by Carey Gillam
Rising demand for more and better testing prompted one coalition of scientists and activists, working through what they call the Detox Project, to start offering testing in early 2016 through a laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco, that is registered with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The program was designed for individuals curious to learn if glyphosate is present in their bodies through urine testing, but it quickly expanded to include food product testing, using the more precise and well-regarded method known as liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS).
The Detox Project warns would-be testers that they may not like what they find. The group says this on its website:
Glyphosate is present at all levels of the food chain: in water, plants, animals, and even in humans. Every single study that has measured human contamination with glyphosate has found it….
Despite claims that glyphosate has been widely studied by regulatory agencies and industry, little is known about the health effects of glyphosate-based herbicides at levels found in food or water.
In North Dakota, an agronomist at the state university, Joel Ransom, became so curious about glyphosate residue that in 2014 he ran his own tests on flour samples from the region. North Dakota grows much of America’s hard red spring wheat, a type that is considered the aristocrat of wheat and carries the highest protein content of all classes of American wheat. It is used to make some of the world’s finest yeast breads, hard rolls, and bagels. But growing the wheat and bringing a healthy crop to harvest is not always easy in a state known for cold and damp conditions. To make harvesting the crop easier, many North Dakota farmers spray their wheat crops directly with glyphosate to help dry the plants a week or so before they roll out their combines. The practice is also common in Saskatchewan, across the border in Canada. So when Ransom ran his tests on flour samples from the area, including flour from Canada, he expected to find some samples with glyphosate. He certainly did not expect all of them to have glyphosate residues. But they did. Ransom reported his findings to the Wheat Quality Council in February 2015, telling the group he was surprised by the results because it was generally believed by agricultural experts that if farmers used glyphosate as instructed, the pesticide’s residues should not persist in the grain, let alone in the flour made from it.
Researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) have also been on the hunt for glyphosate residues in recent years. As an agency of the U.S. Department of the Interior, the USGS’s mission is to provide scientific information about the health of the nation’s natural resources. Part of its recent work has been tracking glyphosate use in America and the spread of the pesticide through the nation’s waterways, air, and soil.
USGS scientists have found glyphosate and something called AMPA (short for aminomethylphosphonic acid) “widely in the environment,” including “commonly in surface waters” and in more than 50 percent of soil and sediment samples and water samples from ditches, drains, large rivers, and streams.7 The scientists also found the pesticide and the related acid in roughly 30 percent of lakes, ponds, and wetland areas.
“Glyphosate is definitely out there. You see it all the time. Glyphosate and AMPA are pervasive in the environment,”8 said William Battaglin, a USGS hydrologist and past president of the American Water Resources Association. Battaglin coauthored the 2014 study for the USGS that found glyphosate and AMPA so prominently around the United States.9
Measuring residues that include those from AMPA, which is created as glyphosate starts to break down, is critical because AMPA is not just a benign by-product; it carries its own set of concerns, scientists believe. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) did at one time include AMPA residues in calculations when setting a “safe” residue level for glyphosate in food, but it has not done so in recent years, a decision that many scientists believe adds to the hidden danger associated with the pesticide.
It’s a shell game of sorts, according to biologist Michael Hansen, who is a senior scientist with Consumers Union and a former member of the USDA’s Advisory Committee on Agricultural Biotechnology. By not considering AMPA residues when setting the legally allowed levels of glyphosate residue, Hansen said, the maximum residue limit (MRL), or “tolerance,” as the EPA calls it, is functionally made much higher. To put it more simply, by ignoring the residues of the by-product of glyphosate, more glyphosate residues are legally allowed to be considered “safe.”10
Since at least the 1960s, world food and health experts have sought to gauge how much of a pesticide can be ingested on a daily basis—an “acceptable daily intake” (ADI)—over a lifetime without any noteworthy health risk. U.S. regulators typically use the term “chronic reference dose,” but the idea is essentially the same—to establish a limit on how much of a pesticide a given individual can ingest, or be exposed to in a day, without exceeding levels that regulators believe could be of concern. Chronic reference doses are typically based on what animal studies show to be the lowest dose at which adverse health effects caused by a pesticide are seen. The EPA takes the human-equivalent amount of pesticide that harms animals and lowers it significantly in a formula designed to provide protection to human health. That acceptable dose is set at 1.75 milligrams (mg) of glyphosate per kilogram (kg) of a person’s body weight per day for Americans. The European Union, in contrast, says the acceptable intake is more than fivefold lower, or 0.3 mg/kg/day.
Separately, many countries also set different tolerance levels for the amount of pesticide residue legally allowed in foods. These MRLs vary for different types of grains and food, and they correlate to the maximum amount of residue that is expected following proper application of whatever pesticide the tolerance is tied to. Tolerances for pesticides may differ depending on the commodity. For example, although the tolerance for the insecticide chlorpyrifos is 1 part per million (ppm) on cherries, it is 2 ppm on radishes. The EPA uses the tolerance levels, together with estimated concentrations in drinking water, to calculate people’s high-end dietary exposure to a pesticide based on a typical diet, making sure that estimated exposures do not exceed the ADI, or reference dose.
