Talking Biotech 052 -- 17 Questions on Glyphosate

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Now here's your host, Today on the Talking Biotech podcast, it's really a pleasure to speak with Ida Ruschaum, and I probably said that wrong. But Ida keeps the blog that's called Thoughtscapism and also has an extensive background working in different aspects of chemistry. She's a cell biologist who's worked in environmental chemistry as well as in diabetes research, and Also a prolific writer, right?

Yeah.

But I wanted to have you on the podcast because you wrote a beautiful blog about glyphosate. And glyphosate is a hot topic right now because of its use in conjunction with biotech crops. And as folks have failed to be able to really vilify the crops for any scientific reason, it's easy to move to the other associated products because herbicides by nature are chemicals and people really do kind of fear chemicals they don't understand. So what I would like to do is talk to you about your blog and the questions you have posed within there. So could you tell us first a little bit about the motivation of your blog and, and why you chose to take on this topic?

Yes, I'm really happy. Thanks a lot for inviting me to this podcast. And I would say that my motivation for starting the blog and glyphosate as well specifically is really my own ignorance to begin with. I am a biologist, but I didn't study agriculture specifically, and I realized that I carried a lot of assumptions that I had just never questioned. I thought, I nodded and repeated that Monsanto was evil and industrial farming was terrible and doing really terrible things. And then at some point I encountered some scientific sources that sort of questioned this view, like maybe it's not so terrible, or actually these things are not happening the way I thought. And I read up on it and I got involved in science forums and I talked to a lot of scientists and farmers there, and I realized that a lot of assumptions that I had were wrong. So even a person who is really educated can just not have thought too much about it and have these completely false ideas. And glyphosate was one of the topics that came up a lot, or Roundup, the mixture, the famous mixture where glyphosate is the active ingredient. And when I learned so much more about it, I really loved both about biotech foods and biotech crops and glyphosate and other health topics. I really wished more people would have access to this nuanced, accurate information. And with glyphosate, there's so many questions that there's many great sources that help make sense of the science, but there are so many different questions and you find the sources in several different places. And I realized that I really want to have one place where you can easily have access to all of them, all that I have found anyway. That's how my blog in general started, and that's why I also decided to write about glyphosate.

It was really, really well done, probably the best treatment of the subject I've ever seen. And could you maybe even give us a little more background about your scientific training and, and more importantly, what's important to you? And now you're in Switzerland, right? You're, you're— and what's important to you and maybe, you know, your family and friends about farming and about sustainable agriculture?

I would say that environment has always been a big thing for me. I've been a big nature lover since I was a kid. I was almost, almost a little bit antipathic towards humans. I was thinking that humans just destroy everything and nature is wonderful and beautiful and I want to conserve that. So I would identify as an environmentalist, but I also have always had a very great curiosity. How do things work? How— I really love nature and I wanted to understand it. So that's why sciences were really the natural place to go because, wow, you learn all this cool stuff about the natural world. So I always wanted to have this environmental aspect, especially with food and farming. It was first and foremost, it was I want to know that it's not harming the environment. And then I also realized that a lot of the environmentalism today lacks critical thinking. So they have the good idea, they want to protect the environment, but if you do that, then you have to really go and look at the facts. What's really happening? The evidence, what does it show? So I want to bring that back to the discussion. I want to have evidence as an important part of being an environmentalist and looking at farming. And the health aspect became really important to me when I became a parent, because I realized that having kids, what a powerful emotion it can be to have these vague fears about maybe something I'm doing, something every day, is actually harming my kids. So it's really important for me for parents to get reliable information. Where should they worry? What's realistic? What is really overblown? Where is worry just unnecessary?

So if we start from that space, what is glyphosate and how is it used as an herbicide?

For me, when I look at it from biochemical, biochemistry perspective, it's not very far from a Normal amino acid that we have in our bodies to build our proteins, glycine. But then you have taken this little bit of carbon with a phosphoric acid group, and you've added it to the glycine, so to say. So it's glycine phosphonate or glyphosate. And what it does, I won't go into the details so we don't get into too long, but basically it inhibits a specific enzyme, enzyme that's not found in animals or us, but only in plants and many bacteria, that helps these plants and bacteria synthesize 3 aromatic amino acids. We have to get these from our food. We have to eat these amino acids and take them up. But plants and bacteria can actually synthesize them themselves, although bacteria can also actually eat them. Amino acids when they're available, but more on that later. So it's really beautiful because it's specific. It doesn't— the enzyme, the target doesn't exist in us. It goes straight to the plants.

Well, take your points in order from your website because I think there was a really nice logic to that. If we start with the first one, and this is the really big one that most people care about and that most people are— where most of the fear is being built around is, does glyphosate cause cancer?

