Glyphosate in Chicken Feed- Should I be concerned or not?

[saysfaa]

... Australians chose low quality poisoned food over abundant, nutritional food that spread and grew without effort

Spread and grow without effort, yes.

Harvest without extensive labor, not so much.

I admit I've never tried to harvest a prickly pear but it seems the flowers and pads are the only parts eaten by people.

the fruits of are delicate, they need to be carefully harvested by hand. Then the spines rubbed off.

The pads of the plant also must be harvested by hand. Then the spines removed.

 

[Loving my girls]

I LOVE it!!! Thank you!!!

I've never seen a peer review (or peer review type) submission with so many of the notes about what changes the committee recommended and why. Especially, why. And notes about how the authors edited and why. Especially, why.

That is worth far more to me than anything it actually says. Although, I do wonder a bit about who leaked it. And will fight with my conscious about whether I should spread anything about it - later, when I'm less sleep deprived and less in need of a diversion from real life.

But about what it says...

Did you read it beyond the title? I don't think it says what you think it says.

"The NRC review considered adverse effects of water fluoride, focusing on a range of concentrations (2-4 mg/L) above the current 0.7 mg/L recommendation for community water fluoridation."

They weren't looking for the effects of fluoride at low concentrations. However, they did include them sometimes - some of the studies included them to some degree.

At first read and a little bit of going back to check things, it seems to me that the studies consistently (but not universally) found that statistically significantly lower IQ was found in children living with increased fluorine exposure only when the concentration of fluorine is greater than twice the recommended concentration. Not when it is at the recommended concentration or lower.

And the differences in IQ were increasingly greater the higher the concentration of fluorine.

Oh. I should have read the rest of it in greater detail before starting to write... on page 21 "Much of the evidence presented in the report comes from studies that involve realtively high fluoride concentrations. Little or no conclusive information can be garnered...about the effects of fluoride at low exposure concentrations (less than 1.5 mg/L). ... Drawing conclusions about the effects of low fluoride exposures (less than 1.5 mg/L) would require..."

A list of what conclusions about the effects of low fluoride exposures would require (at least for this committee's approval) is given.

-------------------

Going down a few rabbit trails from this...

I wondered if fluorine does things besides protect against tooth decay. It does. "Although fluorine is not an essential in mammalian physiology, it plays several important roles and overexposure can cause harm to every major organ system." from chapter 10 of "Essential and Toxic Trace Elements and Vitamins in Human Health" by Nour Mahmoud, et al. published 2020.

The book covers "routes of human exposure to fluorine, the beneficial effects..., metabolism, cellular processes affected by fluoride, and how organ systems and disease processes are modulated by homeostatic and pathologic fluoride exposure." Very cool! I'll look into getting this book or an older edition if there is one.

And I wondered if it is possible to be deficient in fluorine besides its effect on teeth. Evidently, it might just not be an issue because it is ubiquitous in the atmosphere and hydrosphere, and in soils and plants. That needs more looking into. Also, its relationship to Iodine in the body - hopefully, that will be in the book.

And way down the rabbit trails....
It is pretty easy to make tooth powder if you are worried about fluorine in toothpaste too. And a lot less expensive, I think - I'm not too sure about that part, i was given the clay. I think the tooth powder is better than baking soda or salt or toothpaste. I'm not particularly worried about the fluorine; I looked it up as a way to ditch the plastic tubes toothpaste comes in.

Toothpaste is one of my pet hates, so to speak.
Generally there are 7 items in toothpaste which are “bad” by that I mean carcinogenic etc. The worst being good old Sodium Laurel Sulphate or SLS. The foaming agent which does nothing but foam and is carcinogenic, it is also in shampoo, washing machine liquid the list goes on. These products have been sold to us by saying the bubbles are good … but they’re not.
I have found quite a few toothpastes in supermarkets which do not contain these bad guys so I have to ask why do the others still exist ? Answer they make people rich.

 

[No Coop No Problem]

Spread and grow without effort, yes.

Harvest without extensive labor, not so much.

I admit I've never tried to harvest a prickly pear but it seems the flowers and pads are the only parts eaten by people.

the fruits of are delicate, they need to be carefully harvested by hand. Then the spines rubbed off.

The pads of the plant also must be harvested by hand. Then the spines removed.

The entire plant, besides the roots, is fully edible. It grows a ton of delicious fruit as well. They're genuine miracle plants that are capable of growing without effort in barren deserts. You're correct the harvesting is more complicated than traditional crops though, but I'm sure a machine could easily remove the spines if the industry was motivated

It takes me about 20 seconds to use my thumb to remove the spines from a fruit. Usually I use a knife to remove the larger spines from the pads

Anyways, this is an example of a crop that grows without effort, without poison, in both nice areas and arid areas that are otherwise unable to grow anything at all. In fact they're so vigorous that the Australian government had to import exotic animals to stop them, a food source, from spreading

 

[Folly's place]

Speaking as a cranky old lady here. There's nothing new about being exposed to dangerous stuff! In those 'good old days', lead, mercury, DDT, other products too numerous to mention. How about TB, plague, smallpox, other fun diseases? Way more food poisoning, diagnosed less often, but there.
Our life expectancy is twice what it was not so long ago.
Modern agriculture has it's flaws, but in those 'good old days', way fewer people were fed.
Mary

 

[Sally PB]

Amen, Mary. From one cranky old lady to another.

