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Moont1de t1_ixqu7a1 wrote

It's absurd how much we rely on methods and substances that we understand very little of to produce the food we eat and sell to others.

Agrarian reform should be at the forefront of political debate, not mostly irrelevant distractions such as children indoctrination or whatever the current buzz is

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Decapentaplegia t1_ixsc81r wrote

>It's absurd how much we rely on methods and substances that we understand very little of to produce the food we eat and sell to others

Glyphosate has been studied for decades, there are hundreds of publications and even entire textbooks dedicated solely to it. And the overwhelming conclusion from those studies is that is low risk, especially compared to what it replaced.

... and that's not even touching on the incredible environmental benefits from using it in tandem with crops bred to tolerate it.

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Jealous-Pop-8997 OP t1_ixqyh9i wrote

Yeah I agree but I think what it comes down to is that any way of farming that will be safe is going to require more labor and community involvement in peoples' own food production. but people have become acclimated to delegating the food production to mass producers so they can have easier lives.

I mean food prices have drastically dropped over the last 100 years since food production became hyper industrialized, to the point that the quantity of labor that actually goes towards feeding oneself is an all time low across world history. They're acclimated to super cheap food (with the health costs they're largely unaware of). People complain that the costs went up 10% or so as a result of inflation. It will be even more expensive than that if its not produced industrially with harmful compounds

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fasthpst t1_ixx7kgq wrote

That massive leap in efficiency came from mechanization. The minor contribution of pesticides is not worth the chronic exposure of our population.

Organic agriculture needs to be properly optimized. Soil science is where it's at.

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BlackViperMWG t1_iy2winy wrote

> Organic agriculture needs to be properly optimized. Soil science is where it's at.

But those two doesn't support each other. You can't really have healthy soil when farming organic at large scale. And you need more of it.

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[deleted] t1_ixrad9u wrote

What’s worse is that these substances are basically assumed safe until proven unsafe, and we leave the vast majority of safety testing and regulation to those who own and profit from the sales of these substances.

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Decapentaplegia t1_ixscg2y wrote

This is simply not accurate. All agrochems have to pass regulatory standards for agencies relevant to their use.

For example, in the US all pesticide residues are regulated to be at least 100x lower than the no-observed-affect level.

As for funding those studies... of course they are funded by the manufacturers, who else would? Many required studies are, however, conducted by independent certified testing labs.

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Jealous-Pop-8997 OP t1_ixsx4lp wrote

But it’s still effectively “safe until proven unsafe” because they merely reify the fact that they know what a safe level is, and that they understand every potential mechanism by which glyphosate can harm us, and that they know and have measured the full extent of the effects of the safe amounts of residue

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Decapentaplegia t1_ixzs5qn wrote

It just sounds like you aren't familiar with how OECD toxicology studies work. There are standardized protocols to assess chemical interactions with cell culture and animal models.

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Jealous-Pop-8997 OP t1_ixzuqa5 wrote

I could essentially just reply with the same exact comment.

Still effectively “safe until proven unsafe” because they merely reify the fact that they know what a safe level is, and that they understand every potential mechanism by which glyphosate can harm us, and that they know and have measured the full extent of the effects of the safe amounts of residue.

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Decapentaplegia t1_ixzv21m wrote

You could say that about literally any chemical. Why focus on glyphosate?

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Jealous-Pop-8997 OP t1_ixzurj5 wrote

Hence why other studies have demonstrated the harms

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Decapentaplegia t1_ixzvbuw wrote

I'm not denying that glyphosate does harmful things to cells if you expose them to preposterously high concentrations. I'm arguing that such studies have no relevance. Consumers ingest about 0.5 mg of gly daily, that's far lower than any of the studies showing harm.

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Jealous-Pop-8997 OP t1_ixzx3lc wrote

No I mean harm done in the doses regularly found in residues

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Decapentaplegia t1_iy0086b wrote

Can you cite some example studies?

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eng050599 t1_iy11w2i wrote

There's nothing capable of showing causal effects.

All of that data supports the current toxicity metrics.

What we tend to see are underpowered studies with little replication...if any, non-standard techniques, unsubstantiated deviations from established protocols, and of course, passing off of molecular fishing expositions, as being able to accurately determine treatment effects.

Consider that the OP posted a study where the authors state that their results shouldn't be extrapolated to represent normal pregnancies.

