Tag Archives: Glyphosate

Glyphosate, Tea, and Media

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Glyphosate in Tea, and the effect on the tea drinking population.
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I had seen the evidence, from CFIA tests in Canada, that North America produced the most toxic of all seed based foods on the planet, from wheat to rye, barley, oats, to beans, chickpea and lentils.

http://www.ijehe.org/temp/IntJEnvHealthEng712-362183_100338.pdf

I also knew that people were getting poisoned far faster and with a far greater dose of glyphosate from non-GMO crops than GMO, which in general contained far less amount of glyphosate, with rice and quinoa being the only known exceptions.

I had seen further evidence that processed foods were on average lot more toxic with glyphosate than the same food in raw stage before processing. Such as carrots from the field (much cleaner), compared to carrots coming from famous branded tinned variety (dirtier with glyphosate contamination). Besides, most of the popular food processors including baby food and morning cereal makers somehow appeared to add a lot of glyphosate into their products, such as Kelloggs. I even wrote a letter to them about it, but only got a sort of holding message without follow up.

I had not paid too much to beverages, since not much of that was tested, and because it was so hard to guess what ingredients were included in popular health drinks etc.

However, coming to India, a major tea growing and tea drinking nation with high population, I became increasingly conscious of the issue of glyphosate in tea production. Tea garden owners have told me they have been using glyphosate in tea gardens for a long time, perhaps stretching a generation.

I have found that in rubber plantations, even in remote Himalayan foothills, glyphosate has reached.

Then Sri Lanka imposed a nationwide ban of glyphosate due to suspicion that it was killing farm workers from Kidney failure. Recently commercial pressure has pushed Sri Lanka to selectively open up Glyphosate in tea and rubber production.

So, when I heard about research papers from the US that seemed to find higher concentration of glyphosate tea compared to lots of processed foods and beverages, I found the authors of the study, but could not lay my hands on the published paper.

So I asked around and am thankful for agro-scientist André Comeau of Quebec, Canada, for sending me the link to the paper, which I have now downloaded and given it a cursory look, saving it for thorough reading in a few days. Apparently, a lot more glyphosate is noted in people’s urine that have drunk tea in the last 24 hours. I know glyphosate does bioaccumulates, so what is seen in the Urine is only a fraction of the stuff that one drinks. The rest goes into the person’s biology – one way or another, and ends up in all kinds of places it should not be – thus starting a long process of diseases or ill-health.

This chart is from that paper.

I used to think a billion plus people of India are getting mass scale poisoned primarily from imported daal (pulses) from countries such as Canada, Australia etc.

But now that I know how glyphosate has penetrated every aspect of modern farmlands growing virtually anything, from potato to cauliflower to rice, and how it is so visible in processed tea bags, I am beginning to suspect the billion strong population might be poisoned both from imported pulses, as as well most anything homegrown, from food to tea.

I feel increasingly sure the the tea-glyphosate link is not unique to India but across the entire tea producing world, from China to Africa, but we shall not know till someone starts broad based testing all these tea leaves, tea dust and tea bags.

It appears that the people in India, while being focussed on resisting GMO, might have allowed a thousand fold bigger tide of poison through reckless, and unchecked use of glyphosate everywhere on one side, and absolute absence of either any testing to see if any of that is safe, and same time without any test of how much of it is in the average diet of people here.

It looks like an unimaginable tsunami of ill-health is bearing down on India and all tea drinking regions, and I can already see the tell tale signs of it, with a cursory look at my friends and relatives and noticing the inexplicable rise of auto-immune diseases that were virtually unheard of a decade ago.

To make matters worse, the paper itself does not specifically say if the test also included presence of AMPA, the first metabolite of glyphosate. It is possible that the test excludes AMPA, in which case the actual toxicity from glyphosate/AMPA might be much higher than the figures shown. In absence of a clear mention, I am inclined to believe the data only contains glyphosate.

This should go into my blog – its too important and worrisome to ignore.

MEDIA MISINFORMATION

Then there is the issue of fake news, wrong news, yellow journalism, and news that are designed to give one sided information on safety of glyphosate, in this case in tea.

http://www.sundaytimes.lk/180513/columns/killing-the-goose-that-lays-the-golden-eggs-neglecting-the-countrys-highest-export-earner-293827.html

 The above news article, from The Sunday Times from Sri Lanka is a good example of bad reporting, and misleads the reader. On the surface of it, it essentially states what might be correct and obvious – that export of tea is a golden goose of Sri Lankan exports.

It further, take great pains to state that banning glyphosate on assumption of physical harm (death from kidney failure) is scientifically baseless. The actual sentence is “The latest blunder was the banning of glyphosate imports that is an essential weedicide in 2015 without a scientific basis“.

What the article fails to indicate, that proof that glyphosate in any food or drink is actually safe, has not been released by any government, and that non-release of such safety data makes approval of glyphosate to be illegal, and any claims that it is safe – little better than baloney.

The industry, that appears to have influenced every government on earth starting from USA, and prevented all of them from disclosing safety test report and raw data to the public, is careful is providing a plethora of scientific reports, all carefully picked, that indicate glyphosate was found not to cause any harm to animals. All these tests are, in fact, third party opinions and little else.

