There has been questions on chickpea and if one can get clean ones if one buys organic.
Well, there are opinions, there are speculations and there are observations from a handful of samples that were tested by CFIA to allow a partial glimpse on the subject.
It is my personal belief that there is no safe way to get hold of glyphosate free chickpea, if one lives in North America, until and unless there is a serious effort at testing locally sold foods at the county or municipal level, and disclosing all those results to the local public every month. That is the reason I had tried to kick start the globally relevant petition for pushing each municipal government to start setting up a budget and start testing local food.
Unfortunately, the world has more people willing to pontificate and less people willing to do something about it – hence petitions like that get no more than 1,400 signatures.
If one does selective testing of three or four organic chickpea grown in Canada, one can find zero glyphosate. But the problem is three fold.
Second – question has been asked, if the organic certification process only ensures that a crop is grown organically, and ignores how the crop is harvested. In other words, one can grow a crop without pesticides, get organic certification and still desiccate it with glyphosate before harvest. If this is true, then that can explain how North American organic chickpea are so extremely contaminated with glyphosate, and how organic certification means absolutely nothing, with regard to glyphosate contamination in some foods grown in North America such as chickpea.
Third – there is always this issue among the CFIA records, regarding ‘unknown’ as country of origin. I suspect some, if not most, of these may have originated in Canada or nearby sources such as the US. Therefore, there is a very high probability of organic chickpea grown anywhere in Canada or the United States will have more samples with glyphosate and less samples without. This further bolsters my belief that, for North Americans, there is no safe way unless each and every kind of food is tested for glyphosate. Someone with a shipload of cash can afford to test every spoonful of food (s)he eats for glyphosate. For the rest of us mere mortals, we either get our local governments to play ball and test the food we buy, or decide to cut chickpea off our menu, or agree to play Russian Roulette with the chickpea we eat.
For people living outside of North America – that’s a different planet, a different solar system, a different galaxy and a different constellation. Rules, observations and expectations therefore would be different for them. My findings, and subsequent writing of the book, is titled Poison Foods of North America. It deals primarily with North America, with some comparisons with foods that came from elsewhere and were sampled in Canada.
Readers will be well advised to be cautious and find their path through this nightmare crop.
They wanted to know if I am happy with either a one hour interview or a two hour.
I personally think anything over 10 minutes gets to be boring for the people, so agreed to a one hour.
These folks came to know about me from German born New Brunswick farmer Werner Bock, who has been screaming hoarse about Canadian government poisoning its agriculture, its forests and its meadows for more than three decades, to the point where the government started harassing him and even putting him temporarily in a loony bin claiming he was mentally disturbed. Apparently, Werner knows everybody in North America. He found out my phone number a few years ago and usually calls me up every few months. He is well known to the radio show people and apparently told them to find me.
I personally am not too sure if radio talks are fruitful.
I know articles written in online and printed papers have their value in raising awareness. I know blog posts and social media have their value in raising awareness. I know youtube video, audio podcasts and radio shows have their value in raising awareness. I know seminars, March against Monsanto, and mock tribunals all have their value in raising awareness.
And yet, I am coming to the conclusion that all these “raising awareness” is pretty much useless, when I consider what result it has achieved in the western hemisphere, especially in North America, which is faced with the worst of this avalanche of food poisoning.
At this rate, we shall have a highly raised level of awareness in a few more decades, while we shall also all be dead from poisons – highly aware people that died from poison but decided to do nothing, other than being “aware”.
The reason for this contradiction, in my analysis, is that the western world in general, and North America in particular, is too full of people that are little more than armchair activists, and people that are addicted to “raising awareness” to millions more armchair activists.
To me, it is clear as the open sky, that the root of all this problem is a dysfunctional democracy that has been hijacked into a full blows fascism, while the addicted population still believes writing an article, or clicking a like button, or hanging out with this or that talking head will bring them close to Nirvana.
If we have a full blown fascism and our democracy is nothing more than a make belief facade, then we have a problem that is political in nature and has to be solved, if at all, by political means.
I am not a politician by nature. I hate politicians and consider their professions to be among the lowest of the low, very close to anti-GMO talking heads in fact. They all are there to make a living out of whatever the hot topic of the day is. They are not here to solve anybody’s problems.
So, as an activist that is fed up with arm chair activism of my friends, fed up with raising awareness, and fed up with local politicians at the municipal, provincial and federal level – the only option appears to be to try and influence more citizens to stop the bullshit, and start targeting politicians, and try to pull their pants off in public. Time is well past when I can still be polite and ask politician with folded hands to “please sir, please madam, please look at this or that issue, please see these reports and please disclose that hidden data and please, please please please please …”
I am dome with that shit. But, I am not a revolutionary and hate violence and bloodshed. I also hate being an elected politician or the compromises that one needs to make in order to gain political office. I am also a serious disbeliever of the political party system. To me, political parties should be banned and only independents allowed to stand for election. That way, theoretically, each elected official works only according to wishes of his or her constituents and not according to any party leader or party whip. The very notion of a political party is, to me, unconstitutional and anti-democratic. Anyhow, hating politics as a profession and refusing anything outside the law, and fed up with “raising awareness” to a comatose citizenry, my options are limited as an activist.
What we have here is a failure of democracy not because politicians are crooks, which they generally are, but because the citizens are in coma. In democracy, even in a failing democracy, every fault of the system lies at the feet of the citizens, no matter how much folks may like to blame politicians or Monsanto or the devil. It is always the fault of the people to allow things to come to whoever it has come. And our citizens, in North America, are are almost incapable of rational thinking. It is as if they are in a coma or has already gone autistic and are incapable of any rational thinking.
