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Weedkiller ingredient tied to cancer found in 80% of US urine samples

theguardian.com

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Re: Weedkiller ingredient tied to cancer found in 80% of US urine samples

#291

Post by swayvil »

whimsicalism wrote: post #274
swayvil wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the rules forbid explicit accusation. Not vague insinuation. A rule forbidding vague insinuation would be too broad and open to abuse. That said, Monsanto would certainly deploy a flock of shills to HN, reddit, twitter, facebook, etc. The existence of motive, means and opportunity is clear. Therefore they have definitely done that. Are we going to ignore that fact?

Why make up something so easily checked? From the HN rules: > Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like.

No post body was provided.

Re: Weedkiller ingredient tied to cancer found in 80% of US urine samples

#292

Post by hyperdimension »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #120
abe_duarte wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who have been exposed to the chemical got cancer. Internal Monsanto documents show the link and their concern. A man got a court to rule in his favour for 289 million dollars, after the jury saw this evidence: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/aug/10/monsanto-tr...

People who have been exposed to got cancer, but that is meaningless in showing causation. Internal documents show concern, but show no evidence that it causes cancer, or that Monsanto had internal data showing it caused cancer.

This comment contains allegations known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm.

Re: Weedkiller ingredient tied to cancer found in 80% of US urine samples

#293

Post by HPsquared »

User23 wrote: post #282
abe_duarte wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who have been exposed to the chemical got cancer. Internal Monsanto documents show the link and their concern. A man got a court to rule in his favour for 289 million dollars, after the jury saw this evidence: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/aug/10/monsanto-tr...

Virtually everyone who eats food has been exposed to glyphosate at this point. You could use the same logic to conclude water is a carcinogen. Every case of cancer is clearly linked to water exposure.

It also works the other way: people who stop consuming water almost never die of cancer.

Re: Weedkiller ingredient tied to cancer found in 80% of US urine samples

#294

Post by EnKopVand »

ouid wrote: post #229
ramphastidae wrote: post #151

Society loves to make fun of those who choose organic produce, but avoiding glysophate is the main reason I do so, and it works: > Organic diet intervention significantly reduces urinary glyphosate levels in U.S. children and adults > https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001393512...

the pesticides used in organic farming are about as bad for you as the pesticides used in non organic farming, and used in higher quantities, since they are worse at being pesticides.

This is just blatantly false on every account. Especially the part where things like non-organic wheat are sprayed with weed-killer in the days before it's harvested because it increases the yield and protein as the wheat goes into turbo-mode because it knows it's dying.

Re: Weedkiller ingredient tied to cancer found in 80% of US urine samples

#295

Post by Retric »

Supermancho wrote: post #280
Retric wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“The earliest evidence of small-scale cultivation of edible grasses is from around 21,000 BC with the Ohalo II people on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.” “The earliest known weed control technology in 8000 BCE was the plow and hand-weeding (which includes hand-pulling, cutting with a knife, hoes and mattocks).” That's a very long gap till 8,000 BC.

It's implied that @21000BC, they were pulling weeds by hand. Weed killing is part of cultivation. No offense, but you seem completely out of touch with reality, on this topic. I'm not sure you can make a compelling argument without experiencing the simple world of gardening. https://imgur.com/a/Bly85h8 - these are 2 weeds that have taken over and killed a simple flowering plant from our yard. You can see there are 2…

That’s a logical assumption without direct archaeological support.

Remember we started with wild plants so a significant energy investments beyond throwing seeds may simply have been wasted effort because it’s less needed and has lower rewards. Further removing competitors is a non obvious behavor.

The benefits of a possible harvest increased after destination so the time lag between just tossing seeds and active farming could have been a very long period.

Re: Weedkiller ingredient tied to cancer found in 80% of US urine samples

#296

Post by tomp »

whimsicalism wrote: post #187
gnicholas wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't part of the benefit of GMO foods that you can make them tolerant to various pesticides? There are other ways to use GMO to make more productive crops, but my understanding was that one of the big reasons is that you can make crops that ignore pesticides that wipe out existing pests.

