Glyphosate Problem #4. There’s another use for Roundup that is actually for non-Roundup Ready crops: PreHarvest Treatment. Here’s the Monsanto PDF file that gives all the information: Monsanto’s PreHarvest Staging Guide. This document provides guidelines for how to spray Roundup on crops for staging, and here’s an excerpt from a page in the guide titled Harvest Management Benefits:
The 3 main harvest management benefits include:
Earlier Harvest
Spraying a Roundup® brand agricultural herbicide allows for uniform crop maturity which gives you the option to straight cut harvest.More Uniform Maturity
The maturation process of the crop occurs simultaneously.Increased Combine Efficiency
Spraying a Roundup® brand agricultural herbicide for your preharvest application allows you to straight cut harvest versus swathing and pickup.
Then in the section titled Best Management Practices for Application, we’re told this:
Swathing may be eliminated when a preharvest herbicide application is used on wheat, barley, oats, peas and flax. The crop may be straight cut 7 days after application. If swathing after a preharvest treatment, wait 3 full days (72 hours) after application to allow thorough translocation for long-term weed control.
So to translate that, you can spray roundup on your crops as little as 3 days before starting your harvest, and this technique is promoted for Wheat, Feed Barley, Tame Oats, Canola, Flax, Peas, Lentils, Soybeans and Dry Beans. So we have all those crops, none of them Roundup Ready, but all of them spray-able with Roundup before the harvest.
And regarding Tame Oats by the way, there’s a note on the Tame Oats page that says:
Preharvest application of Roundup WeatherMAX® and Roundup Transorb® HC are registered for application on all oat varieties – including milling oats destined for human consumption.
And that brings us right back to Problem #1, where neither the USDA nor the FDA are testing for glyphosate residue. Now we’re spraying it on non-GMO crops shortly before harvest, and of course we use it on all Roundup Ready crops. So great, we have a reference dose of 1.75 mg/kg of body weight per day. Too bad we have no way of knowing how much we’re actually ingesting, unless we avoid every single potential product that might contain glyphosate!
Glyphosate Problem #5. That brings me to our 5th and final problem. I’ve read it documented in several places, that glyphosate does NOT accumulate in the human body. That’s a big part of why it’s been considered relatively safe, because if you do ingest it, you’re supposed to easily excrete it in your urine.
Now I went back to The National Pesticide Information Center website, and I found a hodge-podge of almost random quotes from different studies. There have been a lot of studies done, but there’s also a lot of variation. Let me start with these two quotes:
In humans, glyphosate does not easily pass through the skin. Glyphosate taken in through the skin or by mouth goes through the body in less than one day. Glyphosate leaves the body in urine and feces without being changed into another chemical.
Studies with rats showed that about one-third of a dose of glyphosate was absorbed by the rats’ intestines. Half of the dose was found in the rats’ stomachs and intestines 6 hours later, and all traces were gone within one week.
What makes the hodge-podge of quotes very interesting, is that when I actually went to look at the studies directly, from the references included on the NPIC site, I found a lot of different data, with a wide range of results. And strangely enough, that quote noting how all traces were gone within one week, went directly against a Monsanto study that showed two different dosages in male rats, where on the high dosage, just over 6% remained in tissue 7 days later, and then on the lower dosage, over 7% remained after 7 days of just one dose. Here are the comments made on that exact data:
Concentrations in tissues were determined on day 7 after administration of a single oral dose (10 or 1000 mg/kg body weight) of 14C-glyphosate to rats (Monsanto, 1988b). Although only a small proportion was absorbed, the isotope was widely distributed throughout the body, but was primarily found in bone.
And although there was a steep dropoff in concentration, the next two places it was found the most were the colon and the liver. And remember, that was 7 days after only one dose.
Then in another study mentioned right next to this one, where the rats were fed for 14 days instead of just one, there were these comments:
Maximum tissue levels were reached after 10 days or less, with highest concentrations (maximum 0.85 mg/kg at the 100 mg/kg dose level) in kidneys. It should be noted, however, that in this study concentrations in bone or bone marrow were not measured.
The data in that 2nd study showed a lower concentration in the kidneys than the other study, and obviously didn’t mention measure concentrations in bone. So the questions here are quite clear… does this stuff leave our bodies in a day, or doesn’t it? And if we are ingesting it every single day for years, and from multiple sources, then what happens?
We certainly don’t have all the answers yet, but we do have these 5 specific problems identified, which we can now clearly communicate to help raise awareness and make people understand exactly why there is concern about GMOs. In fact, you can make a big difference simply by sharing this post wherever you can, so please do! Click the social media share buttons at the top of this page, or just copy and paste this link to share it on your own:
https://walkamileproject.com/glyphosate-documenting-glyphosate-concerns/
Next up, we’ll dig deep into the EPAs mouse and then rat studies, which will hopefully give us a clearer picture of the whole “probable human carcinogen” bombshell that the World Health Organization dropped a few months back.
And just to make it crystal clear, here are the 5 Potential Concerns in a quick recap:
- If the regulatory agencies aren’t going to tell us how much herbicide residue is in all the roundup ready corn, soy, canola, and sugar beets, which can be in a majority of the food in the United States right now, how are we supposed to know how much we’re even ingesting?
- We don’t have labeling in the USA, so even if we did have an estimate on the residue, we wouldn’t even know when we were eating it anyway, because it doesn’t appear on the label. We’re never told.
- As of Glyphosate usage was literally off the charts, and we don’t even know how much that usage has increased since 2007 — plus, with that much usage, are any of the inert ingredients in glyphosate-based formulas causing concern as well?
- There’s another use for Roundup that is actually for non-Roundup Ready crops: PreHarvest Treatment.
- Does glyphosate accumulate in the human body?