The United States allows among the highest levels of glyphosate residues, which critics say underscores the level of influence Monsanto has with regulators. They point to 2013, when Monsanto asked for, and received, EPA approval to allow even higher tolerance levels than were already allowed on many foods.11 Thousands of public comments opposing the move were filed with the agency, but the EPA backed Monsanto’s position and responded to critics by insisting that glyphosate’s safety was proven, exposures through food and water were low, and worries about ties to diseases such as cancer were unfounded. “EPA has concluded that glyphosate does not pose a cancer risk to humans. Therefore, a dietary exposure assessment for the purpose of assessing cancer risk is unnecessary,” the agency stated in a public notice.12
Tolerance levels for glyphosate have expanded significantly over the years in several crops. Data compiled by agricultural economist and researcher Charles Benbrook show that tolerance levels for wheat, soybeans, and barley have all been raised to levels much higher than they were twenty years ago. The data make it clear that the more pesticide use the chemical companies promote, the higher the tolerance levels are set by the EPA.
The EPA even has gone so far as to say that safety margins called for by law to protect children from pesticide exposures could be reduced when it comes to glyphosate. The Food Quality Protection Act calls for the EPA to use an extra tenfold (10X) safety factor when assessing exposure risk and establishing allowable levels for pesticide residues in food, unless the EPA determines the extra margin is not necessary to protect infants and young children because the substance in question is so safe. That’s exactly what the regulatory agency decided with glyphosate, saying it had adequate data to show that the extra margin of safety for glyphosate could be eliminated.13 “There is a reasonable certainty that no harm will result to the general population or to infan
ts and children from aggregate exposure to glyphosate residues,” the agency stated in its 2013 decision to raise the allowable limits of glyphosate residues in some foods.14
Even with the EPA’s generous allowances for glyphosate residues, many of the various individuals and organizations doing their own testing have found levels that exceed the tolerances, though many tests do show residues falling within the allowed thresholds. Still, critics say even residues that the EPA says are at safe levels may in fact be harmful to human health when consumed meal after meal, day after day. They believe that the EPA’s analysis is outdated and not sufficient to protect people from the pervasiveness of many pesticides, such as glyphosate, that are often combined in food.
Data from animal experiments suggest that when glyphosate is consumed, 15 to 30 percent of it is absorbed into the body.15 Some research has also shown it can cross the placenta during pregnancy.16
But there are far more questions than answers when it comes to glyphosate in food, according to businessman Henry Rowlands, who launched the Detox Project in California to test food and bodily fluids for glyphosate residues. Rowlands, who is from Wales, spends most of his time in Bulgaria, where he owns a language translation business. But his family heritage is rooted in farming, and as he watched the global debate over glyphosate unfold, he jumped in with both feet, getting to know researchers, working with activists, and putting his own money behind efforts to raise awareness. Rowlands said he found quickly that glyphosate is such a hot-button issue that even trying to find independent laboratories to run tests is a challenge. All but two of the American labs he sought out to help launch large-scale testing declined. More than 350 turned him down before Rowlands was able to forge an arrangement with the FDA-registered Anresco Laboratories in San Francisco to offer glyphosate residue testing to both nonprofits and commercial companies.
“I’m certain it was political,” Rowlands told me in a call from Bulgaria. “All of these labs test for big food producers. They aren’t going to risk their bottom line looking for something food companies don’t want people to find. It’s really sad. They’re not protecting public health.” In some of the early work Rowlands had done by Anresco, the lab found glyphosate residues in a range of popular processed foods, including popular brands of cold cereals, crackers, and cookies.17
The private and nonprofit attempts to test foods for glyphosate residues were well under way when the World Health Organization’s cancer experts made their March 2015 decision to classify glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen. But testing efforts doubled after that, in large part because WHO’s decision didn’t stand alone; rather, it added to warnings that many scientists had been making for years. The fallout was fast and furious as various government bodies and consumer groups rushed to respond. California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) went so far as to issue a public notice in September 2016 that it would list glyphosate as a cause of cancer under requirements of the state’s Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986. In Germany, consumer protection officials called for a ban on glyphosate, and Colombia halted a program encouraged by the United States that sprayed glyphosate on illegal coca fields. Consumer organizations in the United States and Europe demanded that regulators take steps to restrict or ban glyphosate herbicides to protect both human health and the environment, and a petition signed by thousands of Americans was presented to the EPA in April 2016 demanding that glyphosate be revoked in the United States.
