I find it disheartening that it takes studies of this nature to reshape regulations. Glyphosate (as Roundup) has been the bestselling herbicide on the market since 1980. Among bee-keepers, asserting that "roundup kills bees" is about as controversial as "rain makes things wet."
The US regulatory environment treats artificially prepared chemicals as innocent until proven guilty. A safer approach (recently adopted in Europe) would be to guarantee the safety of industrial, agricultural, and household chemicals before they are allowed to go to market.
On a potentially related note, sperm counts in the western world have been declining precipitously since 1990. I'd bet that glyphosate and/or other common poorly regulated chemicals have something to do with this.
> I find it disheartening that it takes studies of this nature to reshape regulations.
You … find it disheartening that regulations require sound evidence? That’s odd.
> Among bee-keepers, asserting that "roundup kills bees" is about as controversial as "rain makes things wet."
You may be confusing Roundup with neonicotinoids here. The latter are known to harm bee ecosystems by weakening the bee immune system. Glyphosate generally hasn’t, despite previous studies (which showed no effect on bees). That’s why the new study is actually surprising (if it holds up, and there are already some potential concerns).
> I'd bet that glyphosate and/or other common poorly regulated chemicals have something to do with [reduction in sperm counts].
There is no evidence for this, and no good reason to assume so (for one, there’s no known biochemical connection here, and the general population does not come into contact with glyphosate in noticeable amounts). A much more plausible reason is the presence of residues from hormonal contraceptives in drinking water. But even that is tenuous, and general changes in nutrition are a more plausible candidate.
In sum, nothing of what you’ve said is supported by evidence.
> There is no evidence for this, and no good reason to assume so
I'm gonna invite you to a game called the Pepsi challenge, wherein you're obliged to imbibe a glass full of unknown chemical X and survive 24 hours before you spray it on food that other people eat and/or insert it directly into the foodchain. Wanna play?
It's not scare tactics to be careful with food specifically and the ecosystem in general. You see, we now have the science to actually do experiments and test things for safety before industry belches out thousands or millions of tons of the stuff into the foodchain, whereas 100 years ago we did not. IMO it is actually irresponsible to not do so. What we lack is the political will, and default positions like yours are not helpful.
In my very honest opinion, 100% serious--I think it's entirely reasonable to require proof of safety before society grants you permission to inject your newly designed chemicals into the food chain.
A glass of pure caffeine would kill you. Probably any single compound naturally present in fruits and vegetables would kill you if you drank a concentrated, purified cup of it.
List of things in fruit that, if consumed pure, wouldn’t kill me (a cup):
1. Water
2. Fiber
3. Sugar (that would hurt though)
4. Protein
Yes, trace amounts of essential oils would kill me if purified and I drank a cup of it. But be precise!
Also, we’ve co-evolved with essential oils in plants. We haven’t co-evolved with synthetic chemicals. Therefore, synthetic analogies can be expected to behave in a similar but devastatingly different manner (nicotine, vs nicotine-like. Natural vs. synthetic insulin, etc)
This is a silly game and has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual process of approving ingredients for food safety. That process is far from perfect but — in the case of glyphosate — it worked very well.
> It's not scare tactics to be careful with food specifically and the ecosystem in general
Correct. But it’s a scare tactic to ignore the existing evidence to claim unfounded effects, or to mention “chemicals” to stir up panic.
The only thing I'd add is that there's absolutely a huge weight in the form of industry pressure sitting on the scales. E.g. efforts to limit antibiotic use in food animal production. And it's fair to say that swamps regulations that would otherwise be passed.
> I'm gonna invite you to a game called the Pepsi challenge, wherein you're obliged to imbibe a glass full of unknown chemical X and survive 24 hours before you spray it on food that other people eat and/or insert it directly into the foodchain. Wanna play?
We play that every day when we eat food and drink water. Literally everything we eat is made of chemicals. We simply know more about the man made ones so we can study and learn about any dangers.