This has been big because of the International Agency for Research on Cancer, or IARC, this body that looks at different substances and classifies them. And they have classified glyphosate as probably carcinogenic. So this organization, IARC, has actually been under a lot of criticism because Both because of how it— what studies it looked at for glyphosate, but also because of how— I love the term— how it's been shown to be confusogenic to the public. Because it doesn't actually tell you directly useful information. As a consumer, when they say it's probably carcinogenic, you think it's probably carcinogenic to you. But what they are telling is— what they are looking into is the hazard. Is there any possible scenario under which it could have these effects? And really what we need here is relevance, is the real-world relevance. Does this happen? And to put these things in perspective, there's— it's great to look at other things that are in the same class as glyphosate, for instance red meat or very hot beverages or being a hairdresser. So is this probably carcinogenic? Yes, under very specific circumstances or very high amounts, or— but it doesn't necessarily tell us what should our policy be. Should we ban these things? Or should we— is the use we have at this point, is it good or is it bad? So things that are even more carcinogenic or definitely carcinogenic than glyphosate, for instance, are alcohol and sausages. And it's we're clearly not banning any of those anytime soon, but we should understand moderation. And so this moderation, understanding relevance is what is missing there. And there are many other places that have looked at relevance. So does glyphosate influence cancer risk? There's at least four scientific reviews that I found, and a risk assessment by not IARC, but The World Health Organization, together with the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN, that do look at the actual risk, not just potential hazard. And they say no, there is no risk for for cancer from exposure through occupational means or from diet. You don't have to worry about that. Very, very, very unlikely. And this has also been confirmed by others. like Environmental Protection Agency in the US and European Food Safety Authority and German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment. It's really reassuring. So many organizations and so many reviews have looked at this and they have found there to be no reason to worry.

Okay, and then your next question that you addressed inside your website was, could glyphosate have other health effects? What about surfactant in Roundup or glyphosate breakdown products. What about that?

Yeah, so then if not cancer, maybe something else. People's worries don't stop at cancer, even if it's the biggest one. And often they may find some claim from one single study that says this or that, and then people say that, well, this clearly has implications on us. And the thing is that with single studies on anything, you again don't know, is it relevant really for us? Many of these single studies have highlighted that when you use Roundup mixture instead of just glyphosate, you have more adverse effects. So what in that mixture is bad? Is there something even more harmful? And if you look at it, there's actually more of surfactants, or substances that are like soaps in there to help the spread, to change the surface tension. And to get glyphosate to the plants. So actually, a lot of the studies that look at these health effects have looked at cell cultures that you bathe in quite high concentrations of Roundup mixture, so quite a lot of soap. And soaps just solidify fats and proteins, and we are made of that. So really, naked cells don't like that. We also know that That even with the barrier function of our skin and our gut, which protects us from many of the effects of soaps, we still understand that soap, too much in the wrong place, is probably not good for us. We should probably not drink soap.

There's been a lot of discussion from a scientist, a computer scientist, who has— claims to do research in this area. She does her research on Google, apparently. And this is Seneff et al. and her folks. What about her claims that this causes celiac disease and autism and obesity?

Yes, so a lot of these worrisome claims originate from one person, and that's already a red flag. Stephanie Seneff, she's actually a computer scientist, so she's not a biologist or a doctor, and she actually feeds the data and the conclusions from lots of studies into computer programs and lets them interpret the results for her. Already this is quite far-fetched from the normal world. She's not doing experiments or generating data. And she has found not only that— does she claim that glyphosate causes celiac disease, autism, and obesity, she says it causes Gastrointestinal disorders, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer's disease, depression, anxiety syndrome, Parkinson's disease, Brian disease, infertility and birth defects. It's it's quite incredible. And in an interview, she even goes as far as to say that life is probably partially responsible for school shootings and the Boston bombings. It's it just it should be clear for anyone that this is quite off the rails. If any one agent causes everything, you should be doubtful about the claims. And she's outside her field, and she publishes only in predatory journals. These kind of things can be difficult for laymen to detect. They might not know that this is a really poor study because they don't have the necessarily qualifications to know these things. And this is really why we should look Not a single study that says something strange, but at review papers when there's been multiple layers of peer review. And really, so far on all these health effects, if you look at the reviews, there's 8 reviews on human health at least, and all of them find no harm to human health from normal glyphosate use. And these include already the surfactants and breakdown products like AMPA from AMPA from glyphosate, and National Academies of Science 2016 found that there was no difference in trends of celiac disease, autism, or allergies when they looked at US where glyphosate use has been increasing and UK where glyphosate use has stayed the same. There's just nothing there. These are wild claims. It's It would be funny if it wouldn't be so tragic and people wouldn't listen to them.

Well, that's very true. She does have a considerable following, and I think— I just feel so bad for the people who listen to what she says, who live their lives in fear of something that isn't a problem. But, you know, let's move along to your next question because it really probes into the mechanism that she proposes. Does glyphosate harm our gut bacteria?

