical College), Robert Kroes (Ritox, Utrecht University, Netherlands), and Ian C. Munro (Intertek Cantox, Canada) – but rather Monsanto employees.
It's been awhile since I've done any reading on glyphosate, which I mostly paid attention to because of a wave of bullshit stories about how Monsanto was suing people over seeds that blew onto their land (that basically never happened). Nothing in the intervening years, including this specific retraction, changes what I think about glyphosate, which is that it's probably safer than the herbicides that are used when glyphosate isn't.
I don't know why you think bringing me into this discussion is useful. If you were thinking that some regulatory agency made decisions based on the persuasiveness of my HN comments, probably no.
I'm generally comfortable being on the other side of whatever Mehmet Oz is talking about.
Has he retracted his claim that “raspberry ketones” are a miracle for burning fat in a jar?
Idiots look at people who never admit they were wrong and think those are the people to follow.
People with the slightest bit of intelligence look at the people (or process in this matter) who are constantly checking themselves and willing to admit they were wrong (or in this case misled by frauds) when they find the truth.
Meanwhile, the real issue here is not the science. The real issue here is the American GRAS system, because Europe didn’t allow glyphosates because their political system requires stuff going into your food to be proven safe, whereas the American system simply requires it to not be proven harmful.
Retracting a paper showing it's safety isn't the same as proving it is unsafe. I don't see anything here that does that.
The IARC says the 2A designation was "based on “limited” evidence of cancer in humans (from real-world exposures that actually
occurred) and “sufficient” evidence of cancer in experimental animals (from studies of “pure” glyphosatese"*
Science is a process, not a result. Retractions like this promote the integrity of scientific research and evidence-based medicine.
> When Dr. Oz in 2015 spoke out against glyphosate...
Oz also promoted MLM dietary supplements, antimalarial drugs as COVID treatments, gay conversion "therapy", colloidal silver, and vaccine skepticism. He has zero credibility and cannot be trusted.
The subject of the article is about how one of the widely cited papers on the subject was ghost written by Monsanto, the company that produces Glyphosate. That was the accepted science everyone was trusting which we now know is flat out academic fraud.
So how do we know the assessments from organizations like the WHO weren't also based on this same faulty and fraudulent 'science' that was, at the time, widely accepted in academia? We would have to logically assume that any scientific conclusions based on fraudulent scientific studies and false data can not be provably true.
On what basis should we blindly trust this fao.org study as conclusive? If Monsanto ghost-wrote one paper, how many other studies did it put its finger on the scale for?
I haven't kept up with research. Do you have any actual science showing that glyphosate is a carcinogen?
Retraction of a paper doesn't automatically mean the opposite is true. It doesn't make Dr. Oz's methods right.
Using the retraction of a paper to elevate a known pseudoscience pusher who constantly makes claims without scientific basis is intellectually dishonest. It's a common tactic among pseudoscience and alternative medicine peddlers who think that any loss for the other side is validation for their beliefs.
""""Their request “was actually the first time a complaint came to my desk directly,” Martin van den Berg, a co-editor-in-chief of the journal, told Retraction Watch. The article was published long before he took over, said van den Berg, a toxicologist at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, and “it was simply not brought to my attention” until Kaurov and Oreskes’ article. The retraction “could have been done as early as 2017, but it is clearly a case of two parallel information streams not connecting earlier,” he said.""""
I can feel the pull of glyphosate. I want to kill the weeds right around my house, but that's where my dog sleeps and rolls and eats the grass. Roundup is the popular weed killer and I've got a bottle in the garage. So I look up its effects on pets, and it says "manageable with precautions", particularly waiting for the fluid to dry before letting the dog on it.
I'm not very comfortable with that so looking around for other solutions I see a guy on Youtube telling me how to manage weeds with vinegar. I figure that must be safe, so I buy a bottle of the recommended concentration, but for the hell of it look up its safety for dogs before applying it. They say hell no, this is way too strong for pets and can cause burns, etc. I would need to dilute it quite a bit, making it a lot less effective.
So I ended up using glyphosate, but I'm looking for something better.
As I'm sure you're aware, glyphosate is usually only appropriate as a weed killer on your property if you're looking to kill all vegetation in/around where you spray it. For example if you wanted to "nuke" your lawn by killing all the grass and starting over with new grass. It's a non-selective herbicide in this context, it kills everything.
If you've got some dandelions or thistle, and it's not out of control, the nice safe way is to pull them up by hand or, if they're between pavement cracks, pour boiling water on them.
Broadleaf weeds growing in your lawn that aren't easily hand-pulled can be killed with a selective herbicide like 2,4-d. Tough underground vine-style weeds like creeping charlie or wild violet will need a selective called triclopyr. Crabgrass is best killed by a selective called quinclorac. Yellow nutsedge requires a selective called sulfrentrazone or another called halosulfuron.
Selectively kill the weed infestations as best you can, get rid of the bad ones before they go to seed, and focus on the health of your grass -- in most parts of your lawn, healthy grass will out-compete weeds.
Glyphosate is extremely effective as a targeted weed killer. It only impact what you spray it with. It does not teleport from one plant to another. It's also not strong enough to kill heathy mature plants with a small amount of overspray.
When I really want to nuke it so that nothing grows, like in a decorative stone area, I use water softener salt. I dissolve it in a bucket of water until no more will dissolve then pour it wherever I want the vegetation to stop growing.
Anything there will die, and nothing will grow again for a long time. Although, it does spring back to life eventually. Usually once a year is sufficient.
> As I'm sure you're aware, glyphosate is usually only appropriate as a weed killer on your property if you're looking to kill all vegetation in/around where you spray it.
> It's a non-selective herbicide in this context, it kills everything.
It is a non-selective herbicide, but it's not a systemic herbicide. It functions by interfering with photosynthesis, but since it is minimally absorbed via root systems, it must be applied directly to the foilage. You can spray it on the ground around a plant and that plant will happily ignore it. This is why the instructions are explicit about applying directly to the foilage during sunny days when the wind is light.
As a homeowner, I loved glyphosate. It was cheap, simple, effective, and could be applied in a selective manner. It's not the best choice for getting rid of broadleaf weeds in a lawn, but I used it all the time in my gardens to kill weeds and keep the bermudagrasses out.
Weeds on the lawn: just use a lawnmower each week, the grass will usually handle being cut on a weekly basis much better than any weed.
Weeds between tiles / slabs or on gravel: just pour boiling water over them. The weeds will become mushy and die within 1-2 days. Repeat every 6 weeks during summer.
Source: we bought a house with a garden full of goutweed [0], which I consider the final boss of any garden owner, and which we have in control now through regular mowing / hot water. Goutweed will just laugh at any herbicide you throw at it, and regrow from its underground rhizomes. I also doesn't seem to require sun, because I have seen plants grow to a height of 10cm completely underground. The joke in my family is that it could grow on foreign planets. As Wikipedia dryly puts it: "Once established, goutweed is difficult to eradicate."
You can also use just heat. Like a long propane torch or one of the newer electric infrared ones. It doesn't need a lot of heat, a short burn (like a bit less than a second) is perfectly sufficient to make them wilt within a few days.
Weeds are the flora equivalent of VC-hype-startups. All growth, no substance and no plan B. They pop-up everywhere, with seemingly infinite growth resources and hope you'll despair and do nothing.
