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Taking the article at face value: So they can order the removal of anti-bacterial agents because they haven't scientifically been proven beneficial and there a

Taking the article at face value: So they can order the removal of anti-bacterial agents because they haven't scientifically been proven beneficial and there are potentially unknown side effects. Err on the side of caution, that's a wise decision. ... yet they use terms like GRAS (Generally Regarded as Safe) for things like Roundup Ready crops which have been scientifically (allegedly, I haven't read and understood all the science, but it seems reasonably credible to the layman) proven to contain significantly increased doses of POISON in food on the supermarket shelves which (admittedly unproven but) highly suspiciously correlated skyrocketing food allergies. I don't get it (genuinely). Why one application of a seemingly sane rule with unknown repercussions in one instance and a complete disregard for it in the other in the face of a huge amount of evidence that it is in fact unsafe? Is this because antibacterial agents in soaps are not funded by Monsanto? (okay, I asked that facetiously, but still)

parineum 10y ago
Maybe you should stop and understand the science before you continue on your road of assumptions.
- balabaster 10y ago
  If only I had 10 minutes to study the science of every last thing I don't understand... I'd be getting younger by the article. There's only so much time in a day to devote to so much activity while I'm waiting for code to compile.
  - hx87 10y ago
    Fine, but then don't make brazen statements like > but it seems reasonably credible to the layman > proven to contain significantly increased doses of POISON in food on the supermarket shelves
roasm 10y ago
I'm not defending Roundup at all, but the kicker here is the antibacterial chemicals don't do anything. If they did prove more effective in cleaning hands, I'd guess the FDA would probably look the other way on the side effects.
justratsinacoat 10y ago
>Is this because antibacterial agents in soaps are not funded by Monsanto? (okay, I asked that facetiously, but still) I mean, basically, yeah. Firstly, there's no market-spanning hand sanitizer megacorp (megacorps make hand sanitizer, but there's lots of them all doing it). I'm not scientifically convinced that Monsanto's shit is bad, necessarily, but I do know that they fuckin' run shit along multiple axes in the agribusiness world. Monopoly + legally-ironclad yearly subscription and licensing generally equals abuse, on some level, in the tech sector, and permanently equating the Big Evil Corp Monsanto with the utopian-futurist promise of GMOs is awful, IMO. Secondly, banning Roundup/Roundup-Ready stuff means Monsanto instantly loses tons of money, but banning anti-bacterials in hand sanitizer doesn't really make hand sanitizer work less well and probably won't result in much in the way of lost sales. After all, it's not like alcohol-based hand sanitizers aren't killing nearly everything on your hands already. People who buy a lot of hand sanitizer aren't going to _stop_, they just might be irritated about the loss of one of the 9s in the fractional part of the percent of 'bad things' killed. Triclosan et al are basically just the feature-add version of this [0]. Therefore, there's no need for hand-sanitizer-selling megacorps to protect their product by muddying issues of its safety, because the removal of one ingredient, important only because of the extra 9 on the label, doesn't change the product's value to customers or the megacorps. Banning (or even seriously investigating) Round-Up because of health concerns, real or imagined, would immediately harm Monsanto, which is a hueg important megacorp heavily reliant on the civilized world using its pesticide (and pesticide-compatible crops). [0] https://xkcd.com/641/ https://xkcd.com/641/
jonknee 10y ago
But Roundup actually works and works really well. There is no proof that food allergies are related. Anti-bacterial soap isn't proven to work better than regular soap and we have legitimate concerns about anti-bacterial resistance.
- hga 10y ago
  Also, Roundup has some big advantages in inherent safety. It's a competitive inhibitor of an enzyme that's necessary to synthesize aromatic amino acids like L-tryptophan ... and only plants can do this, we animals have to get ours from plants, or animals that eat plants, or animals that eat.... So its mechanism of action is entirely irrelevant to us animals. Maybe it's toxic in some other way, but that's been tested, to the point people are willing to drink the stuff. Now, the surfactants it's normally formulated with, to get past waxy coatings and the like that plants protect themselves with are another matter altogether, but then again, there's a reason we avoid putting soap in our eyes, with or without triclosan....
nxc18 10y ago
The crops that contain Roundup Ready traits (and several other traits including b.t. toxin for insect resistance) are not eaten raw - they are heavily processed. When you buy cornstarch, you're buying cornstarch. When you're buying ethanol for fuel, you're buying ethanol for fuel. People don't eat GM corn, they eat products that contain the products of GM corn, having gone through so much processing that it is ridiculous to think any residual roundup is going to be harmful. There is just no huge amount of evidence that GM crops are harmful to people. There is evidence that things like Roundup Ready corn & insect-resistant corn are better for the environment, because in the first case they reduce tilling (think erosion as huge amounts of soil are disrupted) and in the second they reduce the need for conventional insecticides. As for the correlation between food allergies, the timescale here is so long you could correlate it with anything. A particularly fitting comparison in this case would seem to be the internet, or perhaps devices shipping with Windows NT kernels. Most data sets I find show the rise starting around 1997, which would be fitting for food allergies and NT kernel adoption. (You might say that NT kernel adoption was much faster than the proliferation of GMOs - you'd be wrong) A sane explanation that doesn't rely on a boogeyman is that parents aren't exposing their children to contaminants like they used to. There are medical products coming out to address this, but the consensus seems to be that letting kids play outside, not dousing them in Clorox every 5 minutes, and making them eat peanut butter,etc. early enough are likely to be effective. See: [http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/4/12371552/aralyte-peanut-butter-allergy-antera http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/4/12371552/aralyte-peanut-but...] Finally, I'll leave with this note: anything you buy as a whole or minimally processed food will be essentially devoid of GMO food. You should be much more worried about the high amounts of sugar and sodium in those processed foods as added sugars are well known to be dangerous and unhealthy - the bonus is that if you avoid processed crap you'll also be avoiding GMOs.
- balabaster 10y ago
  Haha I like the comparison between the uptick of food allergies and the uptick of adoption of the NT Kernel. I thought this was considered GRAS, despite much evidence to the contrary :D

parineum 10y ago

Maybe you should stop and understand the science before you continue on your road of assumptions.

balabaster 10y ago
If only I had 10 minutes to study the science of every last thing I don't understand... I'd be getting younger by the article. There's only so much time in a day to devote to so much activity while I'm waiting for code to compile.
- hx87 10y ago
  Fine, but then don't make brazen statements like > but it seems reasonably credible to the layman > proven to contain significantly increased doses of POISON in food on the supermarket shelves

roasm 10y ago

I'm not defending Roundup at all, but the kicker here is the antibacterial chemicals don't do anything. If they did prove more effective in cleaning hands, I'd guess the FDA would probably look the other way on the side effects.

justratsinacoat 10y ago

>Is this because antibacterial agents in soaps are not funded by Monsanto? (okay, I asked that facetiously, but still) I mean, basically, yeah. Firstly, there's no market-spanning hand sanitizer megacorp (megacorps make hand sanitizer, but there's lots of them all doing it). I'm not scientifically convinced that Monsanto's shit is bad, necessarily, but I do know that they fuckin' run shit along multiple axes in the agribusiness world. Monopoly + legally-ironclad yearly subscription and licensing generally equals abuse, on some level, in the tech sector, and permanently equating the Big Evil Corp Monsanto with the utopian-futurist promise of GMOs is awful, IMO. Secondly, banning Roundup/Roundup-Ready stuff means Monsanto instantly loses tons of money, but banning anti-bacterials in hand sanitizer doesn't really make hand sanitizer work less well and probably won't result in much in the way of lost sales. After all, it's not like alcohol-based hand sanitizers aren't killing nearly everything on your hands already. People who buy a lot of hand sanitizer aren't going to _stop_, they just might be irritated about the loss of one of the 9s in the fractional part of the percent of 'bad things' killed. Triclosan et al are basically just the feature-add version of this [0]. Therefore, there's no need for hand-sanitizer-selling megacorps to protect their product by muddying issues of its safety, because the removal of one ingredient, important only because of the extra 9 on the label, doesn't change the product's value to customers or the megacorps. Banning (or even seriously investigating) Round-Up because of health concerns, real or imagined, would immediately harm Monsanto, which is a hueg important megacorp heavily reliant on the civilized world using its pesticide (and pesticide-compatible crops). [0] https://xkcd.com/641/ https://xkcd.com/641/

jonknee 10y ago

But Roundup actually works and works really well. There is no proof that food allergies are related. Anti-bacterial soap isn't proven to work better than regular soap and we have legitimate concerns about anti-bacterial resistance.

hga 10y ago
Also, Roundup has some big advantages in inherent safety. It's a competitive inhibitor of an enzyme that's necessary to synthesize aromatic amino acids like L-tryptophan ... and only plants can do this, we animals have to get ours from plants, or animals that eat plants, or animals that eat.... So its mechanism of action is entirely irrelevant to us animals. Maybe it's toxic in some other way, but that's been tested, to the point people are willing to drink the stuff. Now, the surfactants it's normally formulated with, to get past waxy coatings and the like that plants protect themselves with are another matter altogether, but then again, there's a reason we avoid putting soap in our eyes, with or without triclosan....

nxc18 10y ago

The crops that contain Roundup Ready traits (and several other traits including b.t. toxin for insect resistance) are not eaten raw - they are heavily processed. When you buy cornstarch, you're buying cornstarch. When you're buying ethanol for fuel, you're buying ethanol for fuel. People don't eat GM corn, they eat products that contain the products of GM corn, having gone through so much processing that it is ridiculous to think any residual roundup is going to be harmful. There is just no huge amount of evidence that GM crops are harmful to people. There is evidence that things like Roundup Ready corn & insect-resistant corn are better for the environment, because in the first case they reduce tilling (think erosion as huge amounts of soil are disrupted) and in the second they reduce the need for conventional insecticides. As for the correlation between food allergies, the timescale here is so long you could correlate it with anything. A particularly fitting comparison in this case would seem to be the internet, or perhaps devices shipping with Windows NT kernels. Most data sets I find show the rise starting around 1997, which would be fitting for food allergies and NT kernel adoption. (You might say that NT kernel adoption was much faster than the proliferation of GMOs - you'd be wrong) A sane explanation that doesn't rely on a boogeyman is that parents aren't exposing their children to contaminants like they used to. There are medical products coming out to address this, but the consensus seems to be that letting kids play outside, not dousing them in Clorox every 5 minutes, and making them eat peanut butter,etc. early enough are likely to be effective. See: [http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/4/12371552/aralyte-peanut-butter-allergy-antera http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/4/12371552/aralyte-peanut-but...] Finally, I'll leave with this note: anything you buy as a whole or minimally processed food will be essentially devoid of GMO food. You should be much more worried about the high amounts of sugar and sodium in those processed foods as added sugars are well known to be dangerous and unhealthy - the bonus is that if you avoid processed crap you'll also be avoiding GMOs.

balabaster 10y ago
Haha I like the comparison between the uptick of food allergies and the uptick of adoption of the NT Kernel. I thought this was considered GRAS, despite much evidence to the contrary :D