Emails Show FDA Chemists Have Been Finding Glyphosate in Food • Hacker News Board

Re: Emails Show FDA Chemists Have Been Finding Glyphosate in Food

#221

Post by TeMPOraL » Fri, May 11, 2018, 6:52 AM UTC

toofy wrote: post #219

azernik wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who gives a shit about motivation? Do you care if your take-out food was made in the expectation of a financial return, or does it need to be made out of the restaurant owner's sincere love of feeding strangers?

Considering what motivates someone can often be useful. People can behave and make drastically different choices based solely on motivation. People will often pick and choose what information they choose to share or choose to hide based largely on the motivations that are driving their project. Motivation can drastically alter the way an idea is presented to the audience in which it is being presented. Obviously we w…

Motivations here as are complex as the players involved. It's entirely reasonable to expect that researchers who invented e.g. golden rice were thinking about the lives it'll save. It's also entirely reasonable to expect companies to support development and deployment of it because it's profitable for them.

On a less extreme end, companies sure want crops with improved resistance to pathogens and insects for profit reasons, but this is the case where their incentives somewhat align with public good.

Re: Emails Show FDA Chemists Have Been Finding Glyphosate in Food

#222

Post by resnapremi » Fri, May 11, 2018, 6:54 AM UTC

random4369 wrote: post #14

dfxm12 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember watching a lecture from Vandana Shiva who claimed that glyphosate was harmful and making it in to our food. She cited some European studies that found glyphosate in a wide variety of products. She claimed that there were shady things going on in the US government that seemed to obscure these facts. While this might prove her true that the US government is trying to hide the glyphosate levels in food, does…

Every time the jury is out on a topic where one side has a vested interest and a billion dollar budget to protect it, you can be reasonably sure what the outcome will be. See: pesticides and bees, fossil fuels and climate change, food packaging plastics and cancer, pain treatment meds and addiction. The answer in all those cases is the harmful effects eventually became known, but the jury was out long enough for the…

> See: pesticides and bees, fossil fuels and climate change, food packaging plastics and cancer, pain treatment meds and addiction.

Cigarettes come to mind, too.

Re: Emails Show FDA Chemists Have Been Finding Glyphosate in Food

#223

Post by TeMPOraL » Fri, May 11, 2018, 6:58 AM UTC

buvanshak wrote: post #215

vincnetas wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why so pessimistic? Aren't there any independent labs where you can send your samples for testing and then see results for your self? Send to multiple labs for more control.

This is not always possible. For example, take the claim that a certain thing X in some eatables is harmful/not harmful for human beings. Such a thing might not be possible without long term study. Or the claim that smoking will kill you, but what if you want to know if smoking moderately is as bad as exposing to automobile pollution every day? Or living in an area with polluted air. Mainstream narrative today emphas…

Those cases have another interesting feature - you're wasting time worrying about them.

When scientists have problems figuring out whether or how much something is harmful, it's because it's so harmless it's hard to measure. If e.g. artificial sweeteners caused cancers the way many believe, you'd see people dropping dead left and right, with cancers clearly linkable to the use of sweeteners.

Those studies are obviously important, on a population scale. For individuals, obsessing about those things too much puts you in more danger to your health than those things could ever cause.

Re: Emails Show FDA Chemists Have Been Finding Glyphosate in Food

#224

Post by realusername » Fri, May 11, 2018, 7:03 AM UTC

colah3 wrote: post #151

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Blind opposition to industrial progress -- which is what you are suggesting -- carried by the rising tide of public opinion will cause a ton of damage in the century to come, and the damage will never be repaid. What damage will be caused by people using their phones less for fear of getting cancer? What about GMOs? What is the harm in not using them? The EU has mostly banned them and it doesn't look to be sufferi…

With regards to GMOs, the green revolution (as I understand it[1], partly using GMOs to increase food production, especially in developing countries) is often described as saving a billion lives. On a brief glance, I can't find a detailed estimate of the Humanitarian effects, but Borlaug received a Nobel peace prize for it and that scale of impact does seem plausible. [1] See discussion below about relative importanc…

> the green revolution (as I understand it[1], partly using GMOs to increase food production, especially in developing countries) is often described as saving a billion lives.

This argument is moot, industrialisation saved those lives, not GMO, GMO only provides a 5% increase to crops in the developed world. Tractors, fertilizers and proper agricultural techniques saved the developed world (just like it did in the current developed one) not GMO.

Re: Emails Show FDA Chemists Have Been Finding Glyphosate in Food

#225

Post by TeMPOraL » Fri, May 11, 2018, 7:03 AM UTC

sincerely wrote: post #78

rohit2412 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SO what about cell phone radiation and cancer, or maybe GMO food and cancer?

a pretty informative read re: cell phones and cancer: https://www.thenation.com/article/how-big-wireless-made-us-t... (as usual, article headline is clickbait, not chosen by writer, please do not judge the content based on the title)

Could you do the TL;DR of that? I skimmed it, because it's the long-form type of read I hate (little meat, lots of unrelated stories). Is there anything there that stands up to the standard counterargument called "non-ionizing radiation"?

