Glyphosate in food: Weed-killing chemical found in Cheerios

Melia Robinson/Business
Insider

• A jury recently ordered
  Monsanto to
  pay $289 million in damages to a plaintiff who alleged that
  his cancer was the result of using Roundup, the company’s
  popular herbicide.
• On the heels of the trial, an environmental nonprofit
  released a report that showed traces of the herbicide in
  popular cereals including Cheerios, Quaker Oats, and Lucky
  Charms.
• One important thing the cereal report left out: The
  active ingredient in Roundup — a chemical called glyphosate —
  
  likely does not cause cancer in the very low levels at
  which it is present.

Last week, a jury in San Francisco
ordered Monsanto to pay $289 million in damages to a school
groundskeeper who developed cancer after years of using Roundup,
the company’s popular herbicide. On the heels of the trial
outcome, The Environmental Working Group published
a scary-sounding
report that found traces of the chemical in dozens of
everyday foods, from cereals like Cheerios and Quaker Oats to
granola bars.

One important thing the report left out: The active
ingredient in Roundup — a chemical called glyphosate —
likely does not cause cancer in the very low levels at which
it is present.

The science linking glyphosate to cancer is limited at best. In
fact, the majority of published research on glyphosate and cancer
reveals low or zero risk. Here’s what you need to know about the
chemical in cereal.

The dose makes the poison

Dozens
of everyday items, from water (yes, water!) to chocolate can kill
you — provided you have enough of them.

wavebreakmedia/Shutterstock

Before developing cancer, the plaintiff in the
recent trial had used Roundup regularly in his job as a
groundskeeper at a California public school. For neglecting to
alert Johnson (and the rest of the public) about the potential
links between glyphosate-containing Roundup and cancer, the

jury ordered Monsanto to pay Johnson $289 million.

But as for whether glyphosate could actually have been the sole
or even primary cause of an individual’s cancer, the research
leans heavily toward “no.”

That’s because the dose makes the poison.

Eat or drink too much of nearly anything,
and you can die. That applies to everything from apple seeds
(which contain the deadly poison arsenic) to chocolate (which
packs the toxic chemical theobromide) to water (if you drink
roughly 6 litres of water at once, you can develop hyponatremia,
a deadly condition in which an excess of water causes your cells
to puff up like balloons).

The scare over a potential link between glyphosate and cancer
appears to have begun with a now widely-criticized statement put
out by a World Health Organization group known as the
International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in 2015.

That year, the IARC put glyphosate — Roundup’s active ingredient
— in a cancer-risk category one level below widely-recognized
harmful activities like smoking. But several researchers have
said the IARC’s
determination was bogus because there is
no evidence that glyphosate causes cancer. In fact, a

lengthy review found that the IARC had edited out portions of
the documents they used to review glyphosate to
make the chemical look far more harmful than its own research
had concluded.

Several recent rigorous scientific studies have added to the
notion that glyphosate — at least in the amounts we consume —
poses little harm and is unlikely to cause cancer.

Just last year, a review of
studies looking at the ties between glyphosate and cancer
concluded that in the low amounts of that people are actually
exposed to, glyphosate “do[es] not represent a public concern.”

So, should you be worried about breakfast cereal?

Melia Robinson/Business
Insider

The cereal report — which focused on children, not adults — found
levels of glyphosate higher than what it determined to be safe
for 43 of the 45 cereals it tested. Bu the math fails to
line up with other published figures on glyphosate safety levels.

In its report,
any cereal with a glyphosate level of more than 160 ppb, or parts
per billion, was marked as “unsafe.” The Environmental
Protection Agency’s legal limit on glyphosate in food for adults
is
5 parts per million, or 5,000 parts per
billion — meaning that the cereal report’s figures
were 31 times more stringent than what the EPA considers safe.

Given that children are smaller than adults, toxicologists
generally develop slightly more strict figures for them.

But instead of drawing from the EPA’s glyphosate numbers, the
cereal report authors looked to California standards — which are
notoriously tough and
recently led to the controversial decision of the state
slapping
cancer warning labels on coffee.

In California, where glyphosate is still listed in
a registry of “chemicals known to cause cancer,” the levels
of glyphosate considered “safe” to ingest are 60 times more
stringent than EPA regulations. Using that figure as a baseline,
the cereal report authors then added “an additional 10-fold
margin of safety” to arrive at their glyphosate safety threshold,
determining that ingesting 0.01 milligrams of glyphosate every
day would give you a one-in-a-million risk of developing cancer
over the course of your lifetime.

Given all that, it’s not surprising that so many cereals got
flagged as in the red for having glyphosate levels higher than
what the cereal report authors determined to be safe.

“Our products are safe and without question they meet regulatory
safety levels. The EPA has researched this issue and has set
rules that we follow,” a spokesperson with General Mills, the
company behind Cheerios and Lucky Charms, said in a
statement supplied to Fast Company.

“Glyphosate is commonly used by farmers across the industry who
apply it pre-harvest. Once the oats are transported to us, we put
them through our rigorous process that thoroughly cleanses them.
Any levels of glyphosate that may remain are significantly below
any regulatory limits and well within compliance of the safety
standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and
the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) as safe for human
consumption,”
said a Quaker spokesperson.

New research could change the controversial classification of
glyphosate

The IARC’s 2015 statement on glyphosate and cancer is not final.

Based on new studies (typically in mice), glyphosate could go
from its current status — where some people see it as a potential
cancer risk — to being recognized as having a low risk for harm.

Several studies of glyphosate and cancer are ongoing, and more
are coming out each year. Just last year, a review of
studies looking at the ties between glyphosate and cancer
concluded that in the low amounts that people are actually
exposed to, glyphosate “do[es] not represent a public concern.”

It’s also possible that new evidence could come out strongly
against glyphosate and suggest that it’s incredibly harmful. New
evidence dramatically changed the public perception of another
popular product which was initially labeled cancerous — a

zero-calorie sweetener called saccharin, which is sold under the
brand name Sweet’ N Low.

In the 1980s, any
product containing the sweetener was required to carry a
warning label saying that it was “determined to cause cancer.”
But the science was flawed: the rats that had been used in the
studies were especially prone to bladder cancer, and the findings
did not apply to people. So in 2016, the sweetener was removed
from a list of cancer-causing ingredients.

Glyphosate’s status ultimately remains to be seen.