I want other citizens to grab their politicians by the scruff of their necks, metaphorically, and give them one issue options – “ban glyphosate or your rear end is mine to kick”.
Meanwhile, here is a chart about “Chlorothalonil” in foods as tested by CFIA, consolidated from over 65,000 tests and plotted on a logarithmic scale. I have not had the time to look deeper into it, but Canada and USA ranks high in these along with a few others like Guatemala, Mexico and China etc. Some of the worst individual samples have over 50,000 ppb of Chlorothalonil, such as Chinese Cabbage grown in Canada.
I shall eventually have time to break these down by nations and food types better. All this would be in my book, which may bloat from the current 400 pages to either closer to 1,000 pages, or be split into volume two.
This chart is only covering food types that had chlorothalonil average contamination level of over 20 ppb, and shows both the average contamination and the percentage contamination. So, for items that have very low percentage contamination and yet rather high average contamination – those foods have only a few samples with extremely high levels of Chorothalonil while the rest where clean. Good examples of these might be Fine Herbs, Chinese Cabbage (this was make in Canada), Plum, Apricot and Beet. It would therefore make sense to check if those very high levels of contamination in a few few samples are an indication of where they were grown etc etc.
Other food items where the percentage contamination is also high, might be candidates that folks aught to consider rejecting, or growing themselves, or buying organic.
Incidentally, all items in this chart are conventional. Lots of organic food types were also tested by CFIA. They all had zero or negligible amounts of Chlorothalonil. So, in this particular case, going organic only is safer. All that will appear in my book eventually. Its a work in progress.
The green line represents the concentration in ppb, in descending order from left to right, with corresponding percentage contamination in blue for each of these food types.
All that will come in due course. Meanwhile I have to figure out how to kick some more political rear ends and how to goad them, shame them, insult them, till they start responding.
There are some animals that turn over and play dead when in trouble. If you take a stick and turn the animal right side up, it immediately turns over belly up again, to convince you that it is really dead. Our politicians are a master of that act.
Some of these should end up in my blogs but I am having some malware issues with the wordpress platform and need to solve those first so that future blogs come out OK.
PS I hope to catch up with Anthony Samsel sometime to catch up on the implications of having much chlorothalonil in food, especially what we consider as vegetables.
I am determined to try my best to bring the issue of glyphosate and the Canadian Foods being the most toxic on earth, to the mainstream political discourse. I have not been too successful so far, as politicians in general as well as mainstream media, seems to have developed a case of indigestion when it comes to facing this issue.
Nonetheless, the effort continues, as part of our citizen’s duty, to be vigorously involved in our political process and try to force the candidates to address real concerns of citizens intend of talking on manufactured issues.
I have already written to three candidates of my riding, cover in earlier blogs. These were from the Liberal, NDP and BC Greens party. Two of them, the Liberal and the NDP, did not even bother to respond, which has convinced me never to vote for a candidate that ignores you.
But more than that, I have tried to lead by example so other citizens would follow and try to ask direct questions to the candidates, especially why people of western Canada are subjected to the most toxic foods on earth.
I made a few videos on this already.
The first one is here – a ten minute video about why and how I found Western Canada to be the epicentre of toxic foods.
The next, my explanation on why I wrote the book on glyphosate contamination of foods based on CFIA records, and why I do not go with the mainstream media trying to whitewash the results – an 8 minute video.
Next, a letter to the BC Greens Leader. – a 3 minute video.
And finally, a response from the BC Greens candidate from my riding – another under 3 minute video.
As I was telling someone in email today, I am convinced that our problem is rooted more to the corruption in my political process and less to do with Monsanto or any other entity, and it is our duty, as a citizen, to grab this political beast by the horn and shake it till it starts piddling.
I am writing this joint and public letter to all of you, as a voter from North Delta, raising a serious concern and a serious question that I have failed to get a response from so far from any candidate. I have separately written to two of you Mr Kahlon and Mr. Hamilton, by email, and have not received any response. I had not asked Ms Miller as I did not know her contacts at the time.
Jacqui Miller – Greens Candidate
The concern relates to the fact that Canada appears to be producing the most toxic foods on earth with regard to poisoning with glyphosate, the active ingredient in the weed killer Roundup. I came to learn of this after analyzing for several months, near 8,000 records of foods collected within Canada, by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) covering food samples from over sixty countries. My findings can be checked in a book I published on Amazon recently, titled – Poison Foods of North America.
While Canada produces the most toxic foods on earth, foods collected in western Canada proved to be even more toxic than foods available elsewhere in Canada. Therefore western Canada appears to be the epicentre of poisonous foods on the planet.
I include a few references in my email in case anyone is at all interested.
I have reason to believe glyphosate is a key ingredient responsible for an epidemic level rise of all sorts of auto-immune diseases across the land in Canada as well as a steep decline in wildlife while our elected politicians continue to stick their head in the sand.
My simple question to all of you is – what are you prepared to do about this ?
This public letter may be reproduced into a video, in order to circulate among other voters of this and other ridings within and beyond BC, as an effort to get the people to rise up against this tendency by entrenched and aspiring politicians of avoiding uncomfortable questions.
Scott Hamilton – Liberal incumbent
To inspire other voters of my riding as well as across the land, myself and other friends might read this letter, or speak independently, in short videos standing next to the bill boards of you and other candidates and circulate them on social media, hoping for two results:
a) to get the candidates to actually address serious concerns of voters instead of talking about manufactured issues.
b) get more citizens to stand up and ask similar hard questions to the candidates, especially about Canadians having to eat the most poisonous foods on earth.