Yes, this is one big favorite of Senefs and also something that really sticks to people's minds because gut bacteria or microbiome is such a new, interesting, and exciting topic. So many people think maybe there could be something there that we didn't know before. But really, so to say again, these bacteria do have, or many bacteria do have, the same enzyme as plants. So glyphosate can target this enzyme and inhibit it, and then they can't synthesize these amino acids that they need. But as I said before, bacteria can actually eat these amino acids from their environment as well, the same way we do, if they are available. And to look at studies that have found an inhibitive effect on bacteria from glyphosate, they've needed millimolar concentrations. So then they have seen a temporary setback for the bacteria, but if they supply them with amino acids, they continue growing. They don't— they're not killed by the glyphosate in these concentrations. And these concentrations are actually thousands of times bigger than the ones that we can expect to find in our gut, even if we eat the most glyphosate, biggest residue of glyphosate that we can have from products. In the US, the biggest is 5 parts per million, the biggest allowed residue. So in fact, to get to these 1,000 times bigger amounts, you would have to eat 150 kilograms, or in US units, 330 pounds. So basically, you would have to eat more than your own weight at one go to even have a chance of inhibiting the bacteria in your gut only if there weren't amino acids available in the environment. And if you eat that amount of food, there's a lot of protein in your stomach being broken down. And not to mention the health effects of eating 150 kilograms, your own weight, more than your own weight in food. It's not healthy.

Yeah, your own weight in soybeans, and, you know, that's a tall order. And your 5th question really kind of appeals to the precautionary principle and says, could glyphosate be another case like DDT or thalidomide? Something where we just don't know. What do you think about that?

Yeah, I think about even if lots of health reviews during several decades have shown no harmful effects, people still think maybe there's something unknown, maybe we just can't know yet. And they take cases like DDT as an example. And I think something that's really illustrative is that even before we go into the differences between DDT and glyphosate, the biggest difference seems to be the way they were introduced. The time when DDT came out, 1945, there was actually no regulation. It wasn't approved because it didn't need approval. There was no testing required. Then, and even when it came, it actually replaced some more toxic pesticides like arsenate compounds. Before it, but when it was used for a couple of decades, it became apparent that it's actually persisting in the environment, that it doesn't get broken down. And this is the second big difference between DDT and glyphosate. Glyphosate doesn't persist. It's broken down. It doesn't bioaccumulate, and it had been extensively tested. It has been used for decades. There's reevaluations every 15 years by EPA. There's all this wealth of research. Simply, with DDT we didn't know. With glyphosate we know so much more. The mechanisms are completely different, both the regulatory and the biological situations around them. So for there to be a reason to apply the precautionary principle, we should really— should have some reasonable grounds.

I guess it ties in really well with your question number 6, which says, is glyphosate an especially dangerous pesticide?

Many people don't know about the advances in farming and how much— how we know so much more today, and that has moved modern farming methods away from many toxic pesticides that were used in the last century. And even after DDT, there were other less harmful pesticides, and after those pesticides, glyphosate has actually come and replaced many of those pesticides that were more harmful. So pesticides that are in use now are, most of them, less harmful than many of the household products that we have now. Bleach and caffeine and ammonia and vanillin and citric acid are all more harmful than glyphosate. And even many of the common organic herbicides, which are often thought of as more innocent, they're actually more toxic. Flavonoids, acetic acid, and cinnamaldehyde, for instance. You don't have to worry about their traces either, but there would be more to worry about those than from glyphosate. Glyphosate has helped replace a lot of the older, more toxic pesticides. And here it's never about choosing only one risk. Either we use glyphosate or we don't. But if we don't, what's the risk of what we have to use instead? And really glyphosate is the safer choice.

That's a really important point, is that it replaced things that had more acute and environmental impacts. And we've actually taken a turn for the better, I suppose. But I wasn't going to give my editorial comments. I was going to let you run the show here. So let me move along to the next one, which is one of my favorites. Is there glyphosate in the air and rainwater?

Yes. So I like to call this next set of several questions, actually, in my head I call them the glyphosate omnipresence. Because even if we take all the health reviews that see no problem and all the history that's shown that glyphosate is less harmful than pesticides that were used before, then the claims still keep popping up. Like, if we can't scare them with those data, maybe we can just say glyphosate can be detected here and there and there. So it's sort of a scare tactic, but it usually leaves out how much glyphosate was detected. It also often turns out to be not only misleading how much, that it's not actually relevant to us, it's such a vanishingly small amount, and in other cases it actually is downright false. These detection methods may not have been correct. But when it comes to the air and rainwater, it's actually a study that was done with mass spectrometry. And I mean, I am in great awe of this technique. We have people in our lab doing mass spectrometry, and it's so incredibly fine-tuned. As a perspective, even spacecraft use mass spectrometers To detect the particles in space, it can take minute particles, minute amounts of particles, and tell you what's there. So it's a wonder of modern measurement techniques. And this study did find that in the fields, in the dust, and in the dissolved into the rainwater, they could find a few molecules of glyphosate. And what these headlines that tell you about air and rainwater. Actually forget to say is that they actually tested at 2 different time points, when glyphosate wasn't widely in use and when it was in more widespread use. And they saw that of this minute amount of pesticide particles, the more toxic pesticides had diminished or had been completely replaced by glyphosate. So there was less of toxic particles in the samples.