What actually constitutes proof of safety, is a comparison in health parameters of one group of test animals fed food with a measured dose of glyphosate, and health parameters of an identical batch of animals living an identical lifestyle and eating identical foods, without without any glyphosate. This comparison either proves glyphosate does not cause any harm to the animals or shows evidence of harm. This and this alone constitutes proof of safety. And this document, usually going into tens of thousands of pages of data on tests conducted usually on more than one group of animals, usually mammals, has been submitted to most governments in order to have them approve glyphosate for use in agriculture. And this is the document that has been kept out of public eye, which makes the approval illegal in my understanding of the law.

If a government cannot disclose safety test report and data of a toxin or non-food item to be used in agriculture, then the government may not approve nor release that item for use in agriculture either. That is how I understand constitutional law in most countries that are democratic and supported by a constitution.

The report should mention that Sri Lankan people have seen no proof whatsoever that presence of glyphosate in their food or beverage does not hurt the consumer. Also, Sri Lanka has not conducted any test of directly exposing glyphosate to test animals, like their sugarcane workers and tea garden workers have been exposed to glyphosate, to see if there is any adverse health impact on the animals.

The report also failed to disclose that sugarcane workers were dying of kidney failure only after the practice of spraying glyphosate on sugarcane was started, and some tea garden workers started developing throat cancer, suspected from exposure to glyphosate.

It is not very difficult to conduct tests on lab animals to see if comparative exposure to glyphosate duplicates these maladies on animals or not.

The paper has been harping on the golden goose of export dollars, but by failing to mention the health risks and the total absence of proof of any safety, implies that earning export dollars is worth more than deaths and illnesses of Sri Lankan Farm Workers.

That, to me is worse than yellow journalism. An honest journalist would not pen such a blatantly one sided article, but a poison peddler might.

Talking glyphosate, corruption, & citizen duty – in 17 minutes

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Talking about glyphosate poisoning of the planet, political corruption that makes it possible, and how the buck stops are your feet – all in 17 minutes.

Well – we are facing an existential crisis, and the buck stops are our feet.Question is, what are we, as individual citizens, prepared to do?

Here is my take, on Glyphosae, political and scientific corruption, and the need for citizen activism.

Glyphosate, being a mineral chelator, was denying our body from picking up essential nutrients from food by chelating (stealing) the minerals.

About a third of all our proteins (say around 40,000 kinds, give or take) function with a metallic ion placed in them. When our body creates a new protein of this kind, say to replace damaged one, it needs a metallic ion such as Manganese, or Iron, etc. to be attached to them in order for the proteins to function properly. This mineral is to be picked up from our food. However, glyphosate, if present in the same food, is able to steal that mineral. So, newly formed proteins would be denied its essential mineral, and remain non-functional as a result. Non-functional proteins lead to a pathway of diseases.

We humans and all animals have evolved in symbiosis with the bacterial kingdom, and a mass of bacteria use our body as host and in return perform essential services such as helping digest our food and assist our immune system.

Glyphosate kills bacteria, and thus it indirectly harms all of us, if we consume glyphosate along with our food. The claim that glyphosate is safe is patently false and to make it stick, industry has acquired a stranglehold on scientific research, destroying its neutrality and objectivity. More on this later.

Our immune system has not learned to identify glyphosate as a harmful substance because it is a synthetic molecule that did not exist in nature in the 4 billion year evolutionary history of life on earth. Our evolutionary process did not have to deal with it. That is why we have no defence against Glyphosate. This molecule was invented by man, only two generations ago, and as such is of extraterrestrial nature. It aught to be made extraterrestrial again – sending it out of planet earth. Let them make it and store it on Jupiter.

As if all this was not enough, glyphosate is a biological mimic of glycine, a canonical amino acid that is among the most common of the 22 amino acids that form the basic building block of  all life. By molecular mimicry, it slips past all our defences and gets mis-incorporated into our proteins. This invasion of glyphosate into our proteins turns them into rogue proteins, which can lead to a cascading series of diseases including synthetic diseases that did not exist before.

For scientific confirmation – one may read peer reviewed papers of Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Seneff, linked in my blog tonu.org.

For me, glyphosate is unacceptable for a simpler and more ominous reason. A product may not be approved by a government for general release without disclosure of its safety documents and providing the proof that it is safe. However, test data and documents that prove glyphosate is safe for consumers, have not been disclosed by any nations anywhere, despite it being approved for use since the 1970s. To me, this itself makes approval of glyphosate illegal.

Also, no government was engaged in broad based testing of food to detect levels of concentration of glyphosate, the most used herbicide on the planet. This is not just irresponsible and unacceptable. It should be criminal.

Personally I could not get any organization, anti-GMO groups and various talking heads to join me in asking the government in Canada to disclose hitherto hidden safety document on glyphosate. Neither could I find anyone to join me asking the Canadian government to start testing our foods for glyphosate. That is how I decided to go alone.