Ravi Kahlon, NDP Candidate
Should we make such video, they would be circulated on social media, and on blogs, and I should be sending you copies for your reference. If we continue to get no response from the candidates, that too will be aired through alternative media. If we get meaningful responses from some candidates, we intend to circulate that too.
I shall be pleased to hear if you have any response on this.
I am including one of the near 400 tables and slides from my book for your reference.
Thank you Mr. Mulcair, for the note, and I do not disagree. However, issues raised in your note is of minor importance in my judgment, compared to rising toxicity in foods produced in Canada that makes it near impossible for average citizens to eat without being slow poisoned.
Tom Mulcair, NDP leader
This is to do with rampant toxicity in our food system due to unending use of pesticides such as Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup weed killer.
A few of the past NDP parliamentarians had been aware of the gravity of the situation and had done what they could within their means to resist it or raise awareness. Unfortunately, I do not see any sign of awareness or interest in it among the current NDP politicians that I can vote for. NDP candidate from my riding in BC does not even acknowledged let alone answer email from me.
Here are the basics I would like you to consider.
1) I have studied near 8,000 records of tests done by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, on foods collected in Canada, produced in Canada and imported from over sixty countries, for presence of glyphosate. I am in possession of the records and am so shocked with the results that I wrote an e-book and published on Amazon to alert the people about it . The book is titled ‘POISON FOODS OF NORTH AMERICA’.
2) Conventional, non GMO seed crops that are desiccated with glyphosate are the most contaminated with this weed killer instead of roundup ready GM crops. Most toxic of North American foods are Rye, Wheat, Oats, Chickpea and lentils, all of which carry too much glyphosate in them, way more than in roundup ready crops like corn or soy.
3) I found that english speaking North America produces foods that are an order of dimension more toxic with glyphosate contamination than foods produced by anybody else anywhere else.
Toxicity in North American foods compared to the rest of the world
4) Canada produces foods that are significantly more contaminated with this weed killer than even foods produced in the United States. This makes Canada the epicentre of poisonous foods in the world. There is rising evidence that we are slow poisoning our citizens, ruining our future generations and pushing our wildlife towards extinction.
Ravi Kahlon – NDP candidate
Please take note – the government of Canada has till date has not disclosed actual safety test and analysis reports based on which it decided glyphosate was safe enough to be approved for use in agriculture. According to my understanding of the law, it is illegal to approve a product and allow its release while withholding its safety test data. My repeated efforts with the government to release all safety documents on glyphosate has not produced results. Our government does not say I do not have the right to see these safety results, but continues to drag its feet. Health Canada has been dragging its feet on this for forty years now.
The rate of rise of auto immune diseases because of this in North America and especially in Canada is going through the roof. Our school system is going to be wrecked due rising demand for more and more special need children, as will our health care and economy. Our big game wildlife are being pushed to the edge of extinction due to rising level of birth defects that make rising percentage newborns unable to reach maturity or produce viable offsprings due to constant use of the practice in aerial spray of glyphosate over Crown forests by logging corporations while nobody has ever seen or approved any study of the effect of glyphosate on environment. Neither our provincial governments nor Ottawa wants to open this pandora’s box. I have butted head with the BC government repeatedly to find out what safety documents it has seen before approval of spraying glyphosate over BC forests without any result.
I am including a small table (above) from my book, which has over 300 such tables. To me, this and all future elections have becomes a more or less single issue election
Scott Hamilton, the incumbent liberal MLA will not respond to my emails. Mr. Kahlon, the NDP candidate, will also not respond. For the first time in my life, I am forced to contemplate not voting for any major candidate and am searching for a third party candidate that might be ready to acknowledge and address this looming disaster.
Canadian rye the most toxic on earth
A candidate that refuses to face this issue is one that deserves to be an unemployed politician in my view.
This email concerns public interest and not a private matter. Therefore it should be considered as a public letter of grave concern for Canadians. This letter and any response received, or not received, may be included and discussed on social media, my blogs, any newspaper that might agree to post it, and included in future versions of my book. I have had as much silence from political candidates as I can stomach.
Please take this not as an attack, but a sign of extreme frustration with a political process where candidates want people’s votes but will not address people’s concerns.
Scott Hamilton, incumbent MLA, Liberal
I look forward to what you might have to say about it Mr. Mulcair.
Comment by scientist Stephanie Seneff about glyphosate in food and about my analysis of the CFIA data. This comment is from the book itself:
I believe glyphosate will go down in history as the worst synthetic chemical this planet has ever faced, as a consequence of its perceived non-toxicity to humans and its massive use in agriculture and on people’s lawns with careless handling due to lack of awareness of its insidious, cumulative toxicity. It is destructive of human health and it is threatening extinction to multiple species, most obviously the bees and the monarch butterflies. I believe it will eventually be proven that glyphosate gets into proteins by mistake in place of glycine, and that this is the key reason for several phenomena going on in the US (and Canada?) that currently are seemingly inexplicable:
the epidemic in autoimmune diseases, most importantly autism and dementia,
the runaway health care costs that are bankrupting our government, and
the epidemic in opioid drug abuse due to chronic intense pain as a consequence of glyphosate disrupting the elastic and tensile strength properties of collagen, and then causing an autoimmune attack on collagen.
Collagen makes up 25% of the body’s protein, and glycine makes up 25% of collagen’s amino acids. Collagen in pigs and cows fed heavy doses of glyphosate in their feed is the main source of gelatin that makes its way into vaccines, gel caps, jello, and various other food products. Collagen is contaminated with glyphosate and as a consequence so are these derivatives. This easily explains why MMR vaccine today causes many more acute adverse reactions than it did in the 1990’s.