Would you be concerned about drinking malic acid, quinic acid, shikimic acid, and fumaric acid? Did you know about any of those when you first drank apple juice?
When it comes to things that we put in our bodies and affects a large portion of foods in the store, I'd like to see stricter regulations and, if needed, more studies, so that 4-5 decades don't pass before we learn something is super dangerous for our bodies (like say processed vegetable oil, which was promoted by special interest groups without evidence [1] of being healthier).
I think the onus and liability should be on the companies "inventing" new food stuff to prove that they are safe to introduce on the market before actually doing that. I mention liability, because if the stuff is later found to actually be dangerous and it's found that the companies lied/were misleading with their own studies, then people should be going to jail (no, not just fines, regardless of how big they are - we know they aren't going to bankrupt the company anyway).
This is reasonable, and I entirely agree in general. Except glyphosate specifically has been studied for decades, and is known to be a lot less concerning than other herbicides and pesticides that we’re using abundantly (including on organic food).
Presuming chemicals are not safe seeems rational to me, especially sprayed on our food. Why not have monstanto spray a fucking bee? They ain’t gonna do it themselves.
Seems like the burden of proof would be to establish safety. If that’s not possible, why is it being used?
And where is this evidence you have that is is safe?
> Presuming chemicals are not safe seeems rational to me
I’m sorry but it’s fundamentally irrational. Everything is chemicals. Chemophobia is by definition irrational.
> especially sprayed on our food
~~~It’s not.~~~ Glyphosate is a herbicide: if you spray it on plants, those plants die. That is in fact its purpose. [EDIT: see correction in comment below.]
— Regarding your later edit:
> Seems like the burden of proof would be to establish safety.
That is indeed the case, why do you assume otherwise?
> And where is this evidence you have that is is safe?
There are — literally — thousands of studies [1] on that subject. Wikipedia contains a summary. All national and almost all international health and safety organisations class it as safe, with the exception of IARC, which classes it as “potentially carcinogenic” (context: compared to red meat, which it classifies as definitely ”carcinogenic”). The IARC has been roundly criticised for excluding contradictory evidence, and for using misleading language, by the scientific community [2].
> I’m sorry but it’s fundamentally irrational. Everything is chemicals. Chemophobia is by definition irrational.
You might disagree, but it's not irrational at all. To follow your argument, if everything is chemicals - is it rational to presume everything is safe? Of course not, there are plenty of dangerous things in the world. Of course the -phobia demarks a fear as irrational, but this isn't "chemophobia".
> ~~~It’s not.~~~ Glyphosate is a herbicide: if you spray it on plants, those plants die. That is in fact its purpose.
It's also worth noting that while it's a herbicide, of course it's only effective as a herbicide at a certain concentration. Consider that <agricultural conglomerate X> intends to spray the weeds right next to the lettuce, not the lettuce itself, so they can make $$$ from that still-alive lettuce at market. It's still going to be exposed to a small amount of herbicide, just not in a "lethal" dose. Is it absorbed into the lettuce/does it make it to the consumer? I don't know. If it did, would it be harmful at that dose? Probably not, but I don't know. Does it accumulate in the body over time, to an eventual harmful dose? Don't know. But those questions all demonstrate that it's not simply an irrational fear; there is a good number of questions to answer to go from "this could be unsafe" to "this is definitely safe".
I don't have any views on Glyphosate at all, I know next to nothing about it. Just objecting to your first two points.
> Is it absorbed into the lettuce/does it make it to the consumer? I don't know. If it did, would it be harmful at that dose? Probably not, but I don't know. Does it accumulate in the body over time, to an eventual harmful dose? Don't know. But those questions all demonstrate that it's not simply an irrational fear; there is a good number of questions to answer to go from "this could be unsafe" to "this is definitely safe".
These are all questions that have simple, well-tested, easily-Googelable answers. The fact that you don't personally know them is irrelevant, because scientists and government regulators do.