Great.

That's great news. But they rarely put that spin on things in the sensationalist media.

Well, and those same reports also showed that the glyphosate they were detecting, these were all done between 3 and 100 meters away from the side of a cotton field where glyphosate was applied.

Yeah, in the fields.

Well, then they show pictures on the websites of children walking in their raincoats saying it's raining glyphosate or weed killer on your children. And it's such a distortion. And well, again, I hate— I don't want to editorialize. I said this is your show. I'm not gonna fill in the— I'm not gonna fill in the blanks. All right, so the next 2 are in the same— the next 3 are in the same area. Is there really glyphosate in urine?

To try to make the glyphosate omnipresence more scary is, of course, if you take your personal bodily fluid and say that There's glyphosate there. You must be scared. But really, I mean, firstly, if there is glyphosate in urine, it's in trace amounts that are being cleared from the body. So it's being it's leaving you. When you look at the scientific evidence on this, there's actually a review of the seven studies that have looked at urine levels, and they find that the levels are by magnitudes lower than the acceptable daily intake or the acceptable operator exposure. exposure level. And these levels are already set at incredibly low, 100 times lower than level of no observable adverse effects. So really, I mean, the levels in urine are ridiculously small. It's completely taken out of context that you should worry about it. It's a good sign.

Well, all of this has been really helpful so far, and we're going to take a short break here And on the other side, we'll continue with Ida Ruschaume and talking about what is glyphosate and what it's not, and what is currently— what are some of the myths and what are some of the truths, as told by her recent blog on thoughtscapism.com. Thank you for listening. We'll be back in just a couple minutes.

Greetings. Talking Biotech aficionados, and thank you for listening to the Talking Biotech Podcast. Thanks to you. You've written great, wonderful reviews on iTunes, and it's quite a beacon to the podcast surfer. Shows your amazing support for this mofo of a science show. A special thanks to you who dared to. You accepted my challenge, and got that talking biotech tattoo. It's appreciated, but guess what? That tattoo lasts a really long time. It's my hope that someday, a few decades from now, we can look at your dermal commitment to a science podcast, and ridicule you for defacing your flesh. Our hope is that your days in assisted living will use that tat as a conversation starter, reminding the elderly of the dark ages when science was shunned for flashy marketing and myth that placed fear over reason. However, with the support of so many listeners, we're moving innovation to application. And helping people and planet along the way. So tell a friend, write a review on iTunes, and most of all, share the beautiful science that we learn from the expert guests that kindly share their expertise here on the Talking Biotech Podcast.

So before we go back to our interview, I wanted to say hello to an old friend who's currently up in— where are you at in Manitoba?

Meadows, Manitoba, about half an hour from Winnipeg.

So close to Winnipeg. It's Chelsea Boonstra. Hi, Chelsea.

Hey, Kevin.

Yeah, so what are you doing?

I'm currently driving the grain cart in the tractor, so not sure if you can hear all the loud ruckus in the back, but that is the tractor and locomotive.

What kind of grain are you harvesting?

Soybeans.

Well, the reason that we wanted to have you on is because you're working with me in a new segment for the podcast, right?

Yes, correct.

And what's that new segment called?

The Boonstra Report.

The Boonstra Report, aptly named. And so what are you going to talk to us about on the Boonstra Report?

Anything agriculture and biotechnology, and it's also a way for me to promote agriculture in another form of social media.

Yeah, so super cool. So you really wanted to start connecting with people more, and this will be a way to give us a little bit of a bite each week that will play on the podcast that'll allow you to be heard by more people and get your message out there.

Yeah, I'd say so.

I'm pretty excited.

Yeah, me too. So we'll go from And now, from here right now to the first episode of the Boonstra Report. Thanks again, Chelsea.

Thanks, Kevin. Hello there, everyone. My name is Chelsea Boonstra, and welcome to the first episode of the Boonstra Report, where I'll be reporting weekly on all things agriculture. Recently, the NBA, also known as the National Biosafety Authority, has approved open field cultivation for Bt cotton in Kenya. This is the second open field cultivation, with the first one being for insect-resistant corn in February 2016. The purpose of this release is to conduct national performance trials, and the decision to finally release was based on the outcome of food and feed safety assessment, considerations of socioeconomic issues, environmental risk assessment, as well as analysis of public comments received. That's it for today on the Boomstra Report. We'll see you all next week.

And that's It's the new section of the Boonstra Report, and I hope to hear more from Chelsea in the near future. But we go back to today with our discussion of glyphosate— what it is, what it isn't— really as told by cell biologist and author Ida Rush-Helme from her thoughtscapism.com blog. And Ida, let's continue with this idea of glyphosate omnipresence. Is there glyphosate in breast milk?