Just going around plucking leaves from everything that looks like you won't like it for a few weeks twice a year works wonders.
Basically regulatory capture for your lawn. No need to help along your darlings (in the beginning), just make everyone else play with stupid rules. And once things start going down the drain, it's time for subsidies (fertilizer) and public contracts (pre-germination).
I don't understand. What we call "weeds" are plants that evolved to grow quickly and spread quickly. Many gave segmented stems/leaves to resist core damage from cuts and pulls.
I will hate the ground elder as long as I live (but did manage to eradicate it from our garden thru hard work, only to see it spring back up in our neighbor's yard, it's their problem (for) now).
Unless you have an old Roundup bottle, you don't have glyphosate in it.
From the Bayer website:
"The active ingredients found in our Roundup Lawn & Garden products in the U.S. are: fluazifop-p-butyl, triclopyr TEA salt, diquat dibromide and imazapic ammonium. These ingredients have been used safely and effectively in many different weed-control products from a variety of companies for decades."
"We have been very transparent about the new formulation of Roundup Lawn & Garden products and are no longer producing glyphosate-based Roundup products for the U.S. residential lawn and garden market. While Bayer no longer produces or sells glyphosate-based Roundup products – which are also EPA-approved – some quantities may remain on store shelves until remaining stocks are sold. "
This is cool, & new to me. Do you know when they made the change? "some quantities may remain on store shelves until remaining stocks are sold" implies it was recently to the post, but I'm not sure when that was.
I had a tree root growing through the driveway asphalt. My handyman told me to get Roundup Pro because it will actually kill the root, unlike the other herbicides. So I got a gigantic gallon tub of it. It was effective. Good to know that "the good stuff" is now found to be not problematic.
Or if you do want a manicured plot, just cut them with a lawnmower?
The bane of my young life was having the job of cutting the grass around the house - we lived in the country at the time and had about 1/2 an acre of lawn as well as fruit trees, plants, vegetables, etc.
We never considered using weedkiller - I just can't see the need. Isn't it just as easy to pull the weed out of the ground as it is to spray round-up on it and wait for it to die, before presumably anyway pulling the remains of it?
Ignoring the health implications completely, I can see some "value" of using round-up in a commercial environment where your dealing with 100s of acres or more but fail to see what benefit it provides in a domestic setting when the number of weeds is small enough that it would just takes minutes to remove them physically and toss them into a compost heap.
In my area, some weeds will absolutely take over and choke out everything else while also spreading throughout the neighborhood to the delight of all.
But roundup isnt much of an option when the weeds are next to the nice stuff. My compromise is to pull the weeds when I'm motivated to and call it a day.
I agree about with your claim, but the answer to your question is that “weeds” is a set of species that contains both invasive, ecologically harmful species, and crucial native annual and perennial forbs+grasses.
From the universalizability principle, if everyone merely let “weeds” propagate, because of the ecology of invasives that are in that set, we would be MUCH worse off for the next few millennia than we are now. Until the ecosystems healed and the “invasives” become “keystone species”. Not sure how long that would take but we won’t see it :)
Herbicides are useful, they certainly help prevent invasive weed species from taking over native plants and grasses. I'm Kentucky I'm always fighting Johnson grass, thistle and Japanese knotweed in my bluegrass
Fire hazard and native wildlife, mostly. Over here, anything called a weed is invasive. Native birds and insects like their native species, and invasive vegetation brings in invasive species.
We don't mow one part of our lawn and have sowed it with wildflowers) which some people might call weeds) to attract insects. Some wildflowers prefer poor soil, so my wife scythes it at the end of the season and removes all the cuttings. I'm hoping we might get some native orchids eventually.
If it's dandelions, wait a few seasons (now that you've used Roundup) and then eat them! The leaves taste like arugula (the younger the better). The heads, when they bloom, can be dried, ground, and baked into cookie recipes. If you let the heads close, pick them before they start transforming into seeds and either pop them into your mouth raw while you're doing yard work or save them, bread them, and fry them up for a nutty flavor. The roots apparently make a good caffeine-free coffee replacement but who the hell wants to replace coffee?
you had to choose between vinegar and glyphosate, I'd use the vinegar. your dogs aren't going to roll around in a too-strong concentration of vinegar, it has a smell and if it were actually going to cause burns (what kind of vinegar is this, something from a chemical supply house? ) animals would be immediately repelled by it (plus it evaporates quickly anyway). whereas with glyphosate, none of that applies, it's a fully synthetic chemical that stays in the atmosphere for days, would not send any cues to animals, and its effects on animals may be long term, concealed for years, and fatal.
but as someone else said above, if this is a certain area that your dog wants to be, you can always pull weeds for that area by hand, just make sure you get the entire root.
Thanks for the advice. I bought 30% vinegar on Amazon. The instructions are to add in a little dish soap. Do you think that will safely repel the dog when dry?
Depending on weather and the site, a weed burner can be very effective for what people used to use glyphosate for.
For large areas, tarping can work pretty well in the summer. I accidentally cut a perfectly rectangular hole in my lawn by leaving a tarp on the ground as I was moving soil into containers. Enough sunlight was absorbed through the translucent plastic that it quickly baked the area underneath to death.
"So I ended up using glyphosate, but I'm looking for something better."
Not for everyone and not for every situation, but ...
If you get a propane torch - the full sized ones that attach to a 5gal. propane tank - you can very quickly point-and-shoot a large area with similar effort expended to walking around spraying a liquid.
We have a 2500sf veranda made of decomposed granite and it takes about four man-hours to fully clear it of all creepers and flat broadleafs and all the other things that are impossible to pull by hand ... and since it kills them you're clear for the season ...
absolutely insane that you held glyphosate and vinegar in two hands and decided to opt for glyphosate. vinegar will not hurt your dogs. use vinegar, or fire, or drench the weeds in water and pull them out by hand.
If it's low-concentration or diluted vinegar, then yes, but more for maintenance than to kill established weeds.
But industrial-strength vinegar is corrosive and harmful on skin, eye, and lung contact. If OP looked at the bottle and saw skin irritant or corrosion warnings required to be present on it (in the US, at 8% or higher acetic acid concentrations; in the EU, I think it's skin irritant 10-25%, corrosion 25%+), then it's probably that.
Garden stores often sell 20%-45% concentration vinegars, and YouTube/TikTok influencers often promote industrial-strength vinegar at 75% concentrations, at which point it'll damage turf on contact. And any repeat or large pour of high-concentration vinegar can reduce the soil pH deeper than expected, which can be harmful to nearby trees or other root-system plants.
Pulling weeds by hand works for a lot of weeds and is the most environmentally friendly solution where possible. It's what I've done, for the most part.
I will say for some weed species that can be ineffective or counterproductive, unfortunately, and for those a chemical (or other) solution may be in order.
Weeds can also be a sign of a potential problem, such as poor drainage, a leak, etc.
Nutsedge is an example of that. As I recall, pulling it out results in it sending more shoots up if you don't get the nut (which can be feet underground).
At that point, you have to continuously pull weeds on a daily (or multiple times daily) basis in order for it to use up more energy growing than it generates.
It likes water, so if it's there, it might be because there's standing water from rain.