In 2013 Canada did not even have a lab that could test glyphosate in food, mainly because neither our government nor the medical establishment had so far been interested in testing foods for glyphosate. As a result, labs did not gear themselves up for a non-existent market.

I subsequently started a single handed two pronged effort to get the Canadian government, as the time under Stephen Harper and the conservatives, to get off its backside and first disclose all safety documents and data based on glyphosate was approved for the first time, back in the 1970s. Then, on a separate appeal, I asked the ministry of health to get some labs ready to test foods for glyphosate and to answer why Canadians could not test presence of the most used herbicide in our food.

The first effort is still dragging on. The government does agree I have a right to see the safety documents. And yet, it drags it feet forever. I also learned that I was the first person in Canada to officially as for this information, although the molecule has been approved back in the 1970s.

The second effort was more successful. In fact, it moved mountains, primarily due to a dedicated member of parliament, Mr. Alex Atamanenko, who took up my cause and demanded that the then minister of health answers me why Canadians cannot test food for glyphosate. This resulted in the ministry of health finally responding to me in a letter and also arranging to have its food inspection agency to start broad based testing of all foods available in Canada, produced locally and imported, for presence of glyphosate.

As soon as I learned that the wheels of the Government was finally beginning to turn in favour of testing our food for glyphosate, I asked the Canadian government discloses all test results to me – not just for the emerging records on glyphosate but for all biocides in food that the government had already tested for. And thus December 2016 I got almost 8,000 just concluded test results of glyphosate in foods and later another almost 100,000 records of results of other biocides in foods.

Analysis of the glyphosate records proved to be a shocker.

First, seed based foods and food products produced in the US and Canada were an order of dimension more toxic with glyphosate than same foods produced anywhere else on the planet. North America produces the most poisonous foods on the planet. I call glyphosate to be poisonous on the grounds that its safety data has been kept hidden. By that omission, I consider approval of glyphosate as illegal and the product as unsafe and downright a slow and deadly poison. Also, That it in fact is a deadly slow poison, has been explained by scientists such as Samsel and Seneff in their peer reviewed papers.

Not only that, I found out that conventional non-GMO crops such as wheat, rye, oats, barley, chickpea etc have an order of dimension more glyphosate than GM crops like soy and corn. Thus conventional non-GMO foods were, in my view, very much more poisonous than GM crops.

In my view, going after Monsanto is a useless exercise, because Monsanto does not necessarily break the law. What is does is corrupt our governments and gets our politicians to change the law to suit its business model. I believe its claim of safety of glyphosate to be fraudulent. I believe that is why it influences governments to hide this safety record from the people and prevents independent scrutiny of these data. Our governments is thus knowingly or unknowingly helping slow poisoning of the people, by allowing widespread use of glyphosate in agriculture.

Therefore, if one has to identify the rogues that are responsible for poisoning our food, our health, and our future, one needs to focus on our ineffective and possibly corrupt political process and perhaps corrupt or illiterate politicians that could not distinguish glyphosate from their elbow, who are unfortunately in charge of the regulatory mechanism and end up changing the laws of the nation to allow glyphosate to be used in agriculture.

Other scientists have found problems not just with glyphosate, but also with other chemicals packaged around it to make the branded product such as RoundUp. While this may be correct, it is glyphosate and glyphosate alone, that goes to regulatory mechanism and passes approval that ends up as RoundUp herbicide. In my view the cumulative damage that glyphosate does, not just at the toxicological level but in destroying our biology by molecular mimicry, sets this molecule apart from other adjuvants that goes into the packaging of RoundUp and even other herbicides.

And while we have other herbicides, pesticides, insecticides that are all possibly harming the ecosystem, glyphosate again stands out by the sheer volume of it that is produced and used, compared to all other biocides.

GMO are also based on fraudulent logic, exploitative ethics, twisted science as well as designed to undermine food security and freedom of a nation. However, there are hundreds and hundreds of them, each following different sets of scientific detail. If I have to fight a single battle and not a thousand battles, then I would choose glyphosate to be in my primary target. Glyphosate is the 900 pound gorilla in our food web and environment. Killing it would effectively also kill the GMO project. We shall be on the way to have all foods grown everywhere to be naturally organic as well as belonging to the people and the region that grows these foods, and not property of western corporations and banks .

Agri-corporations and their enablers in our government is quick to show the weighty evidence of science papers that claim glyphosate is safe. Promoters of this model of agriculture peddling increased sale of toxic chemicals, support a viewpoint that there is a baseless conspiracy theory and paranoia created in the minds of people by some miscreants and hapless scientists, which is resisting progress and modernism in agriculture and fighting glyphosate. There is a misconception that a little bit of toxicity in food in way of glyphosate is both acceptable and necessary, in view of the increased population of the world. All these claims by the promoters of toxic agriculture are fraudulent and not supported by honest facts and honest science. But my response to this chemical onslaught is simple. I say – disclose the safety documents, or shut up.

As to the weight of scientific evidence and the so called science based assessment – this is what I have to say.

