I’d like to respond publicly to Russell Easy’s May 24 opinion piece, “Science is not about opinions,” by repeating some of the points I made in my lecture in Mahone Bay in April.

The chelating agent we are discussing is glyphosate, the active ingredient of the herbicide RoundUp. Almost two billion pounds are sprayed on almost 500 million acres of genetically engineered crops every year.

There is so much of this chemical that it is in our drinking water, soil air, rain and rivers. But most of all, it is all over the food system. Every food item made from engineered crops sprayed with the herbicide RoundUp contains residues of glyphosate.

So what is it about this chemical? A bit of history first. In the early 1960s, a large chemical company was looking to create a product that would clean industrial pipes and boilers of mineral deposits. The successful molecule was glyphosate.

The Stauffer chemical company patented glyphosate in 1964 as a strong and very broad-spectrum descaling agent.

A descaling agent is a chelator. Please note that it is not an antioxidant, Mr. Easy.

A descaling agent grabs onto metal deposits in pipes and boilers and cleans them up. In living systems, a descaling agent grabs onto metal micronutrients that are essential to the proper function of many cellular enzymes. A descaling agent, by its very presence, depletes our food supply of essential minerals.

If engineered food is depleted of micronutrients, does that make it junk food? A depleted diet, continent-wide, is not without consequences socially. The medical system is looking for the smoking gun for epidemic levels of celiac and obesity and diabetes and kidney failure and liver damage. Is it possible that after a long time of eating depleted food, some people might become ill?

Depleted food makes people sick, by definition. They are starved of micronutrients made unavailable by the residues of glyphosate in the food.

That is probably why normal people take the correlation co-efficients of Nancy Swanson’s studies very seriously.

They show an incredibly high probability that a depleted Western diet of engineered food is responsible for a long list of epidemic gastro-intestinal, renal and hepatic symptoms in mice, rats and in people.

Thierry Vrain lives in Courtenay, B.C.


principle wisest

Re: Russell Easy’s May 24 rebuttal of Thierry Vrain.

I understand the former’s commitment to science, but I wonder what his answer would be to David Suzuki when he says, “Any politician or scientist who tells you these products are safe is either very stupid or lying. The hazards of these foods are uncertain. In view of our enormous ignorance, the premature application of biotechnology is downright dangerous.”

Lucinda Pigdon, Beaver Bank