Actually, my point was that presumption of safety is irrational; you latched on to the wrong word. And even though glyphosate is a known weed killer it’s still used adjacent to food we do eat.
Anyway, my impression is that glyphosate is regularly detected in the water, the plants we eat, the animals we eat, in our own bodies.
Vinegar seems to work in my experience, a chemical I can drink.
Presumption of safety without qualification would be irrational, correct. But the same is true the other way round: there’s a balance to be struck (otherwise you couldn’t leave your house for risk of being run over by a car). And, again, glyphosate’s safety record is pretty phenomenal, especially compared to all the other stuff we treat our food with.
> Vinegar seems to work in my experience, a chemical I can drink.
No you can’t. Food grade vinegar does fuckall as a herbicide. The stuff you use as an actual herbicide is 20% acetic acid and I urge you strongly not to drink that. And it also has some rather unsavoury side-effects, and caution is therefore necessary.
“Everything is chemicals. Chemophobia is by definition irrational.”
I hate it when ppl project a domain definition to destroy a good argument that uses non domain specific language.
It is obvious to everyone that the word “chemical” refers to moieties that are synthetic, not typically present in nature or in extremely high concentrations.
So, the OP was quite reasonably saying that chemicals not naturally present at certain concentrations should be tested for safety when high concentrations are proposed to be used.
It like those pedantic ppl who say that tomatoes aren’t vegetables. Of course they are! They are also botanical fruit, so what?
Except that chemophobia isn’t irrational just because people use the wrong words. It’s irrational because there is no fundamental, meaningful definition of “synthetic” in this context. What’s synthetic? Is refined sugar, even if it’s chemically identical to unrefined sugar (minus impurities)? Is chemically identical lab-grown insulin?
Furthermore, even if we could draw a precise demarcation that would make sense, it would still be irrelevant: things can be beneficial and harmful regardless of whether they occur naturally or are synthetic. This is known as the naturalistic fallacy. In a similar vein, people tend to overstate the importance of coevolution for biological tolerance. Yes, it has its role in assessing safety but it’s not the ultimate argument that people make it out to be.
> So, the OP was quite reasonably saying that chemicals not naturally present at certain concentrations should be tested for safety when high concentrations are proposed to be used.
Sure but nobody is disputing this in the first place, so making such a statement is at best irrelevant and at worst a bad argument designed to derail a discussion.
Plutonium is also a herbicide. If you spray it on plants, those plants die.
Sadly, plutonium has side effects for us. Glyphosate may also have them, long term or short term. I don’t want to act as guinea pig. If you want, good for you.
> Chemophobia (nice one!)
> Everything is chemicals
Replace chemicals with chemical compounds and you can have a more honest argument. And yes, putting random chemical compounds into the food chain should indeed be scrutinized.
No: glyphosate is a herbicide, and part of its appeal is that — unlike other herbicides — it has very low toxicity for insects. In fact, it was assumed until now to be safe for bees, and the new study also doesn’t claim that it has a direct on bees. Instead, they show that it affects bacteria which occur in the bee’s digestive tract.
(Since you assumed glyphosate was a insecticide, what did you think the purpose of the current study was?)
"As in many animals, honey bees rely on their gut microbial community for a variety of functions, including food processing (25, 26), regulation of immune system (33, 34), and defense against pathogens (17, 27). Perturbations of this system have the potential to lead to negative consequences for host fitness. "
There have been many unexpected effects from the human introduction of long lived synthetic compounds into the environment. E.g. we had to learn the hard way about bioaccumulation and hormonal disruption. Now we are starting to see more and more cases [e.g. 1] where damage to microbiomes may be causing harm and we may need to make such effects part of safety screening and environmental monitoring. Could microbiome effects explain the crash in many insect populations around the world [2-4]?