I dug up a raised flower bed to get rid of it once. Nuts were absolutely everywhere because of poor drainage. I had to go down 2 feet I think to get them all, I replaced the bottom layers of impermeable clay soil with something that drained, along with a drain pipe or two.
Now the sedge is gone, the risk of foundation damage from being too wet is gone, and no chemicals were required.
Corporations will keep misbehaving until the consequences are suitably sized to provide an incentive not to.
One of the reason I’ve been glad to see EU hand out chunkier fines. Or at least attempt it…but there is remarkable enthusiasm for defending billion dollar corporation‘s misbehaviour because that would be over regulation
Yep. There was a company in my country that got a hefty bill after they contaminated a river for a few decades. They simply decided to go bankrupt and leave the country.
Apparently corporations can spin up subsidiaries that are legally siloed.
It's bizarre that the right wing wants to execute people convicted of a single murder, but tobacco and opioid execs, responsible for millions of deaths, don't receive jail time or even fines.
When the alternative is regular and predictable violence. The corporate elite who don't cause issues will vouch for a stronger rule of law wrt their actions, out of fear of becoming an undeserving victim of the zeitgeist. It's better to get dragged into court and be able to prove that you didn't do anything wrong (or even to actually face that prison term), than to get dragged into the street and not see the next sunrise.
I do think that Thompson and Kirk are finally opening some eyes to the possibilities, on both sides.
Right. This is not an area of fines. This is a criminal conspiracy with intent to kill on a wide scale. Absolutely deserving of prison for everyone involved.
Considering the cogs at corporations are going above and beyond to cover for their wrongdoings despite our perceived lack of consequences is concerning, it would seem their efforts to hide their actions would only balloon.
The longest thread on this topic is currently about household use of glyphosate as weed killer. As many have pointed out that's unnecessary. There are plenty of ways of killing weeds without glyphosate.
It's also not a huge problem in the way that industrial use of chemicals, like lead in gasoline, are a mass-poisoning event. Glyphosate is used to desiccate wheat to make it easier to harvest. That's where the big problems could come from.
I've never heardof a farmer spraying soybeans for that reason, and I know a fair number of soybean famers. The plants naturally die at the end of the year, and farmers then wait a few weeks for them to dry
Veritasium has a couple months old video that talks about this issue, and other various issues around agriculture area (Monsanto "seed mafia") in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxVXvFOPIyQ
It's not clear if the data is fake. Retraction Watch said it was retracted because:
> authors didn’t fully disclose their ties to Monsanto
and
> He also called out the authors’ reliance on unpublished studies from Monsanto for their conclusions that glyphosate exposure did not cause cancer, though other studies existed.
A mechanism for harm could be that glyphosate disrupts the gut lining barrier and flora, which can cause or contribute to leaky gut, a loose term for digestive waste and foreign bodies entering the bloodstream.
Those bodies can cause chronic inflammation and the strange autoimmune disorders we see rising over time. Note that some brands like Cheerios (which don't sell an organic equivalent) can contain 700-800 ppb of glyphosate, well over the 160 ppb limit recommend for children by the Environmental Working Group (EWG).
US wheat and other crops seem to have become harder to digest for some people due to genetic tampering. They contains substances borrowed from other species to reduce pest damage, which the body has little or no experience with, which may trigger various reactions (this has not been studied enough to be proven yet).
All of these effects from gut toxicity could lead to ailments like obesity, malnourishment, cardiovascular disease, maybe even cancer. This is why I worry that GLP-1 agonists may be masking symptoms, rather than healing the underlying causes of metabolic syndrome that have been increasing over time.
Many people have chosen to buy organic non-GMO wheat from other countries for this reason. I believe this is partially why the Trump administration imposed a 107% tariff on Italian wheat for example, to protect US agribusiness.
Before you jump on me for this being a conspiracy theory, note that I got these answers from AI and so will you.
My personal, anecdotal experience with this was living with leaky gut symptoms for 5 years after a severe burnout in 2019 from (work) stress, which may have been triggered by food poisoning. I also had extremely high cortisol which disrupted everything else. So I got to the point where my meals were reduced to stuff like green bananas, trying everything I could to heal my gut but failing, until I finally snapped out of my denial and sought medical attention.
For anyone reading this: if holistic approaches don't fix it within say 6 weeks to 6 months, they aren't going to, and you may need medication for a time to get your body out of dysbiosis. But you can definitely recover and return to a normal life like I did, by the grace of God the universe and everything.
Scientific fraud here feels like a reaction to people not understanding the bargain we have to make given the needs of the world's population. It should be punished, but I can't help but feel there's a point that doesn't get discussed.
The thing that sucks about this is, past a certain point, herbicide/pesticide safety doesn't matter.
We use this stuff, at least industrially, to grow food. Humans need food to live. More food, generally speaking, means healthier humans, Western processed food trends notwithstanding. There's the consumer market that uses glyphosate to make yards pretty in North America, but that's not the real reason we invent herbicides, and yards themselves are problematic, so we'll ignore that for now.
It's not an accident that global starvation deaths have decreased since the 1960s[0]. We started applying chemistry and automation to agriculture. Food security and yields went up. Some of these chemicals we use are, over the long term with chronic low-level exposure, hazardous to human health.
However, they're still less immediately hazardous to the general public than malnutrition and starvation, so the question becomes this: Do you want millions to die of malnutrition now, or do you want an unknown number of people to die of various health issues (particularly cancer, though there are others) caused by chemical exposure at an unknown point in the future, and gamble that medicine will, some day, be able to treat or cure the health issues?
“It is a myth,” said Hilal Elver, the UN’s special rapporteur on the right to food. “Using more pesticides is nothing to do with getting rid of hunger. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), we are able to feed 9 billion people today. Production is definitely increasing, but the problem is poverty, inequality and distribution.” [0]
It also exposes how far the pesticide industry has gone to suppress information about negative impacts on the environment and public health while spreading the totally false myth that rampant growth in pesticide use is needed to feed the world’s population.”
The problem now is poverty, inequality, and distribution.
That wasn't the problem in 1950. The problem then was "this pest/plant/fungus made my crop inedible" across entire regions and that kept there from being enough food.
If there wasn't a good reason to use these chemicals, we wouldn't use them. Farming is a notoriously risky way to earn a living, and if farmers could cut thousands of dollars of chemicals and gear out of their expenses, they almost certainly would, especially if that meant sending those hacks at Bayer less money for seeds that the farmers are restricted from doing certain things with.
> The scientists are suspected of having signed a text actually prepared by Monsanto.
I think that this kind of thing has been happening for decades. I'm hoping that these types of things start getting discovered, now that advocacy orgs can do things like run an LLM on a huge pile of old records, reports, and news articles.
Can even do things like stylometric analysis, and make good predictions about the authorship of any particular line or paragraph or paper. Semantic search and RAG aren't the only thing you can do with a high quality vector database system.
Many such cases. Aspartame, BPA, tobacco, Paxil (paroxetine), neonics (pesticide) all have documented trails of how researchers and policy makers were working for the industry and often hiding the fact
In an interview earlier this week [1], with one of the new Editors-in-Chief states that before retracting he tried contacting Gary Williams and send him 3 emails to which Gary never replied.