Yes, so this I find one of the most unethical claims really. It originates, like many of the other incredible claims, from moms across America, and it's not based on scientific studies or even appropriately done tests. So really what they're doing is fabricating an issue for breastfeeding mothers to worry about. They took 10 samples and they analyzed them in the incorrect way, which gives lots of false positives, which is only used as a first screening step in water, not in milk. And milk has a lot of things that could interfere with the assay. It's really just not a valid way of testing this at all. And if you look at the scientific landscape, there have been Close to 200 mothers have tested their, their, given their breast milk for science to test. And in US and Germany, all the studies that have been done have not found any glyphosate in milk. In fact, even studies about soy milk and cow's milk and whole milk powder don't find any glyphosate there. There's no reason to think why it would end up in milk and it doesn't.

Okay. So breast milk, it was out. Um, what about in things like wine?

Yeah, this, this one is almost one of those that really make me chuckle because sometimes the lack of perspective is mind-boggling. The rumor about glyphosate in wine also came from moms across America, and it was about raising alarm on the carcinogenic potential of glyphosate found— and it's found in your wine. And they try to make you scared of this without taking account of the little fact which, Kevin, your wonderful meme just nails, that if you are worried about something in your wine, maybe it should be the 130 million parts per million alcohol, which is a definite carcinogen, and not the 1 part per million That is probable carcinogen. It's— how, how do you even make this a credible claim? It's, yeah, it's a joke.

Well, it ties back in with that bad detection technique. You know, they're using, and we talked a little bit about this, I think on episode 30 and then last week on episode 51, about they're using this competitive ELISA assay. Which is great if you use it in the matrix that it's intended for. So if you're using it with water, it works well with water. But there are so many other compounds in breast milk, in wine, and probably in urine that can inhibit or give false positives in the assay because of the nature of the assay. It's, um, I described it in the last episode pretty well, I think, but it Just, it, it, you know, I, again, I didn't want to editorialize. I wanted you to—

I actually listened to your, um, podcasts, the 30 and 51. I found them really interesting. I thought it was really, really great, uh, to learn more about the assay and how it's used.

Well, I appreciate that. I think it's the, the main, the thing that's really nice about this is that so many people have said, I just don't know how to talk about this with other people who have questions, and that's why I really was so happy to have you on today, because let's just give people the honest information in a way that they can communicate it. And I guess the other one that we see a lot coming up right now is, is wheat toxic because of glyphosate?

This one also originates largely from Stephanie Seneff. Of course, I mean, almost all of the claims do. And it's mostly because of the conclusions she drew when she found a study where fish were basically bathed in Roundup for weeks. And we already know that Roundup, the soap or the surfactant in Roundup, is harmful for fish. And they were bathing in this for weeks in high concentrations, and then their intestinal system didn't look so good. So the logical conclusion from this is not that glyphosate causes celiac disease. It's like several universes jump away. So basically, if you look at both microbiome research that looks at how glyphosate can affect the gut microbiome and the National Academies of Science, they just see no reason to believe there is any connection. And I mean, when scientists say that it's very unlikely that there is a connection, That in normal speak, it means that it's unbelievable if there would be anything to the claim. Because again, I mean, celiac disease was increasing already before genetic genetically engineered crops and glyphosate. And the United Kingdom, where the glyphosate use has not increased, has the same increase in celiac disease. It's there's nothing there. There's something else at play with the with the higher The increase of celiacities.

Winston Churchill said it well, is that what a man desires is not knowledge, but certainty. And as scientists, we automatically don't say anything for certain. I mean, our way we discuss things is conservative, that we say there's no evidence to support that this would cause this. But what people want to hear is, no, there's nothing there.

Yes, definitely. I think that is incredibly insightful because really I think science— a lot of people don't realize that science is really humble. It doesn't claim that it knows for sure. It says it's pretty sure or it's pretty unlikely. Yeah, but people want to have a more simple answer and science is humble enough to say that we may not know everything for certain. I think it's really— I really admire science for that.

And then the people who are in the other side of this discussion, like the Stephanie Seneffs, have great certainty, and, and great certainty based on really poor data. And I think that that's what just confuses the public is here's somebody who is, you know, she's, oh, she's from MIT, and she claims that her research shows— again, I'm going into my spiel. All right, let's go on to number 12. Are crops drenched in glyphosate?

Yeah, this is another tactic that I find that it's, it's all these terms used for drenched or doused, pesticides are used in this way. It's sort of a lazy way of trying to imply that there's something wrong with the way they're applied without going into the specifics. Because looking in any way that you want to interpret the words like drench, the amounts that farmers actually use are hundreds to thousands of times smaller. Most of any pesticide spray that you see is actually water, very little of it is pesticide. And if you look at how much of it is pesticide, I really love the Farm Babes succinct meme on this: it's less than 2 small beer cans per football field, or for the American units, 22 ounces per acre. It's really— you need A very little amount because of the beauty that it's specific. It goes after the plant enzyme and it has a very specific action. So little goes a long way. And it's good also because it's pricey. Farmers don't want to use more than they have to. They don't drench their crops in glyphosate.