Scientific research on safety of technologies such as glyphosate and GMO needs to be public funded and public owned. Instead, it is funded by the industry. Our politicians have allowed this travesty to come about. The public has bought into this on the false idea that this makes science free for the people and reduced our tax burden. This is false. There is no free lunch. You pay junk money for science, and you get junk science.

The industry is not interested in funding scientists that wish to check if products such as glyphosate has a problem. As a result, research on possible negative effects of glyphosate does not get any funding. Science has thus become one sided. It has lost its neutrality and objectivity. This, to me, is not science. This is voodoo, and so called “scientists” promoting it are not true scientists. They are pedlars.

Lastly, all this talk sidesteps a few important points – and these are to do with my perception of what constitutes democracy, the role of citizenry and what should be my personal duty to uphold our democratic process where the people are the masters of the government, and not some poison peddling corporation.

The most important stake holder in democracy is the citizen. It is my view that we, each of us, incur a debt to society and to democracy, as we grow up. The society does a lot to groom us. And we are to pay this debt back through the course of our lives by doing something in return for our society, our neighbourhood and our nation. We take a lot from the the society. We are supposed to put back more than we take, so that we leave the kitty is a bit richer and not sucked dry in our lifetime.

And there is the crux. We as individuals, within our individual capacity, are to engage in citizen activism to uphold and improve the wheels of the nation. This is our job, and not the job of the politicians. The politicians job is to represent us, take our views, and execute our wishes as our temporary servants. Our job is to be ever vigilant to ensure that these temporary servants are not robbing us and selling us off.

If we are caught napping, and stop controlling the politicians, then our politics will start being controlled by someone else or something else – which does not have our best interest at heart. Democracy then begins to fail, or morphs into forms of dictatorship, or fascism or other forms of rogue governments.

As they say – if you have a nation of sheep, you get a government of wolves. So, I appeal to you, the people, to get busy paying your debt to the nation, and start holding the feet of your politician to the fire.

We are facing an existential crisis. The very well beings of your children and grand children depends on you doing your duty in your own lifetime. Nothing else will do. The buck stops at your feet.

Thank you.

Citizen activism against herbicide attack

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Spent an evening at Richard Miller’s iconic home – a three story hillside home that once used to be a power plant and a railway station. Today, it borders a forested hill to the south where hummingbird families make nests, and agricultural flats to the north in Abbotsford.

Family of Robin Wesman of the East Kootenay had arrived to spend the night with them. I came with a pumpkin from my backyard. Richard would show me, another day, how to roast pumpkin seeds. But that was not the main reason we were there.

Richard spoke on the need of the hour, which might be to write multiple letters to the new Agriculture Minister of British Columbia. She is an NDP MLA and has a track record in the past for supporting organic farming and pushing back at industrial chemical dependent toxic farming. Now was the time to write to her, to encourage her in finding ways to push back at the use of glyphosate and reduce its presence in British Columbian agriculture. This was the time to show her the support – by the tens of thousands. His one minute talk on record was short, straight and direct.

Then it was Robin Wesman’s turn. He took two minutes to articulate his view, which is, to engage himself in a step by step process where the first step is to educate the people so they can see the picture about how our long term as well as short term health is affected by excess use of herbicides in our environment. The next step would be for the people to find ways to banish this practice of spraying herbicides in our environment. He covers his points in a two minute talk.

Lana Popham – mew Agriculture Minister of BC (AGR.Minister@gov.bc.ca)

 

Tony explained two things from his own perspective. The first was how science has been hijacked by the industry and we do not have balanced neutral science available to judge agri-industry, GMO or herbicides any more. Science has lost its objectivity and neutrality and stopped being an unbiased tool to assess glyphosate. The second point is – it is not so much the industry such as Monsanto that is at fault. The party that ensured our environment is turned toxic is our politicians that control our government. But the root cause is not just corrupt politicians – but complacency of us, the people of Canada that refuse to perform their main task as citizens. His talk took four minutes.

I forgot to mention, Richard and Tracie made some lovely dinner for us all, with roasted chicken with unbelievably good flavour, along with quinoa and salad, that went with a glass of red wine. I also had a banana.

Received an interesting feedback from a reader on youtube:

I Macey
No I disagree the only people who can change this are the occultists who are in power glyphosate is part of ongoing eugenics and the only reason the e.u haven’t relicensed is because glyphosate is starting to effect themselves . My opinion of course

That’s it for the day. By the time I hit the road heading back to my home, light had disappeared from the sky, and there was a traffic jam due to an accident that turned my hour long drive into a two hour one, reaching back home at 10:30 PM. My wife was fast asleep by then. All in all – a good way to pass quality time, and talk about what we the people aught to do beyond eating, drinking and making money for ourselves. Do we have a responsibility towards the future of the society and the land, or don’t we?

Poison Foods of North America

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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.

Charts on glyphosate

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Glyphosate content in ppb.

Above chart with partial data (2,000 test results out of over 7,000 from CFIA so far looked at) is for buckwheat only. For those who like to eat buckwheat for health or other reasons, but do not like to have glyphosate with it, may consider a few options – consider buying buckwheat from China or Russia and avoid the other sources, or alternately go organic.