[2] Ik heb Gary Williams, de enige van de drie auteurs die nog leeft, drie e-mails gestuurd. Daar heeft hij nooit op gereageerd. Op een gegeven moment houdt het op, hè?
I can understand the use in agriculture, but I've never understood why anyone would use the stuff on their own lawn. Who cares if there are some weeds growing, when you can cut them down with lawnmower anyway?
Heck, my relatives in the countryside don't even have lawn, they just let the dandelions and other natural plants grow, and only use lawnmower in areas where they need to walk. Much better for the environment, and even looks pretty nice. Of course areas where they grow food or fancier flowers require some digging to keep weeds away.
Dandelions are calcium pumps (among other benefits). If you have dandelion, the topsoil has problems. If it's too large an area for someone to treat, there's no point in trying to kill them. They will always come back.
Mechanistic evidence shows low doses cause genotoxicity and oxidative stress in human lymphocytes and other cells.
A novel mechanism proposal is that glyphosate may chelate and accumulate in the bone, slowly releasing into the bloodstream, exposing bone marrow and potentially triggering hematologic malignancies.
My theory is that if you torture a chemical with enough diverse studies, you can find some where it confesses to causing cancer, even if it actually doesn't.
Human gut bacteria have the Shikimate pathways so it can kill them.
Basicaly glyphosate could act like a gut bacteria antibiotic.
>> 54% of the human core gut bacterial species are potentially sensitive to glyphosate, which targets an enzyme in the shikimate pathway, suggesting that roughly half of gut bacteria possess this pathway
Peer-reviewed science is the best scale of measurement we have. When that standard is subverted with intent to deceive, there should be severe repercussions for the beneficiaries.
There have also been numerous, extremely confident and impassioned, defenses of Monsanto and glyphosate here on HN over the years. These might deserve some reexamination.
Imo, the best defense of glyphosate is that if occupational cohorts can't even be shown to have a strong, reproducible jump in effects like cancer at 100s of times the exposure than genpop, then we shouldn't go Kony 2012 on dietary exposure.
HN is plagued by bots and shills. Arguably is one of the main selling points of the site -- it's a news aggregator run by Angel Investors
Why would you expect anti-corporate narratives? If I'm F500 and am trying to sway opinion here is one of the places I'd direct my marketing drones to hit hard, as the tech-bro demographic would then parrot it everywhere else
One of the cornerstone studies claiming glyphosate was safe is now suspected to have been written entirely ghost-written by Monsanto.
A recent analysis (2025) shows that this paper has been cited more than 99.9% of all glyphosate-related research — i.e. it disproportionately shaped scientific and public perceptions of glyphosate’s safety for decades.
I watched a video on the Vertasium channel, and I got the impression that this story is completely different from the story of PFAS. The actual links to diseases are very weak; it wasn't even labeled as carcinogenic, but rather listed as possibly carcinogenic. I have a theory that this scandal was caused by the company itself because its patent was expiring, and if not for the scandal, competitors would have been able to use this extremely effective herbicide.
This kind of shit happened before, is happening right now and is going to happen again. Something needs to be done.
IMO the best way to stop companies from messing with science and law is to hold them accountable for the actual damage, ideally both company leadership (CEO goes to prison) and shareholders (potentially lose everything) when it comes to light that companies prevented regulation or research into negative externalities that they caused.
We had the exact situation with leaded gas (paid shills, lawfare and discrediting campaigns against critical scientists), the exact same thing is happening right now with the fossil fuel industry and if we don't change anything it is invariably gonna happen again.
Science and law (in snail motion) are clearly broken. The paper “Association between Cancer and Environmental Exposure to Glyphosate” [1] shows population groups with significantly higher cancer incidence linked to glyphosate exposure. When findings like these struggle to gain broad acknowledgment, it becomes evident how powerful companies can still "hide the sun with their hands"
[1] Association between Cancer and Environmental Exposure to Glyphosate
Research from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and related studies shows glyphosate negatively impacts bees by disrupting their gut microbiota, weakening immune responses, impairing learning/memory, affecting foraging behavior, and increasing mortality, with effects seen from both pure chemical and commercial formulations at environmentally relevant levels, impacting both adult bees and larval development.
> The disavowal comes 25 years after publication and eight years after thousands of internal Monsanto documents were made public during US court proceedings (the "Monsanto Papers"), revealing that the actual authors of the article were not the listed scientists – Gary M. Williams (New York Medical College), Robert Kroes (Ritox, Utrecht University, Netherlands), and Ian C. Munro (Intertek Cantox, Canada) – but rather Monsanto employees.
Why wasn’t the paper retracted 8 years ago?
It takes time for conspiracy theory to become conspiracy fact.
[flagged]
It's been awhile since I've done any reading on glyphosate, which I mostly paid attention to because of a wave of bullshit stories about how Monsanto was suing people over seeds that blew onto their land (that basically never happened). Nothing in the intervening years, including this specific retraction, changes what I think about glyphosate, which is that it's probably safer than the herbicides that are used when glyphosate isn't.
I don't know why you think bringing me into this discussion is useful. If you were thinking that some regulatory agency made decisions based on the persuasiveness of my HN comments, probably no.
I'm generally comfortable being on the other side of whatever Mehmet Oz is talking about.
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How many retractions has Dr Oz published?
Has he retracted his claim that “raspberry ketones” are a miracle for burning fat in a jar?
Idiots look at people who never admit they were wrong and think those are the people to follow.
People with the slightest bit of intelligence look at the people (or process in this matter) who are constantly checking themselves and willing to admit they were wrong (or in this case misled by frauds) when they find the truth.
Meanwhile, the real issue here is not the science. The real issue here is the American GRAS system, because Europe didn’t allow glyphosates because their political system requires stuff going into your food to be proven safe, whereas the American system simply requires it to not be proven harmful.
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Retracting a paper showing it's safety isn't the same as proving it is unsafe. I don't see anything here that does that.
The IARC says the 2A designation was "based on “limited” evidence of cancer in humans (from real-world exposures that actually occurred) and “sufficient” evidence of cancer in experimental animals (from studies of “pure” glyphosatese"*
* https://www.iarc.who.int/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/QA_Glyph...
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> The evidence seems to suggest that glyphosate is basically inert in humans
It actually might be the case and it still can be damaging to people by affecting the gut microbiome:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...
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> The only large cohort study of high quality found no evidence of an association at any exposure level
Was that the retracted study or a different one?
CGMthrowaway writes:
> Trust the science.
Science is a process, not a result. Retractions like this promote the integrity of scientific research and evidence-based medicine.
> When Dr. Oz in 2015 spoke out against glyphosate...
Oz also promoted MLM dietary supplements, antimalarial drugs as COVID treatments, gay conversion "therapy", colloidal silver, and vaccine skepticism. He has zero credibility and cannot be trusted.
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Big Dr Oz fan eh? Got any quotes from Oprah or other HNers to balance the epistemic master class?
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The subject of the article is about how one of the widely cited papers on the subject was ghost written by Monsanto, the company that produces Glyphosate. That was the accepted science everyone was trusting which we now know is flat out academic fraud.
So how do we know the assessments from organizations like the WHO weren't also based on this same faulty and fraudulent 'science' that was, at the time, widely accepted in academia? We would have to logically assume that any scientific conclusions based on fraudulent scientific studies and false data can not be provably true.