> sperm counts in the western world have been declining precipitously since 1990. I'd bet that glyphosate has something to do with this
Free porn on internet looks like a simpler explanation. Or maybe we could speculate that everybody touching plastic keyboards for many hours a day can't be healthy.
Poor countries in Africa and Asia doing extensive and not-so-regulated agriculture should have an even bigger decrease in sperm count if pesticides are the only reason. It pours Glyphosate there. Probably is a combination of many factors.
> On a potentially related note, sperm counts in the western world have been declining precipitously since 1990.
This is also associated with birth control. The problem is that is hard to do extensive studies on this and get compelling evidence, but it is true, we are not "better safe than sorry".
It is also associated with dozens of compounds found as pollutants or contaminants in food, air, water, personal care products and cleaners... and many of the ingredients put in on purpose. Who knows. It’s probably a result of an additive or synergistic effect of a dozen causes.
Look at Figure 1B. The variation in the gut microbes is large at the start of the study (day 0). Feeding the bees 5 mg/liter glyphosate, they have a statistically significant difference from the control (no glyphosate) in 5 microbes out of 8. But feeding 10 mg/liter, they get no statistically significant differences from the control.
They have no explanation for why glyphosate seems to have an effect at 5 mg/litre concentration but not at the higher 10 mg/litre concentration ("The relative lack of effects of the G-10 treatment on the microbiota composition at day 3 posttreatment is unexplained"). They do give speculations, though.
I don’t care what glyphosate does or doesn’t do. Monsanto has a pile of research showing it as mostly harmless. Maybe that’s like Big Tobacco. Time will tell.
What I do care about is what Roundup does. There are many many curious compounds in Roundup, and some of them appear to be much nastier than glyphosate. If for instance all of these stomach problems people have been having lately are caused by application of Roundup to aid in grain harvesting, we need to know sooner rather than later. And it doesn’t really matter as much to me which chemical is the culprit. It’s the same bad actors regardless.
Figure 1 looks weird. At day 0 the ranges for the bacterias in the evaluated groups (C, G-5, G-10) differ a lot - Is this noise? Why?
If i interpret this graphic right the study did find bacteria changes at lower levels of glyphosate(G-5), but not at higher levels of glyphosate expose (G-10).
I am no bee expert but I doubt that bees normally eat sugar syrup all day - which also will contribute to the weird stuff happening in the C-group in comparision from day 0 to 3.
Worse, Roundup (what's actually being sprayed) is likely causing even more damage than what these glyphosate (just one "active" ingredient) studies are suggesting since other studies demonstrate a significant difference in effect of the cocktail vs just the "active" ingredient
We need to invest more into development of gene drives for elimination of agricultural pests.
The recent development of gene drive on doublesex gene for mosquitoes gives hope that it can work for majority of insects.
And if we find a way to use similar technique for plants, the resulting reduction of pesticide use will be helpful not only for the people but also for remaining species of insects and plants.
Glyphosate concentrations were chosen to mimic environmental levels, which typically range between 1.4 and 7.6 mg/L, and may be encountered by bees foraging at flowering weeds.
They fed the bees concoctions of Glyphosate between 5 mg/L and 10 mg/L, which at the top end is a bit more than 7.6 mg/L, but still quite near normal parameters found in a normal environment.
Those are high normal concentrations for glyphosate in spot spraying applications, not for the much more common broadcast applications, and assume that the bees are drinking straight from the sprayer for five days in a row.
Bayer really messed up with their Monsanto acquisition. Right when sentiment against the company reached a breaking point, and people finally began imposing a concerted backlash.
Glyphosate is the main ingredient in "Round up". I imagine residential use probably has a minimal impact, but this seems like a big problem considering the rise of "Round up resistant" crops. When whole fields are being sprayed at scale, seems like that could be very disruptive to a bee population.
Actually, it's quite possible that residential use is much more harmful than agricultural usage. The study used very high concentrations of glyphosate, and residential usage of glyphosate uses it at a much higher concentration than farmers do.