Glyphosate contamination in ppb in legumes produced in Canada and US (out of the first 2,500 records)

And above is the chart for legumes produced in just two countries. Samples of legumes tested elsewhere gives a different story. Some countries have far less glyphosate in them, but only a few samples tested. Some countries have very high glyphosate figures in some categories but not others, also with low sample number. Canada and USA stand out as particular bad example for legumes with regard to glyphosate contamination, and garbanzo is the worst.

There is so much data to go through, covering the CFIA test of foods collected in Canada for glyphosate content, that analyzing it meaningfully is a task that demands attention and also an effort to look at it from different angles and present views that might be easier to understand.

I wonder if I might some day have a book on the topic of glyphosate in food as collected in Canada. Some of the details are revealing, while absence of some foods from test is equally galling. Therefore there is likely a need for some effort that fills the gaps. Getting Municipalities to start testing foods is believed to be an excellent opportunity to fill the blanks.

And, here are a few charts from the data so far transcribed, about the CFIA test records.

This is a partial country breakdown, after transcribing 2,000 records. Some countries have low sample numbers so their indications may not be true representation. Canada & USA have high sampling numbers.

And then the table below. Food samples marked as Canadian are turning out less than American foods. I find that hard to believe when samples are being drawn from al corners of Canada. Equally puzzling is the largest chunk of the samples coming under “unknown” origin. I suspect these unknown foods are unlabelled bulk foods picked up from local stores all over the country, and are likely to be more of Canadian origin than any other. Also that makes the Canadian sample count to be almost twice as many as US samples. So I created a row with the combined Canada+Unknown items, and consider that to be a better representation of Canadian foods. This also brings the average glyphosate (and AMPA) count o the foods from Canada and USA closer to each other, which seems logicals since both have similar agricultural practices and Canada is so heavily (and in my view negatively) influenced by American agro-industrial influence.

The table below gives some of the basics.

One kind of presumably healthy food category that has really surprised me with astonishingly high glyphosate content – is gluten free food. So much so that I had to try and separate them from the rest and see how the figures play out.

Out of the first two thousand odd records, I find very very few gluten free items from any country except USA and Canada, so I ignored them and focussed on just these two. USA has 130 samples and Canada 99, that have “gluten free” in their description. Average glyphosate + AMPA readings for the US produced gluten free product is 248 ppb and that for Canada is 286.

These readings are between two and three times the national average for USA and Canada, which are already hight to start with. Somehow, anything that has “gluten free” mentioned has become suspect- in my mind.

This is but a preliminary report. I shall later check if Organic-Gluten free is any better, and if it is any better than standard, non-organic, non-glutens free, off the shelf conventional food.

Gluten Free foods have been among the most baffling due to high glyphosate concentration.

But when you break it down to organic and non-organic of the gluten free foods produced in USA and Canada, the pictures changes dramatically, as below.

Non-organic gluten free stuff is way worse than national averages, and out of the two, the Canadian product sucks more

The confusion regarding Organic stamp and gluten free food

If you go to my blog, and download the initial 803 records, in searchable pdf, you can check each record that has the words “gluten free” and see the test results and what kind of food.

There still will be a problem. CFIA has removed the label and the true description of the source of the food sample.

So, if you find ten cases of gluten free flour of some kind, and see that nine out of those ten are having high glyphosate and only one is clean, it might be impossible to ascertain which specific brand, or store or place one must to to pick up the clean variety and not the nine dirty types. This is one reason I would say that gluten free this or that item is in general suspect, because the average glyphosate content (adding the glyphosate amount of the nine positive samples and dividing by ten total samples) gives a pretty high glyphosate parts per billion figure and chance of me getting a good doze of it from this item is high.

For those that are gluten intolerant, the problem is amplified and becomes circular. eating high glyphosate gluten free food on one side removes the pair or discomfort of taking in gluten, on the other side perhaps ensure that the gluten intolerance (it is now more or less established that gut bacteria damage is one of the root causes of gluten intolerance, and that glyphosate hurts gut bacteria) problem is likely to continue or worsen instead of get better, because of continued intake of more glyphosate.

It just so happens that “Organic” gluten free food, in general, are a lot cleaner than conventional gluten free food.

One could download the pdf file and check it for any kind of permutation and combination to arrive at suitable decisions that address one’s particular need.

As and when more data is transcribed, cross checked and error-corrected, more of it will be published on line.

Time to time I take a break and make a chart or two to address some things that appear puzzling or surprising to me.

Finding glyphosate content so much higher in gluten free food that the general average of all foods, came as a surprise since I used to think of gluten free as a healthier kind of food. I personally do not buy gluten free, do not have allergy to gluten and do understand that keeping my gut bacteria healthy has gotten to be very important for my immune system and general health.

We are living in a very difficult world, where the US and Canadian Government is constantly changing definitions of food stamps. Today they accept certain kind of contamination even within certified organic label and has invented multiple kinds of USDA-Organic stamp, with different colours accepting different percentage of the food to have non-organic content.