This book by Tony Mitra is priceless because it tells you which foods have the highest contamination of glyphosate, so you can change your eating habits to minimize your exposure. Glyphosate needs to be banned immediately across the globe, if we are to preserve a bright future for our children and grandchildren.
Stephanie Seneff
Senior Research Scientist
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
From US scientist Don Huber
“Poison Foods of North America” provides critical information for all healthy, health conscience, infirm and struggling individuals that is necessary to prevent the deterioration in their and their families health as a result of the betrayal of the public trust that was placed in regulatory bodies.
Future historians may well look back upon our time and write, not about how many pounds of pesticides we did or did not apply, but about how willing we are to sacrifice our children and jeopardize future generations based on flawed science and failed promises just to benefit the bottom line of a commercial enterprise.
Don M. Huber,
Emeritus Professor,
Purdue University.
A response received
(Le français suit l’anglais)Thank you for contacting our office.All messages are read and considered. However, due to the high volume of emails received, it may not be possible to respond personally to each one.Please visit our website (http://www.ndp.ca) to learn more about our NDP team (http://www.ndp.ca/team) and latest news (http://www.ndp.ca/news).Thank you again for taking the time to share your ideas, concerns and insights. Your input helps us with our work.All the best,Office of Tom Mulcair, MP (Outremont)Leader, New Democratic Party
A question asked of the election candidates of my riding
Sections of Excerpts from the book – POISON FOODS OF NORTH AMERICA, covering food samples tested from the rest of the world.
There are more than 1,100 records of foods tested for glyphosate by CFIA that originated from countries other than Canada and the United States. For this book, I have grouped them as the “Rest of the world”. There are sixty six countries in this group.
There is a reason why this grouping was done by me. Foods produced in the rest of the world, exceptions aside, are an order of dimension better than similar foods grown in English speaking North America, with respect to slow poisoning from glyphosate.
Before folks get into a knot on my use of the term ‘poison’ with regard to glyphosate, I have clarified my position in the book already, which are, briefly as follows
The government of Canada has not disclosed to me or the public any direct tests and data that actually provides proof that glyphosate is safe to be in food at any level of concentration.
Therefore, in my view, all assurances from the Government that the levels present in food currently are safe, is worth little more than voodoo.
Governments and scientists do not own the word poison. They are free to keep harping that glyphosate is not toxic and not poisonous, I shall continue to believe that it is an acute poison to many beneficial organisms that we need and a chronic poison for all other creatures of value including ourselves. I am not in the least interested to engage in any debate on the matter, unless the test results on safety of glyphosate is placed in public domain and be made available for independent scrutiny.
Meanwhile, I have nearly 8,000 records of foods tested in Canada originating from nearly 70 countries, for presence of glyphosate. This book is to alert people about it
A truncated master list of the 66 countries with respect to glyphosate in food, as tested by CFIA, is given below. This section only shows the top half, due to size and bandwidth limits. In the book, the full list covers three pages.
The table covers all the rest of the world, outside of English Speaking North America. The portions shown here are the worst group on top, and the ‘caution’ group in the middle. The top countries and their average level of glyphosate contamination are highlighted in read at left and right column. Countries that have a sample number of ten or more, and therefore might provide a better statistics are highlighted in yellow.
IN the worst group, with samples of ten or more, are Turkey, Poland, Greece and Lebanon. These are the real bad apples, followed by a few others with fewer samples.
The middle group, that are not as bad as the worst and not as good as the best, are highlighted yellow. Relevant countries here are Japan, Italy, India, and Korea.
Countries in the good range ( not included in the table above) are many, which is a very healthy sign for the rest of the world. These countries are Bolivia, China, Chile, Mexico, Spain, Peru, South Africa, Ecuador, France, Thailand, Netherlands, Guatemala. The first countries in this list, i.e. Bolivia have glyphosate content closer to 5 and the last country, Guatemala have zero.
Leaving the bad apples of the rest of the world, let us go back to Australia for now. It occupies the highest rung for the nastiest average contamination in the rest of the world, although with only 4 samples. Further, with only 25% of them contaminated, with an average that is so high, it implies that only one out of those four were bad and that one must have had four times the average value. in fact, that one sample was bad enough to turn Australia into a potential nastiest producer of food outside of Canada and USA. So, one might dig into it a bit and figure out what is going on there.
There it is. This Mung Bean is the culprit that places Australia at the top of the nastiest of nasty list of the rest of the world, for producing glyphosate laden food.
But, far as I know, Mung bean, or Moong Dal, is a lentil of India and not particularly common dish for non-Asians. So what is this Mung Bean, and so highly toxic to boost, doing as an Australian produce ?
I do not know the full answer, but can hazard a guess. India is a densely populated country, and is upwardly mobile in the sense that it is finally shedding its abject poverty and malnutrition through two centuries of western colonization that squeezed it to bare bones, and is just now beginning to eat better. In the process its domestic production is unable to cope with rising demand, and with money in its pocket, India is beginning to import some foods from outside.
This has caught the attention of countries with agricultural land to spare and attractive markets to capture.
Enters countries like Canada, USA and Australia. Each of them start growing lentils. While the US grown lentils have relatively lower levels of glyphosate, those from Canada are really high, as per CFIA records. And now it appears that the single sample from Australia is also sky high in unwanted toxicity. One also wonders how this sample ended up in Canada ? Is it being imported from Australia into Canada? Why? Is some store importing it because it is cheaper than local lentils? Who is growing it in Australia and why?