That's a really good point. And the fact that you apply such a small amount, it's really Pretty amazing. And it's, to me, I think it's one of these things that if it didn't come from Monsanto originally and it came from, uh, you know, uh, you know, Betty's organic chemistry lab, people would use this in organic culture, the production systems. People would use it in every production system.

Yeah, exactly. And it's so close to our normal— it's just a modified amino acid.

And I guess the, the next big question going on number 13 is Does glyphosate use enable bad farming practices?

Here, actually, I find the environmental parts of this really interesting because I think that the health part is, if you look at the scientific data and understand what the uncertainties in science speak mean, it's pretty certain for a normal person, from a normal person perspective, that there are no health effects. But what about environment? A lot of people think that because of glyphosate somehow farming has adopted more harmful practices, that somehow allows this. And I think that something fundamental for me when I learned more about farming was that funnily this traditional image of what all farmers have done for generations, that they till the land or they turn the ground around in order to kill the weeds, they plow it, well it turns out this is actually not environmentally friendly. It brings more erosion, it allows more nutrients to wash off from the fields. When you have to turn or till big areas, you use a lot of fuel going over that area and you compactify the soil. You end up with more carbon emissions. And glyphosate use actually allows farmers to move away from tilling. So not only does glyphosate replace pesticides that were more toxic, but it allows no-till or conservation tillage. And also with the help of glyphosate, you can more efficiently grow several different crops in different years so that you have diverse rotations of crops, which also has lots of benefits for the environment. So it's almost the opposite of what people think. Glyphosate has brought lots of beneficial effects to farming. And what I really find is sad is that at the moment there's activist organization pressure on the EU to reevaluate glyphosate, and they try to pressurize that there should be a ban on glyphosate use totally. Because this would mean that farmers would have to go back to tilling, more toxic herbicides, they would increase fuel use, reduce sequestration of soil organic matter, they would increase nutrient leaching, and it would increase emissions. Because glyphosate does a really great job with helping farmers reduce emissions, and one of the big things that I really love about biotech crops is just the fact that there are Roundup Ready crops that can be used together with glyphosate, and that this combo is a big part of why biotech crops have reduce carbon emissions by taking about 10 million cars off the roads every year. This is really big. For me, environmental issues are really important. And this is like, we should go in this direction. Glyphosate helps with that goal.

Okay, well, what about the issue of superweeds? So it says your 14th question is, what about resistance and superweeds? What do you think there?

Well, firstly, I want to say that superweeds is a bad term, because It's vague, people don't exactly know what it might be, but herbicide-resistant weed is the clear way to say what we mean in this case. And it's a little bit like with antibiotics. If there would be widespread resistance, it would nullify all the environmental benefits that we see from glyphosate. It would be bad. Farmers would have to use those older weed control methods like pesticides and tilling, the other more toxic pesticides and tilling. But funnily enough, even though this would be a big blow for the farmers, but they would have to stop using glyphosate, usually this alarm about resistant weeds is also raised by activist campaigns, same activist campaigns that ban— that campaign for a ban on glyphosate. And if there would be a lot of resistance, that would automatically make their campaigns redundant. So I don't really understand the logic there. But so far, has the resistance caused so much problems? You can read a lot more from this wonderful source by weed ecologist Professor Andrew Knies, and as he puts it, even the most damaging resistant weed that's called Palmer amaranth, even in the states that have been most affected by this weed, their cotton yields are still increasing, have been increasing during this So it's not a big problem, but we really want to have good management. Like with antibiotics, we need to— they are very useful, but we need to manage them well. We need to use many methods, for instance, integrated pest management and rotating herbicides, and try to avoid the resistance problems because we don't want to lose this really great useful tool from our toolbox.

Yeah, and it does have— there are some farms, especially in the south here, where it is a really severe problem and something that those of us who communicate about it really do need to acknowledge in, in no small way because it is a downside. But it's not a downside of the GM crop, it's a downside of reliance on a single method because it's all they've had. If we would have had multiple mechanisms of weed control, it never would have happened.

Yes, we need more pesticides, not less, in a way, but different ones.

And ones that have mechanisms that have limited health effects on humans, if any at all, and that are good for the environment, or have, you know, neutral at least to the environment. Um, you know, we gotta eat, you know. And, uh, let's go ahead to the next one. Does glyphosate interfere with soil organisms or nutrient availability? Question number 15.

Yeah, I find this topic really interesting because there are so many different factors at play here. There could be an inhibitive effect from glyphosate on soil bacteria, but also it might be that glyphosate is largely neutralized by humic acid in soil. On the other hand, glyphosate is actually bacteria— food for bacteria. They can actually use it as a source of phosphorus, and it's been noted that bacterial growth is boosted from presence of certain levels of glyphosate. And on the other hand, no-till, the methods that are enabled with glyphosate, has a positive effect on the soil, because traditional tilling is very soil disruptive. So there could be pros and cons. But again, what actually happens? If we look at the field studies, there's, for instance, a 7-year field study newly out this year, and a review on the older research from 2012, and both of them find that it's plus minus zero. There's no difference in soil bacteria, plant diseases, or mineral nutrient availability with or without both glyphosate and Roundup Ready crops. So all in all, it doesn't seem to have a very big effect. And really, this comes down to— scientifically, it's very interesting for me, all the different factors at play, but the practical aspect of it is that farmers have used glyphosate for They would notice if suddenly the soil was a lot poorer, if the yields were reduced, if there were new bacterial diseases. They would really want to get to the bottom of that fast. And we haven't seen such effects yet. So that is also very reassuring.

