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

[2ndTink]

My chickens were far more thrilled than I was at their attempted invasion. Too bad they were wild, my dragon would have loved them too

Dragon!?! ?

 

[JacinLarkwell]

Dragon!?! ?

I have a beardie too

 

[Kenya Mwangi]

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.

Hello I never thought of it like that. I think I will start using glyphosate now on my crops.

Only kidding!

Your entire post does a disservice to Parcelsus's expression "The Dosage is the Poison"

Cherry picked data about the LD50 of glyphosate comparisons is irrelevant to the effects of small amounts in chicken feed or cheerios to peoples health. And your simplistic view of science suggesting that if something is toxic at high dosage, it must be safe at low dosage, is inane. (I used a thesaurus for that one to sound all scientificky)

 

[Kenya Mwangi]

"high doses"

All those symptoms are scary.

So are the symptoms of all other substances when more are ingested than the body can handle.

Another substance also sounds really scary.

"Ultimately the swelling of brain cells will cause your central nervous system to malfunction. Without treatment, you can experience seizures, enter into a coma, and ultimately die." Source of quote. On the other hand, you're going to have problems if you don't drink water.

We don't need Round Up like we need water. We do need food, though. Preferably, a reliable, affordable supply of it. That might be possible without Round Up. It might not be. I think it would be wise to at least consider what the food supply and costs would be like without it.

Also, have you considered why Round Up is used so much? One of the main reasons is that is orders of magnitude safer than most of the other herbicide options ever developed.


Yes, minuscule amounts have been found in cheerios. Most references say 300 – 1670 ppb of glyphosate.

the EPA determines a safe threshold by taking a given percentage (100th or 1000th, depending on the substance) of the minimum amount that would cause any detectable effect in lab animals.

EPA allows 30,000 parts per billion of glyphosate. Which means it takes at least 3,000,000 parts per billion to result in a detectable difference. Not a significant difference - just a detectible difference.

The World Health Organization gives a threshhold of 1 milligram per kilogram of body weight per day for chronic toxicity.

Hello You may go right ahead with your trusted World-Health-Organization-less-than-1-milligram-per-kilogram-body-weight-glyphosate-is-safe-diet. Make sure you don't eat the full 1 milligram to get that "chronic toxicity" though. Make sure you only get regular toxicity, not the chronic kind.

 

[saysfaa]

Here's an example of the EPA calling something safe that has repeatedly been demonstrated as harmful in countless independent studies-

Here are 64 studies demonstrating that fluoride exposure lowers IQ in children. 64 studies. ...

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.

 

[U_Stormcrow]

Hello I never thought of it like that. I think I will start using glyphosate now on my crops.

Only kidding!

Your entire post does a disservice to Parcelsus's expression "The Dosage is the Poison"

Cherry picked data about the LD50 of glyphosate comparisons is irrelevant to the effects of small amounts in chicken feed or cheerios to peoples health. And your simplistic view of science suggesting that if something is toxic at high dosage, it must be safe at low dosage, is inane. (I used a thesaurus for that one to sound all scientificky)

I've already commented an the lack of a time/dose dependency relationship in the literalture re: non-hodgkins lymphoma.

and yes, I know Theophrastus. No, I don't need a thesaurus or google AI.

I know the IARC conclusion of "possible carcinogen" that has induced the Glyphosate panic (and supported a multi-billion $ jury award) was not "probable carcinogen, likely carcinogen, or known carcinogen" - and even that mild conclusion has been rejected by all other bodies of similar or greater knowledge.

I know that the IARC didn't even pretend to make a risk assessment.

I also know that multigenerational rat studies had NOAEL limits (now that we have covered the LD50s) greater than 2mg/kg/day. The developmental toxicity study for rabbits was 175mg/kg/day. Vitamin A, btw, is similar.

I also know that Glyphosate isn't readily metabolized, doesn't concentrate in any organ particularly, and is mostly excreted via the urinary tract in a brief window after exposure (industrial exposure studies show it peaks about 6 hours after exposure).

So, am I concerned that my birds might be ingesting micrograms ( would have to google the ascii for the greek character to write that otherwise - or copy/paste) daily as part of their feed intake? Having made a risk assesment from the available literature. Resoundingly, NO.

 

[No Coop No Problem]

So pick 3 of the most common things farmers grow in your area.

This is one of the big issues with agriculture. Humans intentionally grow low quality crops that are prone to pests and disease. Corn for example has almost zero nutritional value, and yet it's grown and heavily sprayed with poison throughout the process

There are a million plants out there that are immune to pests and disease, yet farmers won't grow them. They intentionally choose weak plants that require poison to be grown

For one example the prickly pear (opuntia stricta) was introduced to Australia where it spread with zero human assistance and zero poison-

"They quickly became a widespread invasive weed, eventually converting 101,000 sq mi (260,000 km2) of farming land into an impenetrable green jungle of prickly pear, in places 20 ft (6.1 m) high. Scores of farmers were driven off their land by what they called the "green hell"; their abandoned homes were crushed under the cactus growth, which advanced at a rate of 1,000,000 acres (4,046.9 km2; 1,562.5 sq mi) per year."

A million acres of land in Australia was covered by delicious food, naturally and without effort. However the Australians wanted to grow traditional crops instead, and so they imported an exotic moth to kill the cactus so they could grow corn, beans and wheat instead with heavy assistance of herbicide

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

 

[U_Stormcrow]

If you are looking to chase rabbits down holes, btw, Atrazine is used on about 50% more acreage of corn here in the US, in twice the weight of glyphosate use.

Mmmmm, Atrazine.

 

[Loving my girls]

If it is GLYPHOSATE you are referring to …
Over here in France it is illegal to sell, it kills everything. Farmers still use it as they bourght a stash before the law came into effect.

It is used as a kill all weed killer, and it does, very quickly !!!

 

[Loving my girls]

The air you breathe is contaminated. The water you drink is contaminated. As scary as that is I'm not planning to stop breathing air or drinking water.

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. If the air quality is so bad due to a dust storm or fire I try to stay indoors so the AC or heat system can filter those bad particles out of the air.

Am I happy to find Glyphosate or any other contaminate in my air, water, or food? Of course not. But as long as those levels are below the levels someone that has used science as a basis instead of opinion to come up with those levels I'm OK with it.

As is often the case with government chemical limits they specify an amount but, as it’s very low, we don’t worry about it. However if there is a low dose in 15 products used the total of those 15 products can make a dose higher than recommended by the government.
In my opinion it’s better to avoid completely if you can.