Your assertion relies on circular logic.
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On what basis should we blindly trust this fao.org study as conclusive? If Monsanto ghost-wrote one paper, how many other studies did it put its finger on the scale for?
> Trust the science.
I haven't kept up with research. Do you have any actual science showing that glyphosate is a carcinogen?
Retraction of a paper doesn't automatically mean the opposite is true. It doesn't make Dr. Oz's methods right.
Using the retraction of a paper to elevate a known pseudoscience pusher who constantly makes claims without scientific basis is intellectually dishonest. It's a common tactic among pseudoscience and alternative medicine peddlers who think that any loss for the other side is validation for their beliefs.
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It's hard to admit we're wrong
https://retractionwatch.com/2025/12/04/glyphosate-safety-art...
""""Their request “was actually the first time a complaint came to my desk directly,” Martin van den Berg, a co-editor-in-chief of the journal, told Retraction Watch. The article was published long before he took over, said van den Berg, a toxicologist at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, and “it was simply not brought to my attention” until Kaurov and Oreskes’ article. The retraction “could have been done as early as 2017, but it is clearly a case of two parallel information streams not connecting earlier,” he said.""""
I can feel the pull of glyphosate. I want to kill the weeds right around my house, but that's where my dog sleeps and rolls and eats the grass. Roundup is the popular weed killer and I've got a bottle in the garage. So I look up its effects on pets, and it says "manageable with precautions", particularly waiting for the fluid to dry before letting the dog on it.
I'm not very comfortable with that so looking around for other solutions I see a guy on Youtube telling me how to manage weeds with vinegar. I figure that must be safe, so I buy a bottle of the recommended concentration, but for the hell of it look up its safety for dogs before applying it. They say hell no, this is way too strong for pets and can cause burns, etc. I would need to dilute it quite a bit, making it a lot less effective.
So I ended up using glyphosate, but I'm looking for something better.
As I'm sure you're aware, glyphosate is usually only appropriate as a weed killer on your property if you're looking to kill all vegetation in/around where you spray it. For example if you wanted to "nuke" your lawn by killing all the grass and starting over with new grass. It's a non-selective herbicide in this context, it kills everything.
If you've got some dandelions or thistle, and it's not out of control, the nice safe way is to pull them up by hand or, if they're between pavement cracks, pour boiling water on them.
Broadleaf weeds growing in your lawn that aren't easily hand-pulled can be killed with a selective herbicide like 2,4-d. Tough underground vine-style weeds like creeping charlie or wild violet will need a selective called triclopyr. Crabgrass is best killed by a selective called quinclorac. Yellow nutsedge requires a selective called sulfrentrazone or another called halosulfuron.
Selectively kill the weed infestations as best you can, get rid of the bad ones before they go to seed, and focus on the health of your grass -- in most parts of your lawn, healthy grass will out-compete weeds.
Glyphosate is extremely effective as a targeted weed killer. It only impact what you spray it with. It does not teleport from one plant to another. It's also not strong enough to kill heathy mature plants with a small amount of overspray.
Don't spray herbicides everywhere (unless you're certain that's what you want or need).
Instead, just spray each weed a little bit, right above where the leaves connect to the stem.
I get a little paintbrush and paint the leaves of each dandelion with round-up - that ends up killing them but largely leaving other plants alone.
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When I really want to nuke it so that nothing grows, like in a decorative stone area, I use water softener salt. I dissolve it in a bucket of water until no more will dissolve then pour it wherever I want the vegetation to stop growing.
Anything there will die, and nothing will grow again for a long time. Although, it does spring back to life eventually. Usually once a year is sufficient.
> As I'm sure you're aware, glyphosate is usually only appropriate as a weed killer on your property if you're looking to kill all vegetation in/around where you spray it.
> It's a non-selective herbicide in this context, it kills everything.
It is a non-selective herbicide, but it's not a systemic herbicide. It functions by interfering with photosynthesis, but since it is minimally absorbed via root systems, it must be applied directly to the foilage. You can spray it on the ground around a plant and that plant will happily ignore it. This is why the instructions are explicit about applying directly to the foilage during sunny days when the wind is light.
As a homeowner, I loved glyphosate. It was cheap, simple, effective, and could be applied in a selective manner. It's not the best choice for getting rid of broadleaf weeds in a lawn, but I used it all the time in my gardens to kill weeds and keep the bermudagrasses out.
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Can anyone confirm that "pour boiling water on them" is as good as deadly chemicals ? :)
Weeds on the lawn: just use a lawnmower each week, the grass will usually handle being cut on a weekly basis much better than any weed.
Weeds between tiles / slabs or on gravel: just pour boiling water over them. The weeds will become mushy and die within 1-2 days. Repeat every 6 weeks during summer.
Source: we bought a house with a garden full of goutweed [0], which I consider the final boss of any garden owner, and which we have in control now through regular mowing / hot water. Goutweed will just laugh at any herbicide you throw at it, and regrow from its underground rhizomes. I also doesn't seem to require sun, because I have seen plants grow to a height of 10cm completely underground. The joke in my family is that it could grow on foreign planets. As Wikipedia dryly puts it: "Once established, goutweed is difficult to eradicate."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aegopodium_podagraria
You can also use just heat. Like a long propane torch or one of the newer electric infrared ones. It doesn't need a lot of heat, a short burn (like a bit less than a second) is perfectly sufficient to make them wilt within a few days.
Weeds are the flora equivalent of VC-hype-startups. All growth, no substance and no plan B. They pop-up everywhere, with seemingly infinite growth resources and hope you'll despair and do nothing.
Just going around plucking leaves from everything that looks like you won't like it for a few weeks twice a year works wonders.
Basically regulatory capture for your lawn. No need to help along your darlings (in the beginning), just make everyone else play with stupid rules. And once things start going down the drain, it's time for subsidies (fertilizer) and public contracts (pre-germination).
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This is just a recipe to spread weeds everywhere. If you mow them, most of the time you’ll just break them open and spread their seeds
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Why don't you eat it? Harvested young it tastes a little like carrot and parsley. Gout weed in salad is very nice. You can also use it as a healing herb for UTI etc. https://www.ndr.de/ratgeber/gesundheit/Mit-Giersch-kochen-od...
I don't understand. What we call "weeds" are plants that evolved to grow quickly and spread quickly. Many gave segmented stems/leaves to resist core damage from cuts and pulls.
I will hate the ground elder as long as I live (but did manage to eradicate it from our garden thru hard work, only to see it spring back up in our neighbor's yard, it's their problem (for) now).
Unless you have an old Roundup bottle, you don't have glyphosate in it. From the Bayer website:
"The active ingredients found in our Roundup Lawn & Garden products in the U.S. are: fluazifop-p-butyl, triclopyr TEA salt, diquat dibromide and imazapic ammonium. These ingredients have been used safely and effectively in many different weed-control products from a variety of companies for decades."
"We have been very transparent about the new formulation of Roundup Lawn & Garden products and are no longer producing glyphosate-based Roundup products for the U.S. residential lawn and garden market. While Bayer no longer produces or sells glyphosate-based Roundup products – which are also EPA-approved – some quantities may remain on store shelves until remaining stocks are sold. "
This is cool, & new to me. Do you know when they made the change? "some quantities may remain on store shelves until remaining stocks are sold" implies it was recently to the post, but I'm not sure when that was.