Perhaps someone will figure this one out and educate us. My suspicion is that it is grown for India and for people of the Indian diaspora, who are quite well settled and reasonably affluent in North America, Europe, the Middle East and even Australia, all of whom might be the secondary target markets for these lentils.
Of course, lentils from Australia, and if these are designed to end up slow poisoning people in India or the Indian diaspora living across the world, is neither the main nor the only story for this section on the “rest of the world”. So readers might just read on.
Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) had nearly 8,000 records of foods tested for presence of glyphosate, which I came to acquire a copy of after years of working on this issue with various levels of the Canadian Government going back some number of years, to the time when Mr. Harper was the Prime Minister. My interactions started with the issues that Canada at the time did not even have a lab that would test foods for glyphosate, which I considered to be an outrageous and unacceptable state of affair. Thankfully, within a year, labs started getting themselves accredited for testing foods for glyphosate, more or less concurrent with the time when World Health Organization classified glyphosate to be a probable carcinogen.
While this matter was kept outside of the media or Government outlets, i was fully aware of a scheme going on to test foods available in Canada, of both Canadian and imported kind, for glyphosate. This started my next level of effort with the Government to get my hands on the food test records. In between all this there has been letters, meetings, petitions and motions initiated by me and sent to Health Ministers spanning two governments, demanding disclosure on various aspects on glyphosate, from its approval for agriculture, to setting of MRLs, to its aerial use over forests, prairies and watersheds. Those details may not have a direct relation with this blog, but all these efforts and years of involvement brought me to where I was three months ago, sitting on a huge pile of test records on foods collection in Canada, and around a thousand and five hundred of those records involved foods originating in the United States, and a similar number for foods grown in Canada. India and China provided the most samples after USA and Canada.
All these records were scanned by me and converted to editable text and numbers using optical character recognition software, and error corrected. Finally, multiple giant spreadsheets were created to sort through the data for analysis. That prompted me to write and publish an online e-Book to alert the people. I named it “POISON FOODS OF NORTH AMERICA”.
The book is over 300 page long and has more than 300 tables, along with charts and images. Many of the tables give the actual raw data with regard to glyphosate content and description of the food sample, its origin etc.
Some of the findings were as expected while some are totally unexpected, and often shocking.
Here are a few examples:
Canada and USA produce the most toxic foods on the planet, with regard to glyphosate contamination.
Within North America, Canada produces foods with significantly higher levels of glyphosate.
Within Canada, the west is where one can find more glyphosate contaminated foods than from other regions within Canada.
Western Canada is ground zero, for finding nasty foods.
Cleanest of food suppliers are Peru, Thailand, France, South Africa, Mexico, and China. China apparently exports cleaner foods than what locals consume inside China. For example, imported foods from China, averaging 3 ppb contamination, is 28 times cleaner than foods produced in the US, and over 45 times cleaner than foods produced in Canada.
Foods imported from Mexico is 70 times cleaner than Canadian foods and over 40 times cleaner than foods originating in the United States.
Conventional foods desiccated by glyphosate is far more contaminated than GM crops that are roundup ready.
Out of the main cereals, rice is about the only one that is more or less without any glyphosate, except for some rice, rice flour or rice based products produced in Canada and the US.
Lentils and chickpea (garbanzo) produced in North America, as well as foods made with these ingredients are highly contaminated with glyphosate.
Although soy flour may contain high glyphosate, tofu made out of soy has none.
Wheat bran produced in Canada has an average of around 2,500 ppb of glyphosate in every sample.
Foods from over sixty nations have been tested, but not all of them contributed large number of samples. However, a few nations did have high sample depth, USA is among them.
The table here was truncated from a long one, with each and every type of food that was recorded by CFIA to have come from the United States. Then, for now, all food types that hat had less than 10 samples were set aside.
Of the remaining samples, how many belonged to which food type was entered in the second column from left, against each food types. How many of that food type proved ‘negative’ or had to glyphosate, was checked. These two figures allowed calculations on what percentage of the samples were dirty (proved positive in glyphosate screening). Then all the glyphosate and AMPA values were added and then divided by the total number of samples for each food type, to get average ppb contamination level, which is shown in the last column.
Then the table was sorted by ppb values in descending order, and included as the first item within the subchapter of foods from the United States.
So this table is the dirty dozen of American foods.
We shall then proceed with looking at more details of some of the dirty dozen that have high glyphosate levels and high enough sample depth to provide a glimpse of what is happening with toxicity in US grown foods.
The top two items in the second table above are in violation of the MRL (Maximum residue Limit) set by the Canadian Government. What is interesting to ponder, or perhaps correspond with the authorities about, is what happens with such violations are noted. Ideally, the product should be withdrawn. Public should be notified and warned not to buy or consume it. Those that already bought this item should be advised to return it to the store and get a refund. The producer should be prosecuted. The issue should be out on mainstream media for public awareness.
None of that, as far as I can remember happened or happens. I do not remember a single instance with I was aware of such foods being recalled or public warned.
So, are we to suppose that those MRLs which are themselves set arbitrarily without providing any proof of their authenticity, are also not being implemented? In our food safety mechanism we might have a reproduction of the “wild west”.
In the case of violations on foods imported, in this case from the US, should the US Government and public also not be notified? Is anybody from the US aware of this situation?
I use the term toxic and poisonous interchangeably to mean the same thing, and I deny the mainstream any right to control the meaning of the terms toxic or poisonous with regard to glyphosate.
