4 ms·

Chlormequat in food and urine from adults in the United States from 2017 to 2023

92 points by spekcular 3y ago

vilicity 3y ago
I don't understand why it still seems to be a huge secret.They've genetically modified seeds so that home gardening of fruits and veggies seeds cannot be used to plant future gardens.They tell us that we're using to many antibiotics,yet antibiotics are given to cows,pigs,chickens,the very meats we consume.Maybe that's why antibiotics are being said to not work and not human consumption.The very living conditions of meat consumption is also tainted. Meats are being grown in labs stating a shortage of food yet they are using chemicals like the ones listed here to reduce the foods we need. They recently raised the retirement age to 70 years old. They are trying to use chemicals which cause infertility in humans (read the article here keyword infertile). It's all about controlling population, people not living to retire,yet using them as lab rats while they are on this side of the dirt.Plausable deniability be dammed .
- JanaKlein 3y ago
  Has anyone tested cows & chickens? Dogs? General Mills owns Blue Buffalo. It looks like it's been in animal feed since 2007, and purebred dogs have had a noticeable fertility decline since about 2010. "Reverse Flynn effect" started 2011 (steadily decreasing IQs across the board in several countries) as did "trans" population explosion (in same countries.) Ppl think I'm crazy for thinking these issues are population control, so I'm happy to see I'm not alone.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
NegativeLatency 3y ago
Well this is making me think about switching to organic only grains. Feels like a bit of a regulatory failure.
- voakbasda 3y ago
  Organic may not be much better, as many of the chemicals approved for organic crops are even worse. So, yes, regulation has failed. Good luck holding anyone accountable.
  - chasebank 3y ago
    A friend of mine owns / operates a few hundred acre certified organic Avocado ranch in Carpinteria, CA. He explained to me it's mostly just paperwork and the organic pesticides / fertilizers are just as, if not more, gnarly than the non-organic ones. He said it just makes people feel good and there is virtually zero difference. Obviously a single source but one I hold very credible.
    - chabes 3y ago
      Sounds like your buddy is just using the organic title for marketing purposes. That is unfortunate, but not uncommon. Here’s a source that doesn’t fit your buddy’s description… Along the central coast of California, conventional strawberry growers apply chemicals like methyl bromide, an internationally banned substance that is no longer being manufactured, but is stockpiled for exemptions to the ban, which these growers exploit. Alternatively they have been experimenting with methyl iodide and other hardcore synthetic chemicals. They hire undocumented laborers to apply them. Organic strawberry growers, on the other hand, use crop rotation of a brassica crop as a bio-fumigant, and they grow rows of alfalfa as a trap crop where pest infestations can be literally vacuumed up with a tractor implement. In this case, there is a huge difference. It is true that the National Organic Program is a joke, since they let the board get taken over by corporate big ag long ago. That doesn’t mean “it just makes people feel good and there is virtually zero difference”. In some cases it does, but to paint the whole thing as such is denying the larger reality.
      - chasebank 3y ago
        "It is true that the National Organic Program is a joke, since they let the board get taken over by corporate big ag long ago. That doesn’t mean “it just makes people feel good and there is virtually zero difference”. In some cases it does, but to paint the whole thing as such is denying the larger reality." The national program is the one that matters, right? Most people consuming organic produce in the US are affected by this. Isn't that the larger reality? The people who know and buy from their local organic strawberry farmer has to be the .0001 edge case.
voakbasda 3y ago
Another reminder that most food produced by industrial processes is poisoning us. News of this chemical’s prevalence may be news, but the general story is not. Yet nothing has changed, nor should anyone expect otherwise. Big Ag achieved regulatory capture and can afford to delay indefinitely (if not outright stop) any meaningful change from happening.
- readthenotes1 3y ago
  I fail to understand why you're getting downloaded and I hope some of those who did will explain. "Don't ask how the sausage is made" predates any of us still alive by a fair margin
  - billfor 3y ago
    Because life expectancy is nearly at an all time high. Folks that are 50 or older grew up playing with all sorts of toxic chemicals and most of us are still here and fine. If anything you are more likely to become ill by excessive worrying than the actual chemicals.
    - amanaplanacanal 3y ago
      Our gains in life expectancy during the last 100 years are probably mostly due to vaccines, antibiotics, and anti-smoking campaigns, completely unrelated to whatever chemicals are in our food. These are separate issues.
    - snapcaster 3y ago
      Are they fine? What metric are you looking at that indicates the health of americans is good?
hscontinuity 3y ago
Having little personal knowledge in this area of food growth, harvest and production, then of course any pre-market execution practices for shelf lives or processing; what are the ill effects of exposure specifically relating to birth/fetal deficiencies? Perhaps I'm a bad looker-up but I can't find the relative answer (seemingly) in various animal studies linked, outside of noting reproductive issues. Thanks in advance!
boh 3y ago
Excuse me if I’m reading this wrong, but less than 100 urine samples were tracked for any given year?
- alwa 3y ago
  On the one hand, as a statistician memorably put it, “doesn’t matter how big the soup bowl is, you still need the same size spoon to taste what kind of soup it is.” On the other hand, yeah these particular convenience samples seem almost deliberately weird. The entire apparent spike in 2023 seems to correspond to a one-off total switch to buying random bulk urine from Florida.
  - burkaman 3y ago
    Wow that is a great quote, really makes it intuitive why sample size doesn't have to grow with population size.