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I wonder if that includes Roundup Pro, because they still have it as being glyphosate on their website:
https://www.rounduppro.com/products/roundup-promax-herbicide...
I had a tree root growing through the driveway asphalt. My handyman told me to get Roundup Pro because it will actually kill the root, unlike the other herbicides. So I got a gigantic gallon tub of it. It was effective. Good to know that "the good stuff" is now found to be not problematic.
In Canada while the majority is vinegar now, I still see glyphosate roundup products.
How about not killing the weeds? One doesn't need to live a perfectly manicured pesticide-ridden hellscape.
Or if you do want a manicured plot, just cut them with a lawnmower?
The bane of my young life was having the job of cutting the grass around the house - we lived in the country at the time and had about 1/2 an acre of lawn as well as fruit trees, plants, vegetables, etc.
We never considered using weedkiller - I just can't see the need. Isn't it just as easy to pull the weed out of the ground as it is to spray round-up on it and wait for it to die, before presumably anyway pulling the remains of it?
Ignoring the health implications completely, I can see some "value" of using round-up in a commercial environment where your dealing with 100s of acres or more but fail to see what benefit it provides in a domestic setting when the number of weeds is small enough that it would just takes minutes to remove them physically and toss them into a compost heap.
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In my area, some weeds will absolutely take over and choke out everything else while also spreading throughout the neighborhood to the delight of all.
But roundup isnt much of an option when the weeds are next to the nice stuff. My compromise is to pull the weeds when I'm motivated to and call it a day.
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I live in an extremely high wildfire risk area. I also have an extreme rodent problem. Keeping the vegetation low around structures is indicated.
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I agree about with your claim, but the answer to your question is that “weeds” is a set of species that contains both invasive, ecologically harmful species, and crucial native annual and perennial forbs+grasses.
From the universalizability principle, if everyone merely let “weeds” propagate, because of the ecology of invasives that are in that set, we would be MUCH worse off for the next few millennia than we are now. Until the ecosystems healed and the “invasives” become “keystone species”. Not sure how long that would take but we won’t see it :)
Some weeds are quite unpleasant, such as sticker burrs. I'd rather not have a dog and children covered in those.
Some weeds can be damaging to property, trees, sidewalks, etc. or are poisonous.
It's not always about being annoyed by dandelions in an otherwise overly fussed over sterile lawn environment.
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Pesticides aren't used to kill weeds.
Herbicides are useful, they certainly help prevent invasive weed species from taking over native plants and grasses. I'm Kentucky I'm always fighting Johnson grass, thistle and Japanese knotweed in my bluegrass
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How about letting him do what he wants with his own land and not insulting his ideal home?
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Fire hazard and native wildlife, mostly. Over here, anything called a weed is invasive. Native birds and insects like their native species, and invasive vegetation brings in invasive species.
We don't mow one part of our lawn and have sowed it with wildflowers) which some people might call weeds) to attract insects. Some wildflowers prefer poor soil, so my wife scythes it at the end of the season and removes all the cuttings. I'm hoping we might get some native orchids eventually.
Sorry you think my Japanese garden is a hellscape.
Why is something someone else enjoys a "pesticide-ridden hellscape?"
How would you like me to come and pompously shit all over something you enjoy?
If it's dandelions, wait a few seasons (now that you've used Roundup) and then eat them! The leaves taste like arugula (the younger the better). The heads, when they bloom, can be dried, ground, and baked into cookie recipes. If you let the heads close, pick them before they start transforming into seeds and either pop them into your mouth raw while you're doing yard work or save them, bread them, and fry them up for a nutty flavor. The roots apparently make a good caffeine-free coffee replacement but who the hell wants to replace coffee?
There is also dandelion wine. Doesn't need an expensive setup and is a nice summer drink.
you had to choose between vinegar and glyphosate, I'd use the vinegar. your dogs aren't going to roll around in a too-strong concentration of vinegar, it has a smell and if it were actually going to cause burns (what kind of vinegar is this, something from a chemical supply house? ) animals would be immediately repelled by it (plus it evaporates quickly anyway). whereas with glyphosate, none of that applies, it's a fully synthetic chemical that stays in the atmosphere for days, would not send any cues to animals, and its effects on animals may be long term, concealed for years, and fatal.
but as someone else said above, if this is a certain area that your dog wants to be, you can always pull weeds for that area by hand, just make sure you get the entire root.
Thanks for the advice. I bought 30% vinegar on Amazon. The instructions are to add in a little dish soap. Do you think that will safely repel the dog when dry?
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Depending on weather and the site, a weed burner can be very effective for what people used to use glyphosate for.
For large areas, tarping can work pretty well in the summer. I accidentally cut a perfectly rectangular hole in my lawn by leaving a tarp on the ground as I was moving soil into containers. Enough sunlight was absorbed through the translucent plastic that it quickly baked the area underneath to death.
"So I ended up using glyphosate, but I'm looking for something better."
Not for everyone and not for every situation, but ...
If you get a propane torch - the full sized ones that attach to a 5gal. propane tank - you can very quickly point-and-shoot a large area with similar effort expended to walking around spraying a liquid.
We have a 2500sf veranda made of decomposed granite and it takes about four man-hours to fully clear it of all creepers and flat broadleafs and all the other things that are impossible to pull by hand ... and since it kills them you're clear for the season ...
> I would need to dilute it quite a bit, making it a lot less effective.
Doesn't the vinegar act pretty quickly? Keep the dog inside that afternoon, then hose it down in the morning.
Glyphosate is perfectly safe at the levels we use it domestically. If there is a safety issue it's at commercial dosages.
A garden torch is unreasonably effective.
Terrible for the environment though what with all the co2.
Places with common sense regarding human health do weed control with a small torch.
Salt for cattle.
Lasts for a few months.
absolutely insane that you held glyphosate and vinegar in two hands and decided to opt for glyphosate. vinegar will not hurt your dogs. use vinegar, or fire, or drench the weeds in water and pull them out by hand.
If it's low-concentration or diluted vinegar, then yes, but more for maintenance than to kill established weeds.
But industrial-strength vinegar is corrosive and harmful on skin, eye, and lung contact. If OP looked at the bottle and saw skin irritant or corrosion warnings required to be present on it (in the US, at 8% or higher acetic acid concentrations; in the EU, I think it's skin irritant 10-25%, corrosion 25%+), then it's probably that.
Garden stores often sell 20%-45% concentration vinegars, and YouTube/TikTok influencers often promote industrial-strength vinegar at 75% concentrations, at which point it'll damage turf on contact. And any repeat or large pour of high-concentration vinegar can reduce the soil pH deeper than expected, which can be harmful to nearby trees or other root-system plants.
You sound neurotic. Anyway just pull the weeds out with a towel and you hands, or use boiling water to kill them
Pulling weeds by hand works for a lot of weeds and is the most environmentally friendly solution where possible. It's what I've done, for the most part.
I will say for some weed species that can be ineffective or counterproductive, unfortunately, and for those a chemical (or other) solution may be in order.