From a personal experience (I'm a farmer) the concentrations used in a residential context are exaggeratedly above the recommendation. They are mismeasured and generally high.
Plus, glyphosate preparations need to be corrected in pH (below 5 for maximal efficacy), which is something many people don't do.
The professionals doing weed control in cities absolutely must have training and adequate PPE. The same thing applies to pest control.
I'm not against professional usage of pesticides, but I would be OK with forbidding most insecticides and herbicides for personal usage. The every day insecticide spraying can? That thing is poison. Does anyone use a FFP2 mask or even a simple cotton mask? Many permetrine-based insecticides don't even mention that this active substance is specially deadly to cats.
>I'm not against professional usage of pesticides, but I would be OK with forbidding most insecticides and herbicides for personal usage
That is entirely unreasonable as a conclusion. It leads to a world where only people rich enough to hire landscapers and exterminators are able to control insects and weeds.
Of course insecticide is poison. That's literally the point. Don't breathe it, get it on you, or let your pets around it. It's not difficult advice to abide by.
You make a good point but I wouldn’t banning a potentially dangerous chemical that requires expert use to be safe “entirely unreasonable”. In fact the same is true for most such compounds, at least in large parts of Western Europe (less so in the US, I think, but something as harmless as Sudafed is a counter-example): there are many industrial chemicals which you cannot (or only via detours) purchase legally in stores.
I’m generally not a fan of such regulations because most of these chemicals have no common use and the potential for abuse is therefore relatively small. But for many pesticides and herbicides, the potential for harmful misuse is very real.
I usually can find several consumer-grade insecticides that make no mention of the active substances they contain, the health risks, and security or no-entry intervals.
If informed professionals need this information, won't lay people need it as well?
Also, sometimes I don't understand the downvotes. This baffles me. Your comment is perfectly reasonable, and so is the comment you were replying to, even if one doesn't agree with it.
Just as a reference, the last time I used glyphosate the concentration was 15 L of concentrate (glyphosate 360 g/L) to 1000 L water. This is equivalent to 5,4 g/L. The study mentions two concentrations, 10 g/L and 5 g/L, so I think this is representative. Generally I would use more glyphosate, but now I usually mix it with oxyfluorfen in order to cope with glyphosate resistance and use less of each.
I misread the paper: it says 5 mg/L and 10 mg/L, which is a thousand times less concentrated than the prepared spray. At any rate, this is the environmental dosage the bees come in contact with, not the sprayer's concentration.
So I searched for the basis for those targets of 5 mg/L and 10 mg/L.
The article reads:
"Glyphosate concentrations were chosen to mimic environmental levels, which typically range between 1.4 and 7.6 mg/L".[original article]
The reference for this interval[1] makes reference to three other papers.
One of these (from 1988) makes reference to another study on the "effects of a 2.2 L/ha Roundup application".[2] Another, from 1990, mentions an analysis of water residues "following application of ROUNDUP (2.0 kg/ha)"[3].
I have no idea what residues I'd find in my property, but the recommended dosage of concentrated product is still 2-4 L/ha. I am currently doing 3 L/ha.
Different brands of glyphosate concentrate usually have the same concentration, but this value might have changed after 30 years.
Maybe some self righteous "skeptics" could take this as a moment to apologize, figuratively or actually, to the people they derided as "quacks" for urging caution about glyphosate.
No, they’ll just move on to attacking people about other products where the assumptions of safety or efficacy have not yet been debunked. Thanks for the good laugh though.
The US regulatory environment treats artificially prepared chemicals as innocent until proven guilty. A safer approach (recently adopted in Europe) would be to guarantee the safety of industrial, agricultural, and household chemicals before they are allowed to go to market.
On a potentially related note, sperm counts in the western world have been declining precipitously since 1990. I'd bet that glyphosate and/or other common poorly regulated chemicals have something to do with this.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sperm-count-dropp...