    - tgv 3y ago
      But it does grow with variability and effect size. And of processes you don't understand, you don't know these. So you often do need a big spoon, and to taste more than just the top. "This noodle soup is just water (p < 0.05)."
suddenclarity 3y ago
> Compared to these previous studies in Europe, the median levels measured in our study of U.S. samples from 2017 to 2022 were lower, while the median level in 2023 samples were comparable to samples from Sweden, and lower than UK samples > Current chlormequat concentrations in urine from this study and others suggest that individual sample donors were exposed to chlormequat at levels several orders of magnitude below the reference dose (RfD) published by the U.S. EPA (0.05 mg/kg bw/day) and the acceptable daily intake (ADI) value published by the European Food Safety Authority (0.04 mg/kg bw/day). My two takeaways. The main source in the US seems to be from import and it's several magnitudes lower than acceptable daily intake. This might obviously change, but still reasonable to keep in mind.
photochemsyn 3y ago
Body burning screening for toxic chemical accumulation should be a regular part of every American's yearly physical checkup with their doctor - which itself is an increasingly rare phenomenon, many people only go to doctors and hospitals after getting very sick as they can't afford to have a regular doctor or preventative health program. A body burden program would lead to the identification of the most problematic industrial and agricultural chemical products, and so it would be blocked by lobbyists from the fossil fuel, petrochemical, agribusiness, and manufacturing sectors. America has the worst public health care / food safety system in the industrialized world, and not even a pandemic that killed over a million American citizens resulted in any political pressure to change the system.
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  > Body burning screening for toxic chemical accumulation should be a regular part of every American's yearly physical checkup with their doctor Is it just me or are yearly physicals and primary care doctors nearly worthless in practice (not in theory)? For adults, not kids. Anything truly urgent is better served by urgent care or emergency room. They are useful for referrals for specialists when you actually have a serious issue. The screening you suggest seems like a good idea yet so far beyond the type of care they actually offer. Its like they are the 1st tier tech support who cant really do anything and exist as a filter.
  - beacon294 3y ago
    Many family doctors are like this, I think they want to minimize their work and many simply don't have the experience necessary. Would recommend you find a doctor at a bigger institution that wants to be there.
  - FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
    Typo: s/burning/burden/g Initially I thought there was some test involving the combustion of a biopsy sample.
  - ericmcer 3y ago
    Primary care seems kind of like a personal trainer or other accountability person. Sure you can take your heart-rate, blood pressure, EKG, etc. and make assessments on your own (I got a pretty thorough setup for ~$150), but most people need the structure or else they won't even check their BPM. Lab work is the one area that seems worthwhile. Bloodwork can give you early signals for tons of potential problems.
JohnMakin 3y ago
You have to scroll an absurdly long time to find it but this is the key sentence: > Current chlormequat concentrations in urine from this study and others suggest that individual sample donors were exposed to chlormequat at levels several orders of magnitude below the reference dose (RfD) published by the U.S. EPA (0.05 mg/kg bw/day) and the acceptable daily intake (ADI) value published by the European Food Safety Authority (0.04 mg/kg bw/day). The levels reported in this study are so negligible but it gets a lot more clicks on your study if you present this data as "chlormequat was detectable in X% of samples." Statistically significant but they don't mention the concentration at all in the abstract, which is just as an important finding.
- Mistletoe 3y ago
  >Toxicological studies suggest that exposure to chlormequat can reduce fertility and harm the developing fetus at doses lower than those used by regulatory agencies to set allowable daily intake levels. I think they are worried about this. Perhaps the levels are set too high?
  - Qem 3y ago
    Also there's hundreds of similarly synthetic substances, each not individually going over set limits, but perhaps the resulting cocktail causes "death by a thousand cuts".
    - ericmcer 3y ago
      It is scary. Our best recourse is just to "trust the science", but there are a ton of parties invested in keeping the status quo.
      - tgv 3y ago
        "Trust the science" doesn't mean much. In the 70s, studies showed that jeans caused cancer. And yogurt. Other, real carcinogenic compounds were not studied. It takes ages for the dust to settle down and have a decent consensus. In the mean time, it's best to be cautionary.
vondur 3y ago
According the wikipedia page, Chormequat is not authorized for use in food crops, only ornamental plants. Has that changed?
- evancox100 3y ago
  But as the article states, the EPA allows you to import food crops treated with Chlormequat. Don’t ask me how that makes any sense
  - vondur 3y ago
    Yeah that's bad. I guess I shouldn't be surprised with how government works. Probably two different departments that don't talk with each other.
tfvlrue 3y ago
Treat this study with a grain of salt. The Environmental Working Group is essentially a lobbying group for the organic food industry. They tend to stigmatize "conventional" farming in pseudo-scientific ways to make organic food seem better or healthier, when the differences are typically just marketing. More details: https://www.agdaily.com/insights/dirty-deception-ewg-dirty-dozen/ https://www.agdaily.com/insights/dirty-deception-ewg-dirty-d... https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4623/ https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4623/
throwitaway222 3y ago
Normally it's the US that is spraying plants with "Definitely Kills Humans TM" but this time I guess it was the EU doing it.
AlliedForces 3y ago
Can Chlormequat cause bladder cancer? I have it and eat Quaker Oats and Cheerios.