Weeds can also be a sign of a potential problem, such as poor drainage, a leak, etc.
Nutsedge is an example of that. As I recall, pulling it out results in it sending more shoots up if you don't get the nut (which can be feet underground).
At that point, you have to continuously pull weeds on a daily (or multiple times daily) basis in order for it to use up more energy growing than it generates.
It likes water, so if it's there, it might be because there's standing water from rain.
I dug up a raised flower bed to get rid of it once. Nuts were absolutely everywhere because of poor drainage. I had to go down 2 feet I think to get them all, I replaced the bottom layers of impermeable clay soil with something that drained, along with a drain pipe or two.
Now the sedge is gone, the risk of foundation damage from being too wet is gone, and no chemicals were required.
Corporations will keep misbehaving until the consequences are suitably sized to provide an incentive not to.
One of the reason I’ve been glad to see EU hand out chunkier fines. Or at least attempt it…but there is remarkable enthusiasm for defending billion dollar corporation‘s misbehaviour because that would be over regulation
When are we going to start imprisoning people, I wonder.
Yep. There was a company in my country that got a hefty bill after they contaminated a river for a few decades. They simply decided to go bankrupt and leave the country.
Apparently corporations can spin up subsidiaries that are legally siloed.
It's bizarre that the right wing wants to execute people convicted of a single murder, but tobacco and opioid execs, responsible for millions of deaths, don't receive jail time or even fines.
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When the alternative is regular and predictable violence. The corporate elite who don't cause issues will vouch for a stronger rule of law wrt their actions, out of fear of becoming an undeserving victim of the zeitgeist. It's better to get dragged into court and be able to prove that you didn't do anything wrong (or even to actually face that prison term), than to get dragged into the street and not see the next sunrise.
I do think that Thompson and Kirk are finally opening some eyes to the possibilities, on both sides.
When their employers stop giving freebies to politicians?
Pay the fine and Pay for pardon is the business du jour.
Right. This is not an area of fines. This is a criminal conspiracy with intent to kill on a wide scale. Absolutely deserving of prison for everyone involved.
In this economy? We have people murdering CEOs for free!
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Considering the cogs at corporations are going above and beyond to cover for their wrongdoings despite our perceived lack of consequences is concerning, it would seem their efforts to hide their actions would only balloon.
The longest thread on this topic is currently about household use of glyphosate as weed killer. As many have pointed out that's unnecessary. There are plenty of ways of killing weeds without glyphosate.
It's also not a huge problem in the way that industrial use of chemicals, like lead in gasoline, are a mass-poisoning event. Glyphosate is used to desiccate wheat to make it easier to harvest. That's where the big problems could come from.
> Glyphosate is used to desiccate wheat to make it easier to harvest.
Wheat, soy, lentils, ...
Oats too.
Not just wheat. Other crops. I was pretty shocked to see a field full of soybeans that were all dead. They were being dried before harvest.
Terrible scheme.
I've never heardof a farmer spraying soybeans for that reason, and I know a fair number of soybean famers. The plants naturally die at the end of the year, and farmers then wait a few weeks for them to dry
Veritasium has a couple months old video that talks about this issue, and other various issues around agriculture area (Monsanto "seed mafia") in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxVXvFOPIyQ
Faking research data that then leads to the death of citizens from your product should result in a corporate death sentence.
It's not clear if the data is fake. Retraction Watch said it was retracted because:
> authors didn’t fully disclose their ties to Monsanto
and
> He also called out the authors’ reliance on unpublished studies from Monsanto for their conclusions that glyphosate exposure did not cause cancer, though other studies existed.
The problem is always how well one can prove that any harm was done, or that theoretical harm would be done.
What is a corporate death sentence? And if true, the list would be LONG
Dissolution of a company by revoking the charter and liquidating all it's assets to anyone who will buy them.
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Ideally this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal
The list would grow short very quickly.
Wiping out shareholders. I bet shareholders would be a lot more cautious if that was an option.
and criminal penalty consequequences fornthe people who prepared and signed the paper in bad faith
A mechanism for harm could be that glyphosate disrupts the gut lining barrier and flora, which can cause or contribute to leaky gut, a loose term for digestive waste and foreign bodies entering the bloodstream.
Those bodies can cause chronic inflammation and the strange autoimmune disorders we see rising over time. Note that some brands like Cheerios (which don't sell an organic equivalent) can contain 700-800 ppb of glyphosate, well over the 160 ppb limit recommend for children by the Environmental Working Group (EWG).
US wheat and other crops seem to have become harder to digest for some people due to genetic tampering. They contains substances borrowed from other species to reduce pest damage, which the body has little or no experience with, which may trigger various reactions (this has not been studied enough to be proven yet).
All of these effects from gut toxicity could lead to ailments like obesity, malnourishment, cardiovascular disease, maybe even cancer. This is why I worry that GLP-1 agonists may be masking symptoms, rather than healing the underlying causes of metabolic syndrome that have been increasing over time.
Many people have chosen to buy organic non-GMO wheat from other countries for this reason. I believe this is partially why the Trump administration imposed a 107% tariff on Italian wheat for example, to protect US agribusiness.
Before you jump on me for this being a conspiracy theory, note that I got these answers from AI and so will you.
My personal, anecdotal experience with this was living with leaky gut symptoms for 5 years after a severe burnout in 2019 from (work) stress, which may have been triggered by food poisoning. I also had extremely high cortisol which disrupted everything else. So I got to the point where my meals were reduced to stuff like green bananas, trying everything I could to heal my gut but failing, until I finally snapped out of my denial and sought medical attention.
For anyone reading this: if holistic approaches don't fix it within say 6 weeks to 6 months, they aren't going to, and you may need medication for a time to get your body out of dysbiosis. But you can definitely recover and return to a normal life like I did, by the grace of God the universe and everything.
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Scientific fraud here feels like a reaction to people not understanding the bargain we have to make given the needs of the world's population. It should be punished, but I can't help but feel there's a point that doesn't get discussed.
The thing that sucks about this is, past a certain point, herbicide/pesticide safety doesn't matter.
We use this stuff, at least industrially, to grow food. Humans need food to live. More food, generally speaking, means healthier humans, Western processed food trends notwithstanding. There's the consumer market that uses glyphosate to make yards pretty in North America, but that's not the real reason we invent herbicides, and yards themselves are problematic, so we'll ignore that for now.
It's not an accident that global starvation deaths have decreased since the 1960s[0]. We started applying chemistry and automation to agriculture. Food security and yields went up. Some of these chemicals we use are, over the long term with chronic low-level exposure, hazardous to human health.
However, they're still less immediately hazardous to the general public than malnutrition and starvation, so the question becomes this: Do you want millions to die of malnutrition now, or do you want an unknown number of people to die of various health issues (particularly cancer, though there are others) caused by chemical exposure at an unknown point in the future, and gamble that medicine will, some day, be able to treat or cure the health issues?
[0]https://ourworldindata.org/famines
I have news for you:
“It is a myth,” said Hilal Elver, the UN’s special rapporteur on the right to food. “Using more pesticides is nothing to do with getting rid of hunger. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), we are able to feed 9 billion people today. Production is definitely increasing, but the problem is poverty, inequality and distribution.” [0]
It also exposes how far the pesticide industry has gone to suppress information about negative impacts on the environment and public health while spreading the totally false myth that rampant growth in pesticide use is needed to feed the world’s population.”