For example, I just learned from a scientist in USA that the “green label” USDA organic stamp allows 5% non-organic food to be within it. The black USDA-Organic stamp will allow 30% non-organic content in it and still have that black circular USDA Organic stamp.
I am trying to figure out Canadian Government standards on this. As far as CFIA records go, the foods are only described “organic” without any clarification.

For any that wish to investigate and help us with the general work, you may wish to read through the Canadian Safe Food (read Organic) regulation standard for 2017 and see if the Canadian Government is also following the US counterpart in allowing various levels of impurity into the food and yet agreeing to stamp it with different flavours of the circular “CANADIAN ORGANIC – BIOLOGIQUE CANADA”stamp. Click on the image below for the full pdf document and download for your study.

Click on image for the full pdf document

Some text here might appear long winded or a bit out of context. That is because I am aiming to eventually prepare a book or an e-book on the topic and am using some of these blogs as a store of some of my off the cuff write-ups.

I know the pro-Monsanto and pro-glyphosate lobby will snigger and pass condescending notes that the amounts mentioned are tiny, irrelevant and is not harmful to humans, based on yada yada yada reports.

But this blog, or my efforts, are not to engage in any argument with these characters. To me, no amount of glyphosate is desirable, because:

  1. Safety test records and data, based on which Health Canada approved glyphosate, is still kept hidden from the people, illegally I might add, and I am having a multi-year long battle to get them to disclose the data, without which I am unprepared to listen to these industry cronies.
  2. Science has been hijacked by industry. We need science funding to be taken away from industry, restriction removed so that Universities can test for both good points as well as potential dangers of glyphosate, without any interference from promoters, and let all the findings be part of the body of science. Let chips fall as they may. Let twenty years pass and enough material be collected to highlight both sides of the argument. Only then am I willing to even consider listening to reports or evaluations of the scientific community, on safety of glyphosate.
  3. Let someone prove Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Seneff wrong by showing that glyphosate is NOT an analog (mimic) of glycine and it does NOT get picked up by our biology into the extra-cellular matrix, does NOT get into our cells, does NOT get used by our RNA to produce peptides or peptides which eventually end up as new proteins where glyphosate replaces glycine with disastrous consequence to the function of the protein. If such a proof is not produced, I am prepared to ignore all comments on mere toxicological tests and studies on safety of glyphosate.

Meanwhile, I intend to analyze the CFIA test record data with my own assumption that the only safe limit for glyphosate is ZERO, irrespective of what guideline CFIA, Health Canada, EPA or anybody else follows. This analysis is based on that assumption. Those that follow my reasoning, they may continue to read them Those that do not believe my reasoning – go someplace else. I have no time nor any inclination, to argue with you all. Just go.

Lentils and Chickpea/ Garbanzo beans

These have been a nightmare – since these readings are so high, often going into several thousand ppb (parts per billion – which is derived by multiplying the ppm or µg/g figures by CFIA) on some of the samples. I shall address those items later on on this blog. Meanwhile, I prepared some charts for India, since lentil is a heavily consumed group of seeds in India and since this is increasingly popular in the west and since North America is beginning to produce a lot of it, perhaps hoping to re-export back to India where production is falling behind rising demand.

Indian lentils seem to have rising amount of glyphosate, but nowhere as high as lentils produced in Canada (not shown in this chart)

The chart below shows, among all the foods imported from India into Canada, nearly seventy such samples so far seen out of 2,000 odd records, the worst group is the lentil + Chickpea group, compared to say, rice, or any other item.

Canadian grown lentils are way worse than the Indian grown. I shall show them later. Meanwhile, here is another chart about India, or rather, about the foods imported from India into Canada and tested by CFIA. Its the percentages of samples that contain glyphosate/AMPA.

Percentage of bad food among imported Indian samples. You may click on the image to get to the pdf file of the 800 odd records so far transcribed and put on line.

The above chart means, out of all the lentils imported from India, 50% are having glyphosate. Over 12% of the rice has glyphosate, though mostly trace amount, and among the rest – which include a whole gamut from pickles to snacks, over 71% have some glyphosate. However, the averages as you can see in the previous chart above, are still low compared to foods grown in North America.

I shall come back with more shortly. I am also trying out various chart types to practice on them, for perhaps putting in an e-book I might publish on Amazon kindle, about glyphosate in food.

General North American Food

Since readings between USA and Canadian food samples appear more or less similar when compared to foods imported from anywhere else, I have also combined to two for a general idea of glyphosate contamination in certain categories that appear to have high glyphosate contamination, without separating organic from non-organic labelling. The graph below shows that.

Suspect categories of North American food with regard to glyphosate contamination.

More later.

Ag Ministry of Saskatchewan joins the glyphosate testing deniers

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The petition for local governments to test local food for glyphosate is slowly gaining ground. As more people are joining up, I am getting more feedback on potential decision makers to enter into the petition. One such recent entry has been the minister of agriculture for the Canadian province of Saskatchewan.

I was impressed by the promptness of the response, but not by its content. Passing the buck and sidestepping the demand to test local food for glyphosate and not depend on another branch of Government which is obviously not testing anything for the people – seems to be the preferred method used by politicians to tap dance around the burning necessity for letting the people know the quantity of glyphosate in their food, and to deal with it in anyway they like.