There's a lot of reasons. That is one large one, but you can also integrate natural pesticides into the genome of the plant, ie. Bt corn.

Which could be equally dangerous as external pesticides like glyphosate.

Re: Weedkiller ingredient tied to cancer found in 80% of US urine samples

#297

Post by tomp »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #173
gnicholas wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't part of the benefit of GMO foods that you can make them tolerant to various pesticides? There are other ways to use GMO to make more productive crops, but my understanding was that one of the big reasons is that you can make crops that ignore pesticides that wipe out existing pests.

> Isn't part of the benefit of GMO foods that you can make them tolerant to various pesticides? and diseases and parasites and weather etc etc

um... how do you think plants become tolerant to diseases and parasites? pesticides

Re: Weedkiller ingredient tied to cancer found in 80% of US urine samples

#298

Post by twawaaay »

There is very basic, simple reason for it and has nothing to do with the company being evil. I believe it is possible to use Roundup safely and the reason it gets into our food is misuse.

(disclamier: "possible to use safely" does not mean it is reasonable to expect people to do so on their own)

Roundup kills plants. It does it by breaking roots of the plant which causes the entire plant to dry out.

For some crops (like wheat), it is very beneficial to harvest the crop after it dried out. But plants do not care about calendar and do not necessarily all dry out at the same time.

So what farmers do, is to spray their crop just before harvest. It all dries out nicely and uniformly and can be harvested all together at the same time with minimum spoilage. It can also let them schedule harvest on various plots to happen at different times rather than all at the same time. It can also allow to force harvest earlier if you, for example, predict bad weather. Or if you want to go for vacation.

This is not how Roundup is supposed to be used but this is very popular "hack".

Re: Weedkiller ingredient tied to cancer found in 80% of US urine samples

#299

Post by gruez »

abe_duarte wrote: post #39
microSnowball wrote: post #21

Not knowing anything about glyphosate, I went to the article before reading the comments. I’ll just put this here because it was clear the researchers wanted to be sure people see it. From the first paragraph of the article—> > In 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer determined that glyphosate is a “probable human carcinogen” (IARC, 2015). However, the European Food Safety Authority and the Joint Foo…

People who have been exposed to the chemical got cancer. Internal Monsanto documents show the link and their concern. A man got a court to rule in his favour for 289 million dollars, after the jury saw this evidence: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/aug/10/monsanto-tr...

>A man got a court to rule in his favour for 289 million dollars, after the jury saw this evidence: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/aug/10/monsanto-tr...

You seem to be presenting this fact as some sort of that bayer is guilty, but it's not really convincing. For one, it's a 8 person jury in san francisco. I'd expect them to rule against bayer on ideological grounds (ie. little guy vs multi bililon dollar multinational corporation) alone. Second, if there's no scientific consensus on the effects of glysophate, I doubt a panel of laypersons would do better.

Re: Weedkiller ingredient tied to cancer found in 80% of US urine samples

#300

Post by aperson_hello »

User23 wrote: post #284
aperson_hello wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And we get guilt wrong in criminal trials all the time (see the number of people the Innocence Project has gotten off of death row because the person didn't do it). A jury saying one thing doesn't make it objective truth.

The overwhelming majority of convicted criminals really did the deed. The existence of black swans doesn’t mean most aren’t white.

Roughly 90% accuracy. And the burden of proof is lower in civil cases.

Which isn't to say that a civil trial verdict isn't accurate to some extent - it just isn't absolute proof. There's some evidence in scientific literature about roundup's carcinogenicity at high doses (like what a farmer or landscaper would commonly encounter) and other various health issues at high dose. The big question is what happens at low doses and if it's impactful. The science is still out on that (and the alternative of lower agricultural output per unit of land area isn't really palatable from both a starvation risk perspective and a climate perspective).

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