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/mar/07/un-exper...
[1] https://civileats.com/2017/03/13/new-un-report-pesticides-do...
The problem now is poverty, inequality, and distribution.
That wasn't the problem in 1950. The problem then was "this pest/plant/fungus made my crop inedible" across entire regions and that kept there from being enough food.
If there wasn't a good reason to use these chemicals, we wouldn't use them. Farming is a notoriously risky way to earn a living, and if farmers could cut thousands of dollars of chemicals and gear out of their expenses, they almost certainly would, especially if that meant sending those hacks at Bayer less money for seeds that the farmers are restricted from doing certain things with.
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> The scientists are suspected of having signed a text actually prepared by Monsanto.
I think that this kind of thing has been happening for decades. I'm hoping that these types of things start getting discovered, now that advocacy orgs can do things like run an LLM on a huge pile of old records, reports, and news articles.
Can even do things like stylometric analysis, and make good predictions about the authorship of any particular line or paragraph or paper. Semantic search and RAG aren't the only thing you can do with a high quality vector database system.
Many such cases. Aspartame, BPA, tobacco, Paxil (paroxetine), neonics (pesticide) all have documented trails of how researchers and policy makers were working for the industry and often hiding the fact
The sole surviving researcher attached to that paper is still actively publishing:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/author/24433485700/gary-m-will...
In an interview earlier this week [1], with one of the new Editors-in-Chief states that before retracting he tried contacting Gary Williams and send him 3 emails to which Gary never replied.
[1] https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2025/12/03/er-zijn-richtlijnen-ove... or https://archive.is/rjXrR
[2] Ik heb Gary Williams, de enige van de drie auteurs die nog leeft, drie e-mails gestuurd. Daar heeft hij nooit op gereageerd. Op een gegeven moment houdt het op, hè?
I can understand the use in agriculture, but I've never understood why anyone would use the stuff on their own lawn. Who cares if there are some weeds growing, when you can cut them down with lawnmower anyway?
Heck, my relatives in the countryside don't even have lawn, they just let the dandelions and other natural plants grow, and only use lawnmower in areas where they need to walk. Much better for the environment, and even looks pretty nice. Of course areas where they grow food or fancier flowers require some digging to keep weeds away.
Cutting dandelions with a lawnmower just sends the seeds everywhere making the problem worse.
Only if you wait for them to go to seed. If it's important to you, don't do that.
I let them grow. Dandelions are harmless.
Dandelions are calcium pumps (among other benefits). If you have dandelion, the topsoil has problems. If it's too large an area for someone to treat, there's no point in trying to kill them. They will always come back.
Some neighbors spray poison ivy --- I just cover it with stones/bricks when I see it.
So what's the current speculation on how it causes cancer?
Glyphosate acts on the Shikimate pathway that doesn't exist in humans.
Is it killing gut bacteria?
Mechanistic evidence shows low doses cause genotoxicity and oxidative stress in human lymphocytes and other cells.
A novel mechanism proposal is that glyphosate may chelate and accumulate in the bone, slowly releasing into the bloodstream, exposing bone marrow and potentially triggering hematologic malignancies.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S21522...
My theory is that if you torture a chemical with enough diverse studies, you can find some where it confesses to causing cancer, even if it actually doesn't.
If what you say is true, we would know almost nothing about pharmacology and modern medicine wouldn't exist.
There are basic scientific and statistical methods to avoid this.
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When it comes to mechanistic speculation, absolutely.
Human gut bacteria have the Shikimate pathways so it can kill them.
Basicaly glyphosate could act like a gut bacteria antibiotic.
>> 54% of the human core gut bacterial species are potentially sensitive to glyphosate, which targets an enzyme in the shikimate pathway, suggesting that roughly half of gut bacteria possess this pathway
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/11/201120095858.h...
Peer-reviewed science is the best scale of measurement we have. When that standard is subverted with intent to deceive, there should be severe repercussions for the beneficiaries.
There have also been numerous, extremely confident and impassioned, defenses of Monsanto and glyphosate here on HN over the years. These might deserve some reexamination.
Imo, the best defense of glyphosate is that if occupational cohorts can't even be shown to have a strong, reproducible jump in effects like cancer at 100s of times the exposure than genpop, then we shouldn't go Kony 2012 on dietary exposure.
OK, but that is not how you properly test pesticides for safety.
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HN is plagued by bots and shills. Arguably is one of the main selling points of the site -- it's a news aggregator run by Angel Investors
Why would you expect anti-corporate narratives? If I'm F500 and am trying to sway opinion here is one of the places I'd direct my marketing drones to hit hard, as the tech-bro demographic would then parrot it everywhere else
Tl; dr:
One of the cornerstone studies claiming glyphosate was safe is now suspected to have been written entirely ghost-written by Monsanto.
A recent analysis (2025) shows that this paper has been cited more than 99.9% of all glyphosate-related research — i.e. it disproportionately shaped scientific and public perceptions of glyphosate’s safety for decades.
[ https://undark.org/2025/08/15/opinion-ghostwritten-paper-gly... ]
I watched a video on the Vertasium channel, and I got the impression that this story is completely different from the story of PFAS. The actual links to diseases are very weak; it wasn't even labeled as carcinogenic, but rather listed as possibly carcinogenic. I have a theory that this scandal was caused by the company itself because its patent was expiring, and if not for the scandal, competitors would have been able to use this extremely effective herbicide.
This kind of shit happened before, is happening right now and is going to happen again. Something needs to be done.
IMO the best way to stop companies from messing with science and law is to hold them accountable for the actual damage, ideally both company leadership (CEO goes to prison) and shareholders (potentially lose everything) when it comes to light that companies prevented regulation or research into negative externalities that they caused.
We had the exact situation with leaded gas (paid shills, lawfare and discrediting campaigns against critical scientists), the exact same thing is happening right now with the fossil fuel industry and if we don't change anything it is invariably gonna happen again.
Maybe Patrick Moore will offer to drink some again?
https://youtu.be/QWM_PgnoAtA
I’m not actually familiar with current state of scientific research. Are there any quality studies that contradict the ghost-written report?
I understand the valid reasons for pulling the study, but that does nothing to specifically address its claims or evidence.
Science and law (in snail motion) are clearly broken. The paper “Association between Cancer and Environmental Exposure to Glyphosate” [1] shows population groups with significantly higher cancer incidence linked to glyphosate exposure. When findings like these struggle to gain broad acknowledgment, it becomes evident how powerful companies can still "hide the sun with their hands"
[1] Association between Cancer and Environmental Exposure to Glyphosate
https://archive.is/dRAMg
I have a feeling that it is this causing the collapse of our insect population.
If so, presumably because it kills the weeds that feed the bugs.
Research from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and related studies shows glyphosate negatively impacts bees by disrupting their gut microbiota, weakening immune responses, impairing learning/memory, affecting foraging behavior, and increasing mortality, with effects seen from both pure chemical and commercial formulations at environmentally relevant levels, impacting both adult bees and larval development.
So any misdirection has served its purpose.
The same thing is going to happen with that covid "vaccine" study that claims there were no excess deaths found. Wait and see.
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