Long-Term Exposure To Glyphosate
These ever-increasing sources of exposure are worrisome. Dr. Michael Antoniou of Kings College in London explains that “There is an increasing body of evidence that levels of glyphosate exposure below regulatory set safety limits anywhere in the world given enough time can result in potentially serious disease.”
Health Concerns Over Glyphosate
Since its inception in 1974, America has used over 1.8 million tons of glyphosate. Worldwide, 9.4 million tons have been sprayed on crops to date (4).
It wasn’t until March 2015 that the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer declared the substance as “probably carcinogenic to humans”.
Monsanto is actively trying to fight this claim as well as the same categorization issued by the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (5).
Although glyphosate is mainly used as an herbicide, it is actually patented as an antibiotic (6). This may be part of the reason why the substance has so much impact on human health. It’s believed that the excessive use of the chemical is also contributing to widespread antibiotic resistance.
Other known health effects include:
- Wiping out beneficial gut bacteria
- Chronic inflammation
- Leaky gut
- Cell death (7)
- Breast cancer (8)
- Hormone disruption (9)
- Reproductive problems
- Birth defects (10)
- Neurotoxicity (11)
- Oxidative damage
Research is proving time and time again that glyphosate is dangerous, but it’s not the only ingredient in Roundup that’s toxic. The International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health writes (12):
“Pesticide formulations contain declared active ingredients and co-formulants presented as inert and confidential compounds. We tested the endocrine disruption of co-formulants in six glyphosate-based herbicides (GBH) … All co-formulants and formulations were comparably cytotoxic [toxic to living cells] well below the agricultural dilution of 1 percent (18 to 2000 times for co-formulants, 8 to 141 times for formulations).
… It was demonstrated for the first time that endocrine disruption by GBH could not only be due to the declared active ingredient but also to co-formulants.
These results could explain numerous in vivo results with GBHs not seen with G [glyphosate] alone; moreover, they challenge the relevance of the acceptable daily intake (ADI) value for GBHs exposures, currently calculated from toxicity tests of the declared active ingredient alone.”
The European Union is still on the fence on whether or not to renew a 15-year license for the legal use of the chemical. Although the renewal has been rejected twice, the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) will study health concerns claims for the next year before revisiting the issue (13).
It’s important to understand that the chemical is inherently toxic. It’s so harmful that it actually kills the crops it’s sprayed on, which explains in part why it’s so effective in killing unwanted weeds. Many claim that crops are genetically engineered to improve taste and hardiness, but one of the main reasons why modern crops are engineered is so that they survive exposure to the chemical.
Monsanto has so much influence in the matter of legislation that despite mounting evidence against glyphosate, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency now allows fifty times more glyphosate on corn crops than it did in 1996. The agency has also increased what’s considered as safe in terms of glyphosate contamination by 17 times.
In their press release, Moms Against America Glyphosate insists that the product doesn’t just end up in the food we eat; it actually stays in our bodies. The chemical has even been found in human breast milk (14).
How Does It End Up In Wine?
Quite simply, glyphosate is used on nearly every crop grown conventionally around the world.
In this specific case, glyphosate isn’t sprayed directly on the wine or fruits of grape plants, but rather on the soil in between each row of plants. Despite their attempts to keep the substance off the crops, testing shows that grapes, as well as grape products, are nearly always contaminated.
Worse yet, contaminated soil can retain chemicals for up to 20 years after being first applied.