Home Forums FineTunedMac Community Lounge Cream and sugar in your Round-Up?

This lobbyist backs up so fast, when caught in an "Erin Brockovich Moment", I'm surprised he didn't start to beep.

RoundUp contains two active ingredients: glyphosate and soap. The glyphosate is an enzymatic inhibitor that prevents an enzyme crucial to photosynthesis from working. Animals, which don't use photosynthesis, lack this enzyme. The soap dissolves the waxy cuticle on leaves, allowing the glyphosate to penetrate more easily.

Glyphosate is non-toxic to humans and animals--in fact, its toxicity is lower than baking soda. The soap, on the other hand, is particularly unpleasant. Drinking it won't kill you, but you sure as hell won't like it--imagine a nice tall glass of Dawn dishwashing liquid.

That's not to say there isn't a problem with the chemicals used in agriculture. Whenever you have a chemical that's used without any oversight, there's potential for trouble. Imagine, for example, a pesticide that is toxic enough to humans and marine life, and that's strongly linked to neurological diseases like Parkinson's disease in small doses, which was banned by the government. Imagine that there was such a huge lobbying backlash that the government caved to enormous lobbying pressure on behalf of agribusiness and chemical production companies that it rescinded the ban, and that now not only is it legal, but the government places no restrictions on its use (it can be used on food crops right before they're harvested), and no records are kept on its use.

I'm not talking about glyphosate. I'm talking about rotenone, a pesticide used in large quantities in organic farming. (What? You thought organic farming doesn't use pesticides? Don't be embarrassed; you're not alone. It's one of the most common misperceptions about organic farming.)

I have no problems with glyphosate. In fact, I will gladly drink a shot glass full of Roundup if anyone who fears GMOs will agree to drink a shot glass full of rotenone. (One of us will be okay...)

The fear around GMOs is something I find distressing. Liberals in the US tend to mock conservatives for their anti-intellectual science denial on subjects like global warming and evolutionary biology--but liberals are just as anti-intellectual when it comes to antivax and anti-GMO beliefs.

Thanks for the information….quite enlightening. However, I didn't post this as a commentary on whether Round-up is/isn't harmful. I just thought it was hilarious (and still think so) the way the lobbyist was ready to issue a statement and then be completely unprepared to respond properly when challenged.

It seems to me that, when people in this man's business are going to make statements, they should think about the challenges they may get and have thoughtful answers ready. In this case he could have said: "Are you kidding? That stuff tastes like soap."

Instead, his comment "I'm not an idiot" simply told everyone watching that he must be wrong. And, contrary to what he wanted, he ended up looking like an idiot.

Re your "lobbyist": Patrick Moore, Man Who Refused to Drink Roundup, is Not a Monsanto Lobbyist

But yes, his performance is pretty damned funny!

Too bad they add those pesky inert ingredients.

The polyethoxylated tallowamine (POEA) in the article you linked to is the soap tacit was referring to. It's not considered an inert ingredient.

Well, there seem to be differing opinions on that.

There’s some semantics* involved here, as you well know. The concept ‘inert’ in the sense of 'non-reactive' may be used if the compound in question isn’t involved in the chemical reactions typical for an intended effect. US Federal law uses a variant rule. Surfactants qualify as chemically inert, since they only enable the reagent(s) physical entry into cells by disrupting cell membranes. But that’s NOT necessarily harmless to the affected cells, and that’s where their potential toxicity begins (and why I called it not-inert).

In the field, however, these surfactant concentrations are high enough to work, but also low enough not to harm**, because the crop plant not only needs to survive but to thrive. That said, this potential problem applies to all detergents we use, and the idea is to wash your produce well before use to get rid of any residues, harmful and inert. Moreover, being exposed to these residues by ingesting them is not exactly comparable to the experimental exposures described in the SciAm article you linked to. But you need to be aware of it all to make a balanced call on the issue.

*) Similar semantics are in play when rotenone is considered organic, and hence OK for use with organic produce. The same could be said for ricin, which few would consider harmless, as Georgi Markov could attest.

**) The dose-response issue remains important, in both original and derivative sense. Glyphosate is harmless at the concentrations used in the field and as residue on produce, but when used in massive overdose (e.g., by drinking) it may have a negative effect entirely unrelated to its plant-enzyme disrupting function. Remember that you can kill yourself by drinking too much water (and I don't mean drowning). Likewise, carbon dioxide is considered non-toxic, but it can kill you as effectively as if it were. Moore was right to be wary, but foolish to use the harmlessness example in the first place.

after reading wikipedia on that, it ends with a very interesting final note:


wow. that's impressive selectivity.

Rotenone is interesting stuff. I just recently wrote an article on the safety of GMOs that talked about the safety of organic foods as well. Rotenone is used to control insects in organic farming, but it's moderately toxic to humans and extraordinarily toxic to some marine vertebrates. The EPA withdrew approval for rotenone as an insecticide in producing food crops in 2006, but reinstated it in 2007 after an outcry from organic farmers.

One of the unfortunate things about rotenone is it has pretty good persistence. Organic pesticides also aren't regulated, in the sense that farmers need no training to use them, don't need certification in safe handling procedures, don't have limits on when they can use them, and don't have to document how or how much they're used. A recent Scientific American report suggested that pesticide residues from rotenone in some organic foods regularly exceed not only pesticide residues in conventional foods, but also exceed maximum allowable residues on a regular basis--especially for organic olives and organic olive oils. While rotenone is only moderately toxic to humans, some samples of organic olive oil examined in the Scientific American article actually contained unsafe levels of rotenone. (I generally try to avoid eating organic produce, especially spinach; after reading the article, I added organic olives and organic olive oil to the list.)

Rotenone is toxic because it screws up the electron transport chain in mitochondria. Mammalian nerve cells consume more energy than most other cells and are entirely dependent on glucose metabolism by mitochondria--they can't for instance, use the lactic acid cycle or metabolize fats. For that reason, rotenone seems particularly toxic to nerve cells and most especially to dopaminergic nerve cells, which is why it's implicated in causing Parkinson's disease in mammals. I'm not sure why it's so crazy toxic to fish, except perhaps maybe there's a peculiarity in fish glucose metabolism that is especially susceptible to the electron transport chain disruption caused by rotenone.

As an interesting side note, the toxic action of rotenone is remarkably similar to the toxic action of cyanide, which interrupts the mitochondrial electron transport chain by disrupting an enzyme called cytochrome c oxidase.

There it's not so much a matter of toxicity but a matter of uptake. It's very slow to absorb through skin exposure or even ingestion. But when introduced directly to the bloodstream, or specifically via respiration (lung or ESPECIALLY gill) it rockets into the blood.

IE fish could eat it all day without being too affected. But put it in the water they're trying to breathe, and they're coming right to the top. Even if it doesn't kill them outright, it effectively paralyzes them for awhile and they float up to the top, easy pickings for predators or fishers. (it's been used for fishing for a very long time, tribesman crushing up key plants with high concentrations of rotenone in them and tossing them into the water, and go out in the skiff and just pick up the fish floundering on the surface, they must have been seriously in awe of how tossing crushed plants into the water magically made the fish just come up for the grabbing)