Having the entire study population comprised of high risk pregnancies is a major issue.

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[deleted] t1_ixscpa3 wrote

Uh huh. Then why did it take decades to show that glyphosate is toxic despite opponents saying it for so long?

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Decapentaplegia t1_ixse7cn wrote

...it's practically nontoxic.

Nature: Although GE crops have been previously implicated in increasing herbicide use, herbicide increases were more rapid in non-GE crops. Even as herbicide use increased, chronic toxicity associated with herbicide use decreased in two out of six crops, while acute toxicity decreased in four out of six crops. In the final year for which data were available (2014 or 2015), glyphosate accounted for 26% of maize, 43% of soybean and 45% of cotton herbicide applications. However, due to relatively low chronic toxicity, glyphosate contributed only 0.1, 0.3 and 3.5% of the chronic toxicity hazard in those crops, respectively.

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eng050599 t1_ixwt46l wrote

You do realize that the overwhelming majority of the scientific community, and regulatory agencies agree that it is not a significant risk at the current regulatory limit, right?

Let me guess, you read about the IARC's classification, and the studies used to spread fear by the various anti-biotech blogs, but haven't actually looked into the full docket?

In fact, I'm going to bet that you can't tell me the difference between how the IARC assesses chemicals, and how literally every regulatory agency does.

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Jealous-Pop-8997 OP t1_ixzkizm wrote

The problem with this is that truth is not voted on democratically. There used to be a consensus that malaria was contracted from the soil and those who believed it to be caused by mosquitoes were very few and considered fringe. Consensus doesn’t determine reality. We cannot just vote on what we want the laws of physics to be. Things are as they are.

Not to mention the consensus manufacturers gets to choose what scientists/what data to include

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Decapentaplegia t1_ixzqsgt wrote

>truth is not voted on democratically.

Nobody is saying this. We are applying the hierarchy of evidence.

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eng050599 t1_iy0o09r wrote

No, that's not how it works.

At the present time, all of the data regarding causal effects from glyphosate exposure indicate that there is no increased risk of any harm at the current exposure limits.

None of the studies claiming to show harm have an equivalent power of analysis, and are weighted lower than the compliant studies.

The data gets worse for the anti-glyphosate types when we also consider that, among the observational studies, the one with the largest power of analysis, the AHS, doesn't even show a significant correlative association to harm.

This is the reason why the scientific and regulatory communities overwhelmingly reject claims of harm.

What you are advocating is for scientists to weight studies based on how they align with your ideology, not in the strength of their design.

The key point is that we have data for causal effects from glyphosate exposure.

We have it for chronic exposure

We have it for acute exposure

We have it for carcinogenicity

We have it for cytotoxicity

Even though they've had decades to perform studies to show that those studies are flawed, either methodologically, or analytically, we see nothing that even comes close to the minimum standards in toxicology.

Back to the original study for this thread, it's design was so weak that even the authors state that their results are not representative of normal pregnancies.

That's a far cry from what we can determine from the compliant studies.

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Jealous-Pop-8997 OP t1_iy0q3r6 wrote

No what you’re doing is presupposing that you can measure and completely control in order to find harm. You’re also disqualifying or not counting studies that reject your hypothesis, and yes that glyphosate in the residual amount is safe is a hypothesis and not a conclusion.

You’re the one advocating that studies are weighted based on their alignment with your ideology rather than their adherence to the scientific method or their rigorousness

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eng050599 t1_iy0udvj wrote

...you do know that power of analysis isn't a subjective metric, right?

It's quite literally something that we calculate during the design stage of an experiment.

It's also why methods like the OECD designs include multiple guidance documents specifically to ensure that researchers will have data of sufficient strength to test for the causal effects for which the methods were designed.

There is a very real hierarchy in terms of statistical power, and the methods like those from the OECD Guidelines, along with their regional equivalents are only superceded by studies like DB+RCT

All but the largest prospective cohort studies rank below this, and in the case of. Glyphosate, it's actually hilarious that the AHS, a prospective cohort study, that doesn't have the statistical power to counter the OECD-compliant ones, it does have the power to counter the other lesser observational studies.

Guess what?

The AHS shows no significant link between glyphosate exposure at the current limits and harm.

Until data from studies of comparable power to the OECD methods materializes, there's no justification to change the toxicity metrics of glyphosate.

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