Comment by CGMthrowaway
3 hours ago
Very US-centric POV. The herbicides that would be used in the US to replace glyphosate, that are potentially worse (paraquat/diquat, atrazine, and 2,4-D), are are already banned in the EU.
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
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.
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.
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?
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