These answers are not considered to be depressing. It gives us knowledge of what to expect from the fence sitting governments. It also bolsters the notion that the petition is needed more as a tool to develop grassroots movement, where people pressure begins to trump corporate lobby, and clean food trumps toxic one.

Anyhow, I wished to preserve this piece of information, not only because it deserves to be in the general body of information attached to the petition, but also as a blog and perhaps a near future book of essays, on my experience as a food security activist, and the journey of trying to push back from the toxic avalanche we are all subjected to.

tony mitra

Should EPA be shut down by Trump?

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The article above wonders if Trump could be dismantling the EPA, based on talks of him employing a Reagan era official, Anne Grouch Buford, who reportedly wanted to shut down the EPA.

The question is raised withe background of fossil fuel industry against green energy. The EPA, it is supposed here, were considered to be an obstacle to expansion of the oil and coal industry.

I however, have a wholly different take on the EPA. That comes from my concern relating to herbicides approved by the EPA for use in agriculture in general, and approval of glyphosate in particuler. EPA is the institution that has approved all the harmful pesticides and herbicides in agriculture while still hiding their safety test documents from the people.

It is the institution that exerts its influence on other nations to follow suit. I for one am sick of hearing our own ministry of health bragging about ‘working closely’ with US-EPA.

I have made a podcast with recently retired EPA scientist Vallianatos who describes EPA to be so corrupt that it cannot be cleaned up and should be completely shut down and something else rebuilt in its place. He wrote a book on this – Poison Spring.

I do not know what it does with regard to the environment, but one thing I do know, is that the Environment Protection Agency does everything BUT protect the environment.

And EPA is polluting not just USA, but by extension the rest of the world as well.

Readers might consider getting hold of this book and read it. I have.

You can hear Dr. Vallianatos here:

Glyphosate is dangerous because it mimics glycine – Samsel and Seneff

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Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Seneff have published a fresh paper on glyphosate, fifth of the series – listed below. Here the scientists show how glyphosate is an analog (mimic) of glycine, one of the most prevalent of the 21 amino acids that form the basic building blocks of life. Thus, by being a mimic of a molecule that is required for building a lot of our parts, such as proteins, glyphosate is able to slip through our immune system and creates a havoc in our biology. By “our biology” I mean all life, anything that is living.

Here Anthony Samsel is seen speaking with me, in two parts. The term ‘mimic’ is used by me, Samsel, being a proper scientist, uses the world analog.

This is among the most important of informations you will find, to understand glyphosate and how it gets into our proteins and hurts us at a cellular and biological level, which is different from its toxicity, or its ability to cause immediate harm at the chemical level.

Reference

Links to Anthony Samsel’s five peer reviewed papers can be found at ResearchGate, by typing in his name and browsing through his publications. Alternately, they can also be downloaded from here:

Its for reasons like this that I had initiated three parallel efforts to deal with Glyphosate at the public level and a few more on a personal level.

The public ones are:
Asking the Canadian Government to place all safety test documents and raw data on glyphosate on public domain. This should include each and every document that helped the government to reach the decision that glyphosate was safe. I created two different petitions on this:

  1. A petition on change.org.
  2. One more on Canadian House of Commons e-petition platform.

Apart from those, I am involved in creating a grassroots movement, which is more global in its approach, for people to demand to their local healthcare services and governments, to start testing of local food on a monthly basis for presence of glyphosate and to make the data public. A third petition to this specific goal is created where the decision makers would be anybody in charge of the local healthcare service, or local public servant involved with health, or local mayor or governor or premier.

3. Here is the third petition.

If you believe in this, you might consider signing some of these petition, and share, or get involved in identifying more potential decision makers, for the third petition.
Tony Mitra
tony.mitra@gmail.com

Vaccine-glyphosate link exposed by Anthony Samsel

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Scientists Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Seneff have just gotten the fifth peer reviewed paper on Glyphosate published. Its named “Glyphosate pathways to modern diseases V: Amino acid analogue of glycine in diverse proteins”. The interview on that has been covered in the previous blog.

The latest bombshell to come from Anthony Samsel is from the sixth paper, which is not yet published, but whose supporting data is already making waves – various popular vaccines are contaminated with glyphosate.

How? Well, vaccine makers sometimes use animal byproducts in vaccines, products such as chicken egg protein or gelatine that comes from bones. And if those vaccine makers are using animals that come out of factory farms, chances are they are fed GMO and glyphosate laced feed. If so, they would pick up Glyphosate into their system just as we humans do. Therefore, egg protein and gelatine made from these animals may also contain glyphosate, which in turn would then contaminate the vaccines that use these products. Finally, people, or animals, vaccinated with these products would have glyphosate directly injected into them, and will in due course have glyphosate initiating a cascade of diseases.

Anthony Samsel was not passing opinion on this. Rather, he collected vast samples of these popular vaccines and got them tested by multiple labs in USA for presence of Glyphosate, and found, as he suspected, the vaccines to be largely contaminated by it.