Okay, what about with the frequent claims on harm to monarch butterflies or bees? What about glyphosate there?

So glyphosate doesn't actually target animals or insects. The enzyme that it targets is not— it doesn't exist in us. And there is, for example, a recent study that looked at direct spraying of bees with glyphosate, and they were not harmed even by direct spray, which shouldn't happen in normal field conditions. Of course, just as a side note, Insecticides, on the other hand, several of them can harm bees if they're applied incorrectly. Some of them don't, actually, this study also found, but then also the biggest problem for bees are really pests, especially varroa mites and the diseases it spreads, but that is a side note. But on the monarch, on the topic of the monarch butterflies, there is an indirect possible connection with glyphosate being used to combat weeds and monarch caterpillars feeding on weeds, specifically milkweed. But here really it's more of a bigger picture. If we have more milkweed, so more monarch food in our fields, then the farmer will get smaller yields, and to get the same amount of food we'll have to use more land that's converted to fields. Really, farmland can never have the same biodiversity as the lands outside, the habitats of the wildlife, and we really need to conserve those areas. We need to use as little land as possible for farming. So we are many, so we use a lot of farmland, and sure, that does have an effect, but we have to— this is not a balancing act that's simple. We have to try to make the best choices there, and one of the best ways is to have optimal pest control so that we can have smaller farmed areas and So that there's more areas left over for wildlife, monarchs and insects and animals and plants all together.

Now, you said that very well because the other side of the coin is you have to have the farmland, and it doesn't matter whether you kill the milkweed with glyphosate or a plow or a hoe or anything.

Yeah.

You know, what we really need to be focusing on is saying, okay, this much farmland is required required for food. This is our reality. And therefore, to maintain the natural populations, we're going to need to plant X amount of milkweed either in ditches or local refugia or places that can foster what has been replaced in order to farm. And that seems to make so much more sense.

Yes, that's well said. And another concern with monarchs is that it's great to have habitats with milkweed outside of farming, But then also, if there are problems around their migratory routes in Mexico, then even no matter how much food they have in the U.S., it won't help them if problems are elsewhere. So it's not also a simple situation there.

Yeah, and especially if they have to figure out how to get over the wall that we're going to have.

That especially. So like no wall, please.

Well, it must be interesting to watch this political season from. Switzerland. It must be quite—

You don't say. We are all in, in great fear here over in Europe.

Okay, well, let's go to question number 17. Can glyphosate research be trusted? What about conflicts of interest? And, and maybe as you answer that, you know, um, are you a paid agent for the glyphosate industry?

Yes. So If this question is not answered, maybe nobody will even listen to what I said in the 16 questions before. So in a way, this could also be the first question because it's fundamental. And I often come up with this in discussions where if I give a source and then the person says, oh, somebody there has some kind of conflict of interest that's declared on the research paper, then I won't even read the paper because—

Yeah.

I can just look away from that one, it doesn't count, that study doesn't count. And this is really great intelligent laziness or rotten behavior in my opinion, because—

Yeah.

Conflict of interest in itself doesn't actually say that there has been anything wrong with the study. There are several studies where an industry have funded the study and the study actually finds something that the industry really does not want found. It's not a guarantee in any way that something is wrong with the study. To decide that, you have to actually look at the study. That's where it all starts. You can't just decide I won't even look at it. So, in general, life science is usually part of the biotech discussion. Like like you said in the beginning, if there's if they can't find anything to say about biotech because so many scientific organizations are are talking in favor of genetically engineered crops, they try to go instead to glyphosate. And if you— there was a great graphic done by Biofortified and Genetic Literacy Project where they took a sample of about 200 randomly selected safety studies on genetic engineering and looked at their conclusions. Do those studies with different funding sources tend to have different conclusions? Are some positive and some negative? And they saw no difference. No difference. The trend was exactly the same across funding sources. It was really a great way to demonstrate that in general funding does not mean more favorable conclusions on biotech. So even if there's generally not so much bias, then we still have to address the fact that it's not that bias or misconduct does not happen.

Right.