Re: Emails Show FDA Chemists Have Been Finding Glyphosate in Food

#226

Post by TeMPOraL » Fri, May 11, 2018, 7:12 AM UTC

airstrike wrote: post #150

tptacek wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't so much an argument as it is innuendo. If you get glyphosate carcinogenicity wrong, you increase carcinogenic agriculture, because that's what the market alternatives to it are: clearly known human carcinogens.

The other market alternative is eating organic.

"Organic" usually means even worse chemicals were used so no, that's not better.

Re: Emails Show FDA Chemists Have Been Finding Glyphosate in Food

#227

Post by [deleted] » Fri, May 11, 2018, 7:13 AM UTC

colah3 wrote: post #151

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Blind opposition to industrial progress -- which is what you are suggesting -- carried by the rising tide of public opinion will cause a ton of damage in the century to come, and the damage will never be repaid. What damage will be caused by people using their phones less for fear of getting cancer? What about GMOs? What is the harm in not using them? The EU has mostly banned them and it doesn't look to be sufferi…

With regards to GMOs, the green revolution (as I understand it[1], partly using GMOs to increase food production, especially in developing countries) is often described as saving a billion lives. On a brief glance, I can't find a detailed estimate of the Humanitarian effects, but Borlaug received a Nobel peace prize for it and that scale of impact does seem plausible. [1] See discussion below about relative importanc…

[deleted]

Re: Emails Show FDA Chemists Have Been Finding Glyphosate in Food

#228

Post by buvanshak » Fri, May 11, 2018, 7:30 AM UTC

the-pigeon wrote: post #39

tptacek wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't so much an argument as it is innuendo. If you get glyphosate carcinogenicity wrong, you increase carcinogenic agriculture, because that's what the market alternatives to it are: clearly known human carcinogens.

This is actually somewhat common too. Like chlorine being replaced by other disinfectants in drinking water. https://www.npr.org/2011/01/07/132743638/disinfectant-to-cle... Basically you have some popular chemical so it gets studied extensively and we learn about the bad things it does. It then starts being replaced by things that have been less studied, so there's less evidence of the bad things they do but could be…

A very good recent example being Vaping replacing smoking as a "healthier alternative"....

Re: Emails Show FDA Chemists Have Been Finding Glyphosate in Food

#229

Post by buvanshak » Fri, May 11, 2018, 7:36 AM UTC

Black-Plaid wrote: post #198

tptacek wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no credible studies indicating that glyphosate is a carcinogen, and it would be a little bit surprising it if was, since it targets a metabolic pathway not present in animals. Meanwhile, many of the herbicides that glyphosate displace, plenty of which remain in use, are known human carcinogens. The most widely reported declaration of glyphosate's carcinogenicity, by IARC, was disavowed by the WHO, IARC's pa…

There are also no credible studies showing that chlorine gas is carcinogenic, so it must be safe!

Another manifestation I have seen of this behavior is this.

The claim "vaccines does not cause autism" is often made to implicitly imply "All vaccines are very safe". I mean, this belief is harbored by every single one of the "Educated" "science-believers" out there. It is so damn ridiculous that people (who often consider themselves intelligent) can be so easily misguided.

Re: Emails Show FDA Chemists Have Been Finding Glyphosate in Food

#230

Post by mmjaa » Fri, May 11, 2018, 7:41 AM UTC

jjoonathan wrote: post #71

random4369 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time the jury is out on a topic where one side has a vested interest and a billion dollar budget to protect it, you can be reasonably sure what the outcome will be. See: pesticides and bees, fossil fuels and climate change, food packaging plastics and cancer, pain treatment meds and addiction. The answer in all those cases is the harmful effects eventually became known, but the jury was out long enough for the…

In college, I did a deep dive into GMO safety research for journal club back when the Seralini "GMOs cause cancer in mice" paper hit (2010 or thereabouts) and found quite a counterexample to your rule: bogus (obviously p-hacked) science from Seralini and an aggressive misinformation campaign from Greenpeace to convince people that Monsanto was using terminator genes (bio-DRM) against poor farmers when the truth had b…

"Blind opposition to industrial progress -- which is what you are suggesting -- carried by the rising tide of public opinion will cause a ton of damage in the century to come, and the damage will never be repaid."

The OP is clearly NOT suggesting "blind opposition" to industrial progress - in fact, what is wanted, is absolutely transparent, non-blinded research.

But, this is not what is on the table. You've skilfully managed to turn the argument away from the facts: companies such as Monsanto WANT BLIND FAITH in their products, and work very avidly to ensure that the public - and their representatives - do not get to see all the facts.

So, what exactly is your intention here?