Members of a nonprofit called Moms Across America, armed with data about glyphosate residues, boarded a bus and launched a National Toxin Free Town Tour to advocate for a rollback of glyphosate and other chemicals seen as harmful. “The fact is that cities simply cannot afford the risk of using Roundup any longer,” said Zen Honeycutt, the group’s director. Honeycutt, the mother of three boys, founded Moms Across America after she became convinced that pesticide-laden food contributed to the life-threatening food allergies that plagued one of her young sons. Her group’s motto is Empowered Moms, Healthy Kids. Glyphosate is one of the group’s most feared foes.18
Moms Across America and two other nonprofit groups didn’t stop with petitions and marches. They sued General Mills in August 2016, accusing the company of deceptive advertising because some of the company’s granola products marketed as made with “100 percent natural whole grain oats” were allegedly found to contain glyphosate residues.19 Monsanto has done its best to quell the uproar and to assure consumers and regulators that the pesticide is safe. Monsanto officials have stressed repeatedly that they believe even if glyphosate residues are present in food or beverages, they can’t be at levels high enough to be dangerous.
So just how is the public to know if glyphosate residues are common in the food they buy for their families? And if the weed killer is in your food, how high are the levels? If the residues are there, are they at least within the levels set by the EPA as safe? Those should not be hard questions to answer. Indeed, because of the undeniable presence and pervasiveness of pesticides, it has long been the responsibility of the U.S. government to track pesticide levels in food and, importantly, to determine whether residues, if present, are below danger levels. Both the USDA and the FDA have spent decades regularly surveying samples of the American food supply to look at levels of pesticide residues. The testing is critical to protecting public health because a range of health problems are tied to pesticides. Some types, such as popular insecticides, are known to affect the nervous system. Others—like glyphosate—are suspected carcinogens; and others have the potential to cause harmful changes in human hormones. According to the EPA’s website, the specific health effects of a particular pesticide depend on the pesticide’s toxicity and how much of it is consumed. The EPA also notes that infants and children may be especially sensitive to health risks posed by pesticides.
With all that in mind—and considering that glyphosate has been the most widely used herbicide on the planet, and that it has been the top agrochemical in the United States over several years, and that it is commonly used in food production, and that it is sprayed directly onto many types of food crops—one might expect it would be the priority in these residue-sampling programs. After all, regulators routinely have looked for residues of other chemicals used far less in food production.
And yet the truth is this: U.S. regulators have spent decades not testing for glyphosate residues. Glyphosate stands out as the one key pesticide that regulators do not look for. Consider the Pesticide Data Program (PDP) that the USDA has conducted since 1991. Each year, the agency collects residue data for hundreds of pesticides in a range of food products. The analysis has even included infant formula and other baby foods, as well as drinking water. The purpose of the program is to “assure consumers that the food they feed their families is safe,” according to the USDA. In its 2014 PDP annual summary, for instance, the USDA reported testing for residues of more than 400 different herbicides, insecticides, and other pesticides on food products. But how many tests did they run looking for glyphosate residues? None.20
Only one time, in 2011, did the USDA search for glyphosate residues. It conducted what it called a “special project”21 in which it tested 300 soybean samples taken from twenty U.S. states for glyphosate. More than 90 percent—271 of the samples—carried the weed killer residues. Almost all—287—carried AMPA residues. The USDA said in addition to glyphosate and AMPA, eleven different pesticides were found in the soybeans, but less than 21 percent of the samples contained those other pesticide residues. Glyphosate was by far the most pervasive in the beans.22 Some thought the results might trigger more testing, but the agency said further testing for glyphosate was not a high priority because the chemical was considered so safe. It also said that while residue levels in some samples came close to the glyphosate tolerance allowed by the EPA, they did not exceed those levels.
The USDA did come close to launching a very limited testing program in the spring of 2017, just as glyphosate concer
ns were reaching a fever pitch. Documents I obtained from within the agency23 show a plan to test over 300 samples of corn syrup for glyphosate starting in April 2017. But the agency quietly dropped the plan, with little explanation, just a couple of months before it was to begin.24
One of the USDA’s excuses for not testing for glyphosate has been cost—the agency has said repeatedly over the years that it is too expensive and inefficient to look for glyphosate residues in food headed for American dinner tables. And, the agency says, because glyphosate is considered so safe, testing would be a waste of time. That argument mimics Monsanto’s own—the company says if the USDA did seek to test for glyphosate residues in food, it would be a “misuse of valuable resources.”25 Yet, while U.S. regulators don’t test for glyphosate residues in the foods Americans eat, a division within the USDA known as the Grain Inspection, Packers & Stockyards Administration (GIPSA) does test for the residues in crops headed for food production overseas. GIPSA has been quietly testing wheat for glyphosate residues for years because many foreign buyers don’t want glyphosate in this important food crop. GIPSA’s testing is part of an “export cargo sampling program,” documents I obtained from within GIPSA show. GIPSA’s tests found glyphosate residues in more than 40 percent of hundreds of wheat samples examined in 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012, according to documents I obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. The levels vary, the data show, ranging up to 10 parts per million (ppm), well above the 4 ppm that Monsanto at one point had told the EPA should be tolerated and considered safe.26 GIPSA’s testing results were not made available to the public in the USDA’s annual program reports, however. GIPSA’s job is not to report these findings to the public but rather to work with grain handlers, test manufacturers, and life science organizations to help in the marketing of U.S. grain.