It can happen and it does happen, and I want to look at how we keep that— keep such studies from influencing the state of research with the help of an example, because there is one case that has been uncovered of a scientist who was fully and directly paid by the industry, who had skin in the game, who had explicitly told their expectations that this scientist would find harmful effects from glyphosate and published them. And this scientist was called Charles Pembroke. He's an economist, and he did publish studies that said critical things about glyphosate. And what happened? So basically scientists, scientific bloggers, and scientists themselves, different people separately went and looked at his studies. They evaluated his data. They looked at the data and they looked at the conclusions. They looked at his methods and they came to the conclusion that really what you show us here is not solid science. You can't make these conclusions based on this data. It's not— you're ignoring important factors. So they looked at the data, the evidence. This is really the hard currency in science, evidence. They didn't start by only resorting to smear tactics. That, oh, you're probably biased and you're probably bought by an industry, even if that turned out to be the case later in freedom of information requests and so on. But instead, they took the important discussion: what does the data say? So this is really why it can be so confusing also to laymen, because there can be studies that are completely off. But scientists take the time to really scrutinize that data. Science is hard and messy. There's lots of studies. They can say different things. But only together, when you have several confirmed studies and they all together support each other from different teams, different independent sources, you get at the less uncertain conclusion that more scientists can get behind. Their evidence helps support them. So actually, the funding bias, even if it's important to keep hold— keep control of it and be aware of it in science and make sure it's not influencing things, where the influence is more worrisome and more clear is actually somewhere where there aren't scientists continually trying to pick apart and scrutinize the message that's offered, and it's in marketing. There's really worrisome things coming out. For instance, there's an organic marketing report that looks at a big number of organizations from the, well, organic industry actors funding activist organizations that then promote anti-pesticide and anti-biotech views. And these funds go into billboard campaigns and And they have— they specifically target parents who are worried about their health and susceptible targets for doubt. And yeah, it's really also the multitude of different accusations and claims that you can see from this series that I've done as well shows you that they are really trying to fit the evidence, whatever evidence they can find, however flimsy, into the idea that glyphosate is a bad guy. Instead of actually looking at the evidence and allowing their ideas to be shaped by the evidence. And this is why I'm sure that next month there will surely be another misleading claim about glyphosate that tells you something else completely out of context, because they just try to get at it from any angle they can, anything that can have traction in somebody who doesn't know anything about it or hasn't seen the science. I'm really passionate about science because Because I think it can actually help us make farming better and healthier and more environmentally friendly. And I've learned that glyphosate is actually a really good tool that helps accomplish that. And I want people to know this. I want people to be able to find the information.

So in the spirit of the omnipresent nature of glyphosate, where do you think they'll find it next?

Maybe baby food?

Oh, oh yeah, baby food. Or I was gonna say chocolate would be a good one too.

Yeah, exactly.

Or, uh, you know what, I don't know, condoms or something. I don't— well, there's got to be. I mean, they've been— they make so many claims.

Um, isn't there a claim about glyphosate in tampons?

Yes, there is.

And, and that one, I must add that one.

That's— yeah, there's— yeah, it's showing up in many places. So you'll leave it there. Have you had any real negative or positive feedback regarding your blog on this subject?

Yeah, so I have had— I'm active in many science forums online, Facebook, Food and Farm Discussion Lab, and GMO Skeptic Forum and so on, and these forums have really helped with a lot of good feedback on suggestions on what to add or what they would, you know, what they're still uncertain of, and I've been really happy to have that feedback. It's been progressing for several weeks now, I've been adding things. But of course there's also been, you know, a couple of personal messages to me about how I'm a despicable, shameful person for what I've written and I must be paid by Monsanto. I sort of expected to get this because at this point it's what people resort to when they don't like what you're saying. They just say you must be paid. And just for the record, as you asked earlier, I am not paid for blogging at all, in fact. I have never received any money from Monsanto. I have worked in completely different research, in completely different areas. I have no connection to Monsanto.

What about if someone wants to learn more about you and your blog, where do they find your blog?

Yeah, so my blog Thoughtscaping— Thoughtscapism is found at thoughtscapism.com. And also I'm pretty active on Facebook. I have a Facebook page for my blog Thoughtscapism, and it can be found under the name, so it's facebook.com/thoughtscapism. And I also sometimes tweet under the handle Thoughtscapism. And I also answer questions on Quora, and I use the same name everywhere.

That's very good. Let me spell that out just so, because it's a little bit tricky to think about. It's thoughtscapism.com, and that's a great place to see the 17 questions. Here you heard them, but you can read about them in greater detail there. And I think it's a wonderful resource. It was desperately needed, and I'm very grateful that you did it. So thank you very much.

I'm so happy of your feedback. I'm really happy that you appreciate it. And I'm also really happy to hear the pronunciation of thoughtscapism. I was always thinking it might be thoughtscapism.

I think it— and it's— every time I've mentioned it to someone, they say, What is it? What can you spell that? So that's why I wanted to spell it out, um, just because I've referred a number of people to this blog and, um, they've ended up in other places, I guess. But, um, Ida, thank you so, so much for spending the time with me today. I really appreciate it. And, um, best wishes in all your work going forward. And keep me posted if you have another topic that you'd like to discuss on the podcast.

Thank you so much. I'm a big fan of your work. for several years now. So I'm very happy that you invited me. It was a great chance.

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