As long as the public is denied independently verifiable proof that glyphosate in food is safe at any level, over the lifetime of animals consuming it even in low dose, to me, all talks of glyphosate being safe is worth little more than magic or voodoo.
Mainstream can continue to consider glyphosate as safe, and I shall continue to believe it is the most dangerous synthetic chemical to have entered our food system and threatens to undo the long term health of the human society as well as all flora and fauna of the land.
And thus, the table above is the opening section of the “dirty dozen” of US foods. We shall also have more such tables covering the remaining items in dirty dozens list from USA, Canada, Unknown, and some other countries.
The book is already online, but constantly being improved, proof read, new tables, charts, subjects and value added. All updates should be free for legal owners of previous copies. However, there is a catch. Apparently, free updates are decided on case by case basis by Amazon after receiving an application from the author. Standard guidelines provided by Amazon mentions that additional chapter and added pages do not qualify for free access to later versions of the book by folks that bought an earlier version. I did not know that till I started inquiring with Amazon. Now I am trying to impress upon them that this book is a reference and analysis of the most controvercial herbicide in our food system and there is no other book of this kind, covering data that is not available to anybody else at this point of time. And later versions cover critical data on foods form the US, a significant producer of foods that are contaminated with this herbicide. I hope to impress upon them to make a difference and allow free updates to owners of earlier copies.
Otherwise, I would suggest that potential readers might like to wait for about a weak or two before purchasing the book. For all these confusions, the price of the book is lowered temporarily by a few dollars. It will be back up to around $ 9.99 as soon as sections covering US foods and foods from China and India are completed. Target is by the first week of April, 2017.
The book can be found in Amazon, NAMED “Poison foods of North America”. Book cover, designed by me, is shown here with the link.
I also made a three minute video on the book, as shown below.
Lastly, this book is not designed to add to the debate on if glyphosate is safe and at what level. I have no interest to join any such debate. I am uninterested in the opinion of the glyphosate supporting industry and their supportive political and media outlets. I live in a free country and the meaning of any word or term such as toxic or poisonous, is not owned by the industry. The meaning is not even etched in stone and changes with times depending on perception by the people.
So, the mainstream can continue to harp that glyphosate is safe. I shall continue to believe it is dangerous and unsafe at any level of concentration, until proven otherwise by independent verification and the regime of secrecy around it has been dismantled.
So who is this book for? It is for those that have, like me, already decided that glyphosate is a seriously harmful molecule in their food web and they would rather find a way to avoid it right now. Those are the people this book is for.
The mainstream science, media, political class and the regulatory authority has lost public trust on this issue. This book is not aimed at influencing their opinion. This book is for the people – the rest of us.
The eBook ‘POISON FOODS OF NORTH AMERICA” is up on Amazon now. It sells under the the banner of a Kindle edition. It describes how a person could adapt and modify one’s eating habit in order to avoid being slow poisoned by a steady dose of glyphosate. The analysis is based on 7,800 odd records of foods tested by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), of which I got a copy of the raw data of the tests.
As a result there has been some confusion among potential customers, that they might be forced to buy a hardware device from Amazon, in order to read these books. Well, as it happens, that is not true. Amazon sells a free app for various devices. I have found reading the book on my computer to be the most pleasing because of the lovely appearance of the tables.
This blog is written for those who have a doubt if they can read the book “POISON FOODS OF NORTH AMERICA” if do not have a kindle reader device, and think they cannot read this book without that device. Many are reluctant to buy this device only to read one book. This blog is for them and the purpose is to assure them that they do not need to buy an additional device just for one book.
A kindle app logo looks like the one at the right. It is available free of charge at Amazon, and there is an app for each kind of device in your home, such as a computer, or a tablet or a smart phone etc.
The book cover is shown below. I initially thought this would be a temporary cover and I shall move on to a better looking cover later on. But, I think human brain associates some images with the matter represented by that image. In other words, this book cover image is now linked with the book on glyphosate in Food as tested by CFIA. So I shall let the cover stay for now.
The book, if read through my MAC laptop using the kind app, looks quite pleasant. One of the chapters are shown below as a sample.
Finally, I made a four minute video showing how it actually looks on my mac laptop.
Glyphosate has been in the public eye for a while now. I hear that in California, a court has mandated that Roundup herbicide must have a comment in the label that it likely is carcinogenic, or can cause cancer.
There is further news coming from some reportedly leaked comments from within US-EPA that the manner in which glyphosate safety test documents and data has been accepted has apparently not gone well with everyone in EPA. Well, it is almost 40 years since glyphosate has been unleashed. It is high time that approval of glyphosate was put under scrutiny.
In Canada, the EPA counter part, Health Canada, has never released all the safety documents and data based on which it approved glyphosate for use in agriculture. According to my understanding of the law, it is illegal to approve and allow release of a product while withholding release of its safety data. I have had multi-year running issues with the government trying to get disclosure of these safety records.
It is because of these reasons that I do not accept the government set safe limits (MRL) of glyphosate in food. One cannot accept 5,000 ppb of glyphosate in wheat, when the government has not shown proof that glyphosate is safe even at 1 ppb.
Meanwhile, after some years of butting heads with the government on a related issue of Canada not having labs that could test glyphosate in food, and after WHO declared glyphosate to be a probable carcinogen, thankfully the Government showed some inclination to test foods for glyphosate, but on the quiet and away from mainstream media glare.
By the summer of 2015, there were indications from labs that they were busy handling lots of orders from Ottawa in testing glyphosate in all kinds of food samples.