This 5 minute video covers only that part of the talk.

He has already alerted his Senator, as well as various Government and international organizations such as CDC, FDA and WHO.

What is the situation with Canada? It depends on where the vaccine makers have their plants. I don’t know if they have many in Canada. But the issue remains the same. Vaccine manufacturers might be using animals from factory farms, and may never have considered the issue of glyphosate contamination.

For Canada, the most important task would be to take samples of all vaccines and have them tested for presence of glyphosate.

For Canadians, it should trigger a grassroots movement demanding postponing all mass vaccination till we have the issue sorted and till we have forced the vaccine makers to use animals fed organically and tested to be glyphosate free.

I intend to use the content of Anthony Samsel’s letters, add my bit on Canada, as well as video such as this one, to alert our Canadian counterparts.

I request all readers of the blog to share it, and also consider writing to your local representative in the Government, or to the medical establishment, to consider taking a serious second look at this new information of glyphosate poisoning of some of the popular vaccines. The idea is not to ban vaccines per se, but to force the producers to use animals that are not fed GMO and glyphosate laced feed to start with, and to clean up their vaccines. Vaccines are meant to protect people, not poison them or make them sick.

Sample letter sent by Anthony Samsel

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page 5

Reference

Links to Anthony Samsel’s five peer reviewed papers can be found at ResearchGate, by typing in his name and browsing through his publications. Alternately, they can also be downloaded from here:

 

The link between Glyphosate & our RNA

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Scientists Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Seneff have just gotten the fifth peer reviewed paper on Glyphosate published. Its named “Glyphosate pathways to modern diseases V: Amino acid analogue of glycine in diverse proteins”.

In this regard Tony Mitra interviewed Anthony Samsel, to cover the newly emerging scientific findings on Glyphosate and how it can and does hurt creatures including humans.

Pari I: Click the below mage of the tractor to watch the video

[youtube 0C7E25lBCg4]

This is a 28 minute video.

Pari II: Click the below mage of the tractor to watch the video

[youtube BPhfJx0o38o]

This part covers 38 minutes, of which the last five minutes covers the issue of many popular vaccines being contaminated by glyphosate, and the resultant effort to alert national and international institutions of this new found danger.

Samsel stands out at being the very first among all scientists, to draw our attention to the fact that Glyphosate is a different kind of killer chemical and pure toxicological test does not do it justice. The chemical does not have high acute toxicity, and therefore has been approved by EPA. However, it has this unique property of being an analog of (mimic of) glycine, an amino acid that is part of a building block of all life. Therefore, when an organism such as a human, needs to create cells or other structures to replenish dead or damaged ones, it picks up some of the amino acids from our food, which circulates in our blood stream. Due to Glyphosate being an analog of Glycine, it is mistakenly picked up by our body, assuming it to be glycine, and thus our RNA takes it and reconstructs complex structures/peptoid that to go into various parts of our body as proteins we need. Unfortunately, Glyphsoate does not behave like Glycine and ends up creating trunkated, misfolded or defective proteins, which in turn triggers illnesses of diseases of a vast variety, depending on where in our body it happens to be.

This behavior of Glyphosate was not known, and therefore not recognized by either Monsanto or EPA or other scientists, and hence it has been ignored for decades. But not any more.

Samsel has gotten hold of tens of thousands of pages of hitherto sealed safety tests done on Glyphosate by makers such as Monsanto and DuPont through a legal understanding with EPA, and has been revisiting the test data and finds evidence of his claims, which forms the basis of his papers.

He has has one serious meeting with EPA already, sort of educating them of how this amino acid analog of glycine can enter our body where it should not, and harm living creatures, bypassing our immune system, and how the safety test results provide the proof of it, if one looks at the right place.

EPA has recently started calling GLyphosate an amino acid, instead of just a herbicide, which is a major improvement.

They are scheduled to have a serious four day internal meeting in the next few months, to discuss this issue. It is possible that they will allow Anthony Samsel to participate in that meeting, perhaps electronically from long distance, to answer questions or clarify any confusion etc.

Meanwhile, if you google “Glyphosate pathways to modern diseases” you should find increasing mention/links of these studies and papers published on some of the social media such as from Dr. Mercola etc.

Regarding the glyphosate contaminated vaccines, a series of letters have been sent to Senator, CDC, FDA and other health organizations as well as WHO. I myself aim to send letters to Canadian Government and medical institutions shortly.

Scientists such as Seralini has found the toxicity of the combined package of RoundUp herbicide to be more toxic than just Glyphosate. His supporters would like the focus to remain there, and not be side tracked by new findings where Glyphosate alone can do serious harm to living creatures by being absorbed into our biology in place of Glycine. The fact that Glyphosate needs to be assessed by a yardstick other than toxicology, is something that has not sunken in for the approving authorities, the Government, or the scientific diaspora yet.

Competition and jealousy also clouds up science research.

Reference

Links to Anthony Samsel’s five peer reviewed papers can be found at ResearchGate, by typing in his name and browsing through his publications. Alternately, they can also be downloaded from here: