Disturbing: The carcinogenic herbicide found in all of our food - Walla! health

2022-07-14T05:45:10.033Z

The effect of nutrition on our health is tremendous, but it does not end with minerals and vitamins but is also related to the substances with which we grow our fruits and vegetables.

Disturbing: The carcinogenic herbicide found in all of our food

The effect of nutrition on our health is tremendous, but it does not end with minerals and vitamins but is also related to the substances with which we grow our fruits and vegetables.

A new report reveals a very, very worrying aspect - especially for our children

Walla!

health

14/07/2022

Thursday, 14 July 2022, 08:00 Updated: 08:31

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Hazardous substances in our food.

Urine test (Photo: ShutterStock, ShutterStock)

More than 80 percent of urine

samples taken from children and adults in a U.S. health study contained a herbicide-related chemical, a finding that scientists called "disturbing" and "disturbing."

Taken from a group of Americans destined to represent the U.S. population, 1,885 were with recognizable traces of GLYFOS.

It is the active ingredient in herbicides sold worldwide.

In 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, a unit of the World Health Organization, classified Glyphs as a carcinogen in humans.

And if that's not worrying enough - almost a third of the study participants were children aged six to 18.

Academics and private researchers have been reporting high levels of the herbicide Glyphos in surgeries of human urine samples for years.

But the CDC has only recently begun to examine the extent to which humans are exposed to the popular herbicide in the U.S., and its work comes at a time of growing concern and controversy over how food and water pesticides affect human and environmental health.

Most of us have a pesticide in our urine

"I expect the realization that most of us have Glyphs in our urine will bother many people," said Professor Ian Shepherd, of the Department of Environmental Sciences and Occupational Health at the University of Washington.

Thanks to the new study, "we know that a large portion of the population has it in their urine."

Shepherd was a partner in writing a 2019 analysis that found that exposure to Glyphus increases the risk of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and also co-wrote a meta-analysis from 2019 that reviewed 19 studies documenting Glyphus in human urine.

How much pesticide do our children eat?

To the full article

The herbicide is sprayed directly on the crops.

US corn field (Photo: AP, Dirk Lammers)

The herbicide is sprayed directly on genetically modified crops such as corn and soybeans, as well as on non-genetically modified crops such as wheat and oats as a pre-harvest crop.

Many farmers also use it in fields before the growing season, including spinach growers and almond growers.

It is considered the most common herbicide in history.

Glyphos residues have been documented in an array of popular foods made with sprayed crops, including baby food.

The main way of exposure to children is through nutrition.

"People of all ages need to be concerned, but I care especially about children," said Phil Landrigan, director of the World Public Health Program at Boston College.

"Children are more exposed to pesticides than adults because in terms of pounds they drink more water, eat more food and breathe more air," Landrigan said.

"Also, children have many years of future life when they can develop diseases with long incubation periods like cancer."