I had by then already been asking Health Canada, Agriculture Canada and Canadian Food Inspection Agency, for letting me have results of all foods tested in Canada for glyphosate. Finally, in December 2016, I got over 7,800 records of foods tested for glyphosate and its metabolite AMPA under order of CFIA.
The records involved more than five thousand samples and at times multiple records on each samples involving glyphosate and/or AMPA content. Samples were all collected from within Canada, but represented both locally grown and imported food. Foods from more than sixty countries had been collected and tested.
Attempt was initiated immediately, convert the data into an usable format and to analyze it and advise the people on which kinds of foods had how much glyphosate. Scanned images of pages of those records were converted using OCR software, error corrected and turned into electronic data that could be sorted, tabulated, and used for analysis
Same was done over the next few months. The results have in some cases been as expected and in other cases, totally surprising.
A few things became clear as more and more data were analyzed. For example, crops that were not genetically modified but were grown in an industrial scale in north America and were desiccated with glyphosate, had very much more glyphosate in them, than genetically modified Roundup Ready crops.
Another shocking realization was, Canada and the US were producers of the most toxic food in the planet. The difference was not even marginal. Canadian and American grown foods, especially those conventional non GM crops that used glyphosate as a pre-harvest desiccant, had an order of dimension greater level of glyphosate poison in them than the same crops grown anywhere else.
Since I have reason to doubt the Government set MRL while safety data is kept out of reach of people, I consider any level of glyphosate concentration to be poisonous – acutely poisonous to a large body of beneficial organisms and a chronic poison for all other creatures of value including ourselves.
And so, finally, the e-book was prepared and placed on line with Amazon.
This book is not designed to join a debate on if glyphosate is safe or unsafe to be in food or at what level it might be dangerous. This book is for those people that have already decided that glyphosate is an undesirable chemical that can cause serious harm even if taken in low doses over time. It is for those people that are looking for a tool to help navigate through this glyphosate minefield of North American food system.
The book will continue to be edited and more material added. Legal owners will get free downloads of all updates on it. The book is currently over 220 pages long on an iPad and over thousand pages long on a smart phone, as indicated through Amazon upload, though I have not checked it with my iPad or iPhone yet.
Book Description
Analysis of near 8000 records of foods collected and tested in Canada that originated in over 60 countries, for glyphosate content, between mid 2015 and end 2016 by Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA).
North American foods are most heavily contaminated by glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup weed killer. This book is for those people who do not look for continued debate on safety levels of glyphosate, and have already decided that glyphosate is an undesirable chemical to be in their food, and merely wish to have a tool with which they could try and avoid eating foods that have high glyphosate content.
The book has over 220 pages, 55,000 words, filled with over 250 tables along with charts and images. The data is sorted in chapters, starting with the Maximum Residue Limit (MRL) set by the government, comparison of glyphosate in food according to country of origin, and checking according to food types, such as grains, beans, flour, lentils, fruits, vegetables, and ready made meals. Under wheats, sub-sections check wheat bran, wheat flour, wheat germ, whole wheat, pasta, pizza, baking mix, couscous. It shows how glyphosate contamination of bran in wheat grown in Canada averages at over 2,000 ppb, or how 96% of all Canadian wheat bran tested were contaminated against 78% of the US wheat bran. It gives some of the worse contaminations of individual samples in separate tables, with contaminations between 4,000 and 7,000 ppb and how some of them are in violation of the MRL set by the government.
There are specific chapters on organic foods or gluten free ones, and tables comparing where eating organic ensures lower glyphosate contamination and where it does not ensure that. It shows which foods are free of glyphosate irrespective of being organic or not.
Glyphosate (RoundUp) has been in our farms and fields for a generation. That it is safe for humans is supposed to have been verified by the Government. Yet, the documents containing tests done on animals that prove that it does not affect mammals, or beneficial insects such as worms, bees, our gut micro-biome and the flora and fauna of the land, have been kept out of reach from the people.
My understanding of the law is – if the safety documents of a product cannot be released to the people, then the product itself may not be approved for release. While the Government is not saying people do not have right to see the documents, these data are one way or another kept out of reach of the people, often using arguments that the promoter of the product has patents and intellectual rights, and there is a confidentiality clause attached to the agreement with the Government.
This book is not aimed to join the debate on if glyphosate is safe and at what level of contamination it might be a concern. Rather, this book is designed for those people that have already decided to actively try and avoid having glyphosate in their food. This book is to help them select what kind of food, grown in which countries might be better or worse.
Canadian and US foods are about the most contaminated in the entire planet, and finding clean food free of glyphosate has gotten a major challenge, as the data shown in this book will indicate. Navigating through this glyphosate mine field may be of paramount importance for discerning people that are already conscious of potential health issues related to consuming a continuous dose of glyphosate over a long period.
I believe, without bias, that this book is the best guide and tool for consumers, especially those living in North America or considering imported foods from North America, to avoid a steady dose of slow poisoning through glyphosate. I believe this is the only one of its kind. There is no other.
This is going to be discussed in the book being written. But for now, here is the preliminary text on the issue of glyphosate in tofu.
It first came to my attention that while glyphosate was detectable in soy flour by the CFIA tests, it was strangely absent from 50 samples of conventional tofu. I could not figure out why or how the glyphosate disappeared from tofu, if it was already there in the flour used to make tofu. I asked a few scientists I knew. That started the ball rolling. And by now, the issue of glyphosate in tofu has gone beyond CFIA test records. It has started by me wondering why tofu tested by CFIA turned out with zero glyphosate while the soy flour it is made from contains much of the herbicide. I had made an earlier brief post on it on Facebook.
