This paragraph, for example, contains a common refrain. Apparently, glyphosate is being found at levels deemed unsafe by the EPA! 3/pic.twitter.com/mMdTL3vT7E
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I wrote a blog about this if you want the specifics, but the basic story is that glyphosate/cancer would only be a worry if you were eating hundreds of kilos of breakfast cereals a day for an entire lifetime 14/
To recap: 1. Breakfast cereals may have up to 800ppb of glyphosate in them 2. To get an "unsafe" amount - as defined by most experts - you'd have to eat 20kg+ of these cereals a day 3. Current best evidence doesn't support a link between glyphosate and cancer for most people 15/
So why is the EWG pushing the scare narrative so hard when most impartial government reports have found that these levels of glyphosate are safe? It's not immediately clear 16/
One possibility is funding. The EWG is proudly sponsored by the organics industry, who of course do not use glyphosate 17/pic.twitter.com/X91MCHNvMt
The report that they recently released even has a specific call for the companies who produce these breakfast cereals to switch to organic suppliers, who would of course include the above sponsors 18/pic.twitter.com/Wfz03YraHA
Is this a problem? Impossible to know. It is, however, strange that the EWG has gone against all international advice to set a threshold low enough that breakfast cereals are an issue 19/pic.twitter.com/fAWDuvVBIF
I should note - I don't think the EWG has done anything explicitly wrong here. They've set their own threshold for risk, based on their own assessment. It conflicts with most established scientific estimates, but that's not uncommon 20/
The problem is that we don't really know WHY it's so low. It's more than 10x lower than the next most conservative estimate that I can find, which is California who are usually BY FAR the most conservative anyway 21/
It's very hard for me to understand why they'd consider such low levels a problem, given that there are numerous studies that have not shown an issue even at much higher doses 22/
For some context - the California reference dose of 1.1mg/day is based on their "no significant risk" threshold, which means that an intake of this much is associated with a increase of less than 0.0001% lifetime risk 23/
To put it another way, this means that eating 1.1mg/day of glyphosate would be expected to harm 1 in 100,000 people over the course of 80 years 24/
Blog is now out on thishttps://medium.com/the-method/roundup-isnt-poisoning-your-cheerios-626d61f4c3d8 …
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