92 points by spekcular 3y ago

I don't understand why it still seems to be a huge secret.They've genetically modified seeds so that home gardening of fruits and veggies seeds cannot be used to plant future gardens.They tell us that we're using to many antibiotics,yet antibiotics are given to cows,pigs,chickens,the very meats we consume.Maybe that's why antibiotics are being said to not work and not human consumption.The very living conditions of meat consumption is also tainted. Meats are being grown in labs stating a shortage of food yet they are using chemicals like the ones listed here to reduce the foods we need. They recently raised the retirement age to 70 years old. They are trying to use chemicals which cause infertility in humans (read the article here keyword infertile). It's all about controlling population, people not living to retire,yet using them as lab rats while they are on this side of the dirt.Plausable deniability be dammed .

JanaKlein 3y ago
Has anyone tested cows & chickens? Dogs? General Mills owns Blue Buffalo. It looks like it's been in animal feed since 2007, and purebred dogs have had a noticeable fertility decline since about 2010. "Reverse Flynn effect" started 2011 (steadily decreasing IQs across the board in several countries) as did "trans" population explosion (in same countries.) Ppl think I'm crazy for thinking these issues are population control, so I'm happy to see I'm not alone.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

NegativeLatency 3y ago

Well this is making me think about switching to organic only grains. Feels like a bit of a regulatory failure.