 

[U_Stormcrow]

Spread and grow without effort, yes.

Harvest without extensive labor, not so much.

I admit I've never tried to harvest a prickly pear but it seems the flowers and pads are the only parts eaten by people.

the fruits of are delicate, they need to be carefully harvested by hand. Then the spines rubbed off.

The pads of the plant also must be harvested by hand. Then the spines removed.

"the fruits are delicate" (though perhaps less delicate than you might assume) is your answer for why there is limited commercial value. I've almost never seen them fresh even in specialty grocers. Even if you could overcome the other issues or at least make them cost effective, delicate fruit limits shipping and storage, making it a niche local product. Same reason that the only people in the US that eat Paw Paws either grow them themselves, or their neighbor does.

The rest of the plant is plenty edible, but even when I lived in the Austin, TX area, with high demand in certain ethnic/cultural foods, there was low demand for nopales / nopalitos. (Link, for those who don't know what I'm talking about). I have a jar in my fridge right now, and another in the pantry back stock. Use them when making fajitas (every other week, seems like...), they pair really well with goat meat and rather well with chicken...

I have seen the prickly pear cactus flesh itself, fresh, not pickled, available in a large number of specialty stores - it transports better and is a staple of some cuisines.

 

[BDutch]

I agree there is a money motive for finding Monsanto liable, yes.

As to the rest?

Concern (a polite word for fear) is reasonable. But if the fear is not in proportion to the risk, it is IRRATIONAL.

The Dosage is the Poison. as has been known for several hundred years, at least, in the Western World, and much longer in the Easter world.

Every MSDS I linked in response to your earlier comment is deadly, dangerous, or downright lethal in sufficient dosage.

The Oral LD50 - that is, the dose expected to be lethal 50% of the time - is as follows:

90,000 mg/kg for Water in rats (6 liters in several hours reportedly lethal for humans)
3,000 mg/kg for Salt in rats (s we can say salt is 30x more toxic than water)
2,000 mg/kg for Vitamin A in rats (so Vitamin A is about 50% more lethal than Salt)

and Glyphosate? its 5,000 mg/kg in rats. (2.5x SAFER then Vitamin A. 1.66666666x safer than table salt).

Now someone can reasonably argue that you need water, salt, vitamin A to survive. You don't need Glyphosate. I'm certainly not rushing out to the farm store to grab a bottle to have with dinner. But if I did, its likely to be less lethal than an equal amount of Vodka (80 proof is around 2,000 mg/kg, similar to Vitamin A).

So while I might have some very mild concern about Glyphosate in my food, I'm much less concerned by it than the amount of Salt and certain Vitamins added to our foods.

There is a huge difference between instant death and building up toxins until a catastrophe emerges after several decades.

Vitamine A breaks down rapidly in sunlight. The harm is instant. Not in due course.
Glyphosate and similar poisons attacks your nerve systems and brains. It does so every time you inhale /eat or drink a fairly amount of it. The damage is there unnoticed. If you start acting weird, a lot of unreversible damage has been done.

Please look into the problems with Parkinsons disease and similar diseases.

 

[Kenya Mwangi]

To me the key is dosage. How much does it actually take to hurt you? As long as I am below those levels I'm not that concerned about it. I personally like a factor of safety, I do not want to be right on the cusp of dangerous.

Hello When you say this it reminds me of people smoking cigarettes. 1 pack for one day when you are a teenager will not likely hurt you because you are below the danger level. But do that everyday and you might be the one walking around carrying an oxygen machine on your shoulder when you are 50.

The health problems from glyphosate that you are not concerned about might show up later from accumulation.

 

[U_Stormcrow]

There is a huge difference between instant death and building up toxins until a catastrophe emerges after several decades.

Vitamine A breaks down rapidly in sunlight. The harm is instant. Not in due course.
Glyphosate and similar poisons attacks your nerve systems and brains. It does so every time you inhale /eat or drink a fairly amount of it. The damage is there unnoticed. If you start acting weird, a lot of unreversible damage has been done.

Please look into the problems with Parkinsons disease and similar diseases.

Responded to that in greater detail HERE.

My posts are long enough already without trying to both anticipate every potential objection AND squeeze them into a half hour lunch!

Particularly on subjects where the average BYCer appears to have limited background knowledge, no personal expertise, and there are great differences in understanding of the base sciences.

 

[Kenya Mwangi]

Should I really be this concerned?

Hello There is so much information about glyphosate in this review.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9101768/

The conclusion of this review with these dozens of studies is the very last sentence...

"Although there are important discrepancies between the findings analyzed in this review, it is unequivocal that exposure to glyphosate, alone or in commercial formulations, can produce important alterations in the structure and function of the nervous system of humans, rodents, fish, and invertebrate animals."

Read through these studies if you like. Some are you have to pay for, but maybe free for you through Penn State on Pubmed.