Well, the subject has caught attention of a number of scientists and caused a bit of investigation. While the jury is still out, and while no doubt some more investigation might continue by those that are able to conduct further glyphosate tests during the process of tofu making, a couple of details are beginning to emerge. These are :
As a preparatory step to tofu making, the soy flour is mixed in water and boiled. In this process some of the proteins that incorporated glyphosate, as well as some of the carbohydrates, get denatured, thus releasing the glyphosate out from their molecular bonds.
Next, the curdling of tofu is achieved by coagulants which can be either magnesium chloride MgCl2 or calcium sulphate Ca(SO4), salts of bivalent metals Magnesium or Calcium. Some countries like using MgCl2 while others use CaSO4 as coagulant.
Now, glyphosate, which is an amino acid, apparently very readily bonds with these salts of magnesium or calcium, and the resultant salt is very soluble in water.
So, during the process of tofu making, when the curdled tofu paste is pushed down and the water is being separated, to be eventually discarded, the glyphosate that had been released during the denaturing of the proteins and carbohydrates get caught and bonded with the coagulant to form Calcium or Magnesium salts in solution in the discarded water, and can no more be found in the tofu.
In some ways, the to fu making process filters out the glyphosate and gets discarded with the water. This is likely going to be tested eventually by someone in due course, as a confirmation.
Meanwhile, the issue remains about how much of the glyphosate was released when the stuff was boiled. There is a point of view that not all of it gets released, and some remain tightly bound with their parent structure, such that the boiling does not release them. Not just that, but their spectogram is not where glyphosate or AMPA would show up. Therefore LC-MSMS tests may not detect their presence.
Because of these two factors, a) most of the identifiable glyphosate having been captured and removed into the discarded water as magnesium or calcium salts and b) any remaining glyphosate stays undetectable by mass spectrometry, thereby becoming invisible and resulting in possible false negative.
That the above b) might be correct, was deduced by cross checking of scientists with their colleagues back in Asia, where comparative study of body organs was made between subjects that ate GMO tofu and those that did not.
Curiously, part of a new powerpoint slides made for the purpose was named Mitra-Samsel-17.pptx. That made me smile.
Here is one of the slides.
Anyhow, about any glyphosate that did not get trapped in the discarded tofu water, and evades detection, may still be able to cause trouble for consumers, though I should assume it would be less toxic due to the glyphosate that had been removed by the coagulant.
This brings the subject back to the techniques used by the labs, to prepare the sample before glyphosate testing can be done. Apparently most of the glyphosate in the sample can be released for detection by proteolysis using proteinase K or acid hydrolysis. Proteinase K is an enzyme derived from fungus and is not subjected to glyphosate exposure, while other animal enzymes may be contaminated with glyphosate because of their feed.
Therefore, using the right preparatory step taken by the lab before testing glyphosate in samples, especially of proteinaceous samples, might be critical. However, we do not know at this stage what methods were used by the labs employed by CFIA. To the best knowledge of some of the US scientists, most US labs had no knowledge of the problems relating to detection of glyphosate embedded in proteins. They often used an older method of using acidulated methanol to release glyphosate, which may give false results.
Anthony Samsel had the following questions.. “Also, I need to know about CANADA’s methods of testing for Glyphosate in these 7000 samples.. Is it GC MS, HPLC MSMS or ELISA and if they are using acidulated methanol. The reason that I ask, most labs doing HPLC use acidulated methanol in the method. This can mask GLLYPHOSATE so that you don’t get accurate results they are too low and or low levels disappear completely giving a false negative result….”
I should be trying to find some of the answers. While I do not have a confirmation, I can see signs that CFIA first subjected all samples to an ELISA test called glyphosate screening. Results would be either ‘negative’ meaning no glyphosate found, or ‘positive’ meaning glyphosate was detected. No level of concentration of glyphosate was detected in this test. Both results will be entered in the CFIA data, as positive, or negative.
Then, all samples that resulted ‘negative’ will be put aside.
All samples that proved ‘positive’ will be sent again for a costlier LC-MSMS test which was able to detect presence and concentration of glyphosate and AMPA simultaneously.
The result is entered by CFIA as follows:
If there was only glyphosate detected, a single entry is made agains that sample – for glyphosate concentration in ppm
If both glyphosate and AMPA were detected, two entries are made against that sample – one for glyphosate and one more for AMPA.
Thus, a specific food sample can have following entries in the CFIA record:
Just one record – negative
Two records, one for ‘positive’ and another for ppm glyphosate
Three records, one for ‘positive’, one for ppm glyphosate and yet another on ppm AMPA
That answers part of Anthony Samsel’s question, but still leaves out how precisely did the labs try to pull the glyphosate out of the proteinaceous matter? If the US labs knew nothing about using correct proteolysis, then can we expect Canadian labs to do better? This is a question I shall later try to find an answer to. For now, we do not know.
Lastly, the latest science paper that Stephanie Seneff and Anthony Samsel are awaiting publication of, apparently mentions that even Monsanto, or Dupont had found out years ago that if the correct proteolysis was done before testing, the yield in detectable glyphosate in a sample can increase 60 to 120 fold. Thats a staggering level of glyphosate that remains undetectable unless the right step is taken.
So, what do we learn from all this, and the fact that in the CFIA tests, soy flour showed presence of glyphosate, but tofu did not?
There is further news coming from some reportedly leaked comments from within US-EPA that the manner in which glyphosate safety test documents and data has been accepted has apparently not gone well with everyone in EPA. Well, it is almost 40 years since glyphosate has been unleashed. It is high time that approval of glyphosate was put under scrutiny.