voakbasda 3y ago
Organic may not be much better, as many of the chemicals approved for organic crops are even worse. So, yes, regulation has failed. Good luck holding anyone accountable.
- chasebank 3y ago
  A friend of mine owns / operates a few hundred acre certified organic Avocado ranch in Carpinteria, CA. He explained to me it's mostly just paperwork and the organic pesticides / fertilizers are just as, if not more, gnarly than the non-organic ones. He said it just makes people feel good and there is virtually zero difference. Obviously a single source but one I hold very credible.
  - chabes 3y ago
    Sounds like your buddy is just using the organic title for marketing purposes. That is unfortunate, but not uncommon. Here’s a source that doesn’t fit your buddy’s description… Along the central coast of California, conventional strawberry growers apply chemicals like methyl bromide, an internationally banned substance that is no longer being manufactured, but is stockpiled for exemptions to the ban, which these growers exploit. Alternatively they have been experimenting with methyl iodide and other hardcore synthetic chemicals. They hire undocumented laborers to apply them. Organic strawberry growers, on the other hand, use crop rotation of a brassica crop as a bio-fumigant, and they grow rows of alfalfa as a trap crop where pest infestations can be literally vacuumed up with a tractor implement. In this case, there is a huge difference. It is true that the National Organic Program is a joke, since they let the board get taken over by corporate big ag long ago. That doesn’t mean “it just makes people feel good and there is virtually zero difference”. In some cases it does, but to paint the whole thing as such is denying the larger reality.
    - chasebank 3y ago
      "It is true that the National Organic Program is a joke, since they let the board get taken over by corporate big ag long ago. That doesn’t mean “it just makes people feel good and there is virtually zero difference”. In some cases it does, but to paint the whole thing as such is denying the larger reality." The national program is the one that matters, right? Most people consuming organic produce in the US are affected by this. Isn't that the larger reality? The people who know and buy from their local organic strawberry farmer has to be the .0001 edge case.

voakbasda 3y ago

Another reminder that most food produced by industrial processes is poisoning us. News of this chemical’s prevalence may be news, but the general story is not. Yet nothing has changed, nor should anyone expect otherwise. Big Ag achieved regulatory capture and can afford to delay indefinitely (if not outright stop) any meaningful change from happening.

readthenotes1 3y ago
I fail to understand why you're getting downloaded and I hope some of those who did will explain. "Don't ask how the sausage is made" predates any of us still alive by a fair margin
- billfor 3y ago
  Because life expectancy is nearly at an all time high. Folks that are 50 or older grew up playing with all sorts of toxic chemicals and most of us are still here and fine. If anything you are more likely to become ill by excessive worrying than the actual chemicals.
  - amanaplanacanal 3y ago
    Our gains in life expectancy during the last 100 years are probably mostly due to vaccines, antibiotics, and anti-smoking campaigns, completely unrelated to whatever chemicals are in our food. These are separate issues.
  - snapcaster 3y ago
    Are they fine? What metric are you looking at that indicates the health of americans is good?

hscontinuity 3y ago

Having little personal knowledge in this area of food growth, harvest and production, then of course any pre-market execution practices for shelf lives or processing; what are the ill effects of exposure specifically relating to birth/fetal deficiencies? Perhaps I'm a bad looker-up but I can't find the relative answer (seemingly) in various animal studies linked, outside of noting reproductive issues. Thanks in advance!

boh 3y ago

Excuse me if I’m reading this wrong, but less than 100 urine samples were tracked for any given year?

alwa 3y ago
On the one hand, as a statistician memorably put it, “doesn’t matter how big the soup bowl is, you still need the same size spoon to taste what kind of soup it is.” On the other hand, yeah these particular convenience samples seem almost deliberately weird. The entire apparent spike in 2023 seems to correspond to a one-off total switch to buying random bulk urine from Florida.
- burkaman 3y ago
  Wow that is a great quote, really makes it intuitive why sample size doesn't have to grow with population size.
  - tgv 3y ago
    But it does grow with variability and effect size. And of processes you don't understand, you don't know these. So you often do need a big spoon, and to taste more than just the top. "This noodle soup is just water (p < 0.05)."

suddenclarity 3y ago

> Compared to these previous studies in Europe, the median levels measured in our study of U.S. samples from 2017 to 2022 were lower, while the median level in 2023 samples were comparable to samples from Sweden, and lower than UK samples > Current chlormequat concentrations in urine from this study and others suggest that individual sample donors were exposed to chlormequat at levels several orders of magnitude below the reference dose (RfD) published by the U.S. EPA (0.05 mg/kg bw/day) and the acceptable daily intake (ADI) value published by the European Food Safety Authority (0.04 mg/kg bw/day). My two takeaways. The main source in the US seems to be from import and it's several magnitudes lower than acceptable daily intake. This might obviously change, but still reasonable to keep in mind.

