Glyphosate is Everywhere!

Last night at an event, glyphosate came up.  Totally a hot topic that could be discussed at length…for hours.  Because there was so much interest, I thought it made sense to share a little bit about glyphosate.

If you don’t know anything about glyphosate, I’m glad you’re hear.  Ever seen commercials on television for weed killer or been shopping at your local hardware store and seen Round Up on the shelves?  Well, my friends, glyphosate is essentially Round Up.  And it is literally everywhere.  Round Up is owned by a company called Monsanto.  I bet you’ve heard of them.  They developed this herbicide to help farmers kill weeds and bugs that try to destroy their crops, but the problem with doing that is that herbicide gets into our food and spreads like wildfire.  Let me give you a little history lesson on this little germ killer.

Glyphosate was first introduced in 1997.  At the time, it was the 5th most active ingredient in pesticides and 36 million pounds were used.  That number seems high, right?  Wait…

In 2001, glyphosate moves to the #1 spot and is now the most widely used ingredient in pesticides.  Now we’re up to 90 million pounds.  But it gets better…

Just 10 years ago, glyphosate accounted for 182.5 million pounds used and is still the top ingredient in pesticides.  It even passes the second highest ingredient by 100 million pounds.  Are you still with me?  This was the last data sample from the EPA until May 2017.  Why?  There might be a good reason why.

When glyphosate first wanted to be introduced by Monsanto the EPA wanted more testing.  But Monsanto fought back.  The battle went on but Monsanto came out on top.  The won the fight.  No more testing.  And there hasn’t even been testing on humans…ever, from what I understand.  When the EPA finally decided to approve glyphosate, three people decided not to sign the approval for Round Up.  On a podcast I listed to, the interviewee said he asked one of these EPA employees why they chose not to sign.  In a nutshell, this employee said the EPA was making a mistake.

Here’s what I want you to take away from this article.  Yes, glyphosate is everywhere.  Including in organic food.  The problems are:

  1. There is no requirement in the US or Canada for labels to indicate if the food or product has GMOs in it.  There has been a law passed, but we’ll see where that goes…
  2. The World Health Organization has classified glyphosate as a possible carcinogen (YES – the big C-word) but the government has yet to do anything about it.
  3. Glyphosate is predominantly used on wheat, corn and soy crops.  This is clearly the majority of the foods most of us eat!

So what do we do?  There’s a lot more to this story so first and foremost, do some research yourself.  One place I’ve been able to get a lot of good information on is The Walk a Mile Project.  They are a non-profit organization that’s goal is to address one issue at a time and deliver the truth about what’s really going on.  They make documentaries to showcase the effects of GMOs.  I HIGHLY recommend you check them out.  And stay tuned in to what’s going on, what our government is approving and what is happening in our local communities.  You can help change the world by just taking one small action at a time.

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