Comment by baq

I'm definitely not going to go crate digging through the cites in this paper! I think for the level of discourse we keep here on HN, it's more than enough to note (1) glyphosate targets metabolic pathways animals don't have, but (2) bacteria do have those pathways, which could implicate the gut microbiome. Point taken!

In all these discussions, if I could ask for one more data point to be pulled into the context, it's what the other herbicides look like (my understanding: much worse). I think these discussions look different when it's "late 20th century SOTA agriculture writ large vs. modern ideal agriculture with no chemical supplementation" than when it's "Monsanto vs. the world".

A very annoying part of the backstory of the "Monsanto vs. the world" framing are people who care about glyphosate not because they have very fine-grained preferences about specific herbicide risks (glyphosate is probably the only herbicide many of these people know by name), but rather because of glyphosate's relevance to genetically modified crops. I'm automatically allergic to bank-shot appeals to the naturalist fallacy; GM crops are likely to save millions of lives globally.

to build on this further, glyphosate disproportionally targets bifidobacterium and lactobacillus (PMC10330715). It mimics what happens to the gut as people age (PMC4990546) and increasing bifidobacterium, in research, improves dementia symptoms. In the guts of people with allergies, ibs, asthma, and cystic fibrosis there are decreased amounts of certain strains of bifidobacterium.

In mice models, Alzheimer’s is transferrable via gut microbiota. (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-023-02216-7?fromPaywa...).

So to say it messes with the gut is no small thing.