photochemsyn 3y ago

Body burning screening for toxic chemical accumulation should be a regular part of every American's yearly physical checkup with their doctor - which itself is an increasingly rare phenomenon, many people only go to doctors and hospitals after getting very sick as they can't afford to have a regular doctor or preventative health program. A body burden program would lead to the identification of the most problematic industrial and agricultural chemical products, and so it would be blocked by lobbyists from the fossil fuel, petrochemical, agribusiness, and manufacturing sectors. America has the worst public health care / food safety system in the industrialized world, and not even a pandemic that killed over a million American citizens resulted in any political pressure to change the system.

nonethewiser 3y ago
> Body burning screening for toxic chemical accumulation should be a regular part of every American's yearly physical checkup with their doctor Is it just me or are yearly physicals and primary care doctors nearly worthless in practice (not in theory)? For adults, not kids. Anything truly urgent is better served by urgent care or emergency room. They are useful for referrals for specialists when you actually have a serious issue. The screening you suggest seems like a good idea yet so far beyond the type of care they actually offer. Its like they are the 1st tier tech support who cant really do anything and exist as a filter.
- beacon294 3y ago
  Many family doctors are like this, I think they want to minimize their work and many simply don't have the experience necessary. Would recommend you find a doctor at a bigger institution that wants to be there.
- FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
  Typo: s/burning/burden/g Initially I thought there was some test involving the combustion of a biopsy sample.
- ericmcer 3y ago
  Primary care seems kind of like a personal trainer or other accountability person. Sure you can take your heart-rate, blood pressure, EKG, etc. and make assessments on your own (I got a pretty thorough setup for ~$150), but most people need the structure or else they won't even check their BPM. Lab work is the one area that seems worthwhile. Bloodwork can give you early signals for tons of potential problems.

JohnMakin 3y ago

You have to scroll an absurdly long time to find it but this is the key sentence: > Current chlormequat concentrations in urine from this study and others suggest that individual sample donors were exposed to chlormequat at levels several orders of magnitude below the reference dose (RfD) published by the U.S. EPA (0.05 mg/kg bw/day) and the acceptable daily intake (ADI) value published by the European Food Safety Authority (0.04 mg/kg bw/day). The levels reported in this study are so negligible but it gets a lot more clicks on your study if you present this data as "chlormequat was detectable in X% of samples." Statistically significant but they don't mention the concentration at all in the abstract, which is just as an important finding.

Mistletoe 3y ago
>Toxicological studies suggest that exposure to chlormequat can reduce fertility and harm the developing fetus at doses lower than those used by regulatory agencies to set allowable daily intake levels. I think they are worried about this. Perhaps the levels are set too high?
- Qem 3y ago
  Also there's hundreds of similarly synthetic substances, each not individually going over set limits, but perhaps the resulting cocktail causes "death by a thousand cuts".
  - ericmcer 3y ago
    It is scary. Our best recourse is just to "trust the science", but there are a ton of parties invested in keeping the status quo.
    - tgv 3y ago
      "Trust the science" doesn't mean much. In the 70s, studies showed that jeans caused cancer. And yogurt. Other, real carcinogenic compounds were not studied. It takes ages for the dust to settle down and have a decent consensus. In the mean time, it's best to be cautionary.

vondur 3y ago

According the wikipedia page, Chormequat is not authorized for use in food crops, only ornamental plants. Has that changed?

evancox100 3y ago
But as the article states, the EPA allows you to import food crops treated with Chlormequat. Don’t ask me how that makes any sense
- vondur 3y ago
  Yeah that's bad. I guess I shouldn't be surprised with how government works. Probably two different departments that don't talk with each other.

tfvlrue 3y ago

Treat this study with a grain of salt. The Environmental Working Group is essentially a lobbying group for the organic food industry. They tend to stigmatize "conventional" farming in pseudo-scientific ways to make organic food seem better or healthier, when the differences are typically just marketing. More details: https://www.agdaily.com/insights/dirty-deception-ewg-dirty-dozen/ https://www.agdaily.com/insights/dirty-deception-ewg-dirty-d... https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4623/ https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4623/

throwitaway222 3y ago

Normally it's the US that is spraying plants with "Definitely Kills Humans TM" but this time I guess it was the EU doing it.

AlliedForces 3y ago

Can Chlormequat cause bladder cancer? I have it and eat Quaker Oats and Cheerios.