Australians are eating the RoundUp chemical ‘glyphosate’ for breakfast and parents are unknowingly feeding it to infants in baby food.
The so-called ‘safe’ weed killer ingredient, which has been linked to cancer and sparked multi-million-dollar law suits, has been detected in grain-based foods by Australia’s food standards agency.
Glyphosate was found in multi-grain, wholemeal, spelt, rye and white breads, savoury biscuits and crackers, and rice-based breakfast cereals, flours and crackers in Food Standards Australia New Zealand’s (FSANZ) latest Total Diet Survey.
It was also found in infant baby cereal, which is a rice-based product usually offered as a first solid to babies learning to eat.
Cereals and cereal products – in particular bread – was the “major contributing food category to glyphosate dietary exposures” for Australians, and for babies it was infant cereal.
However the food standards agency said glyphosate levels were well below accepted dietary limits and concluded there was “no public health and safety concerns for most substances”.
But the agency has come under fire for its unchanged position on safe levels of glyphosate amid mounting calls for Australian regulators to review the chemical’s use and potential carcinogenic effects on people.
Glyphosate, the active chemical in the weed killer RoundUp, is the most widely used herbicide in the world, with more than 6 billion kilograms applied over the last decade.
In a recent landmark case, a US couple was awarded $2 billion damages when a California jury found their cancer was caused by exposure to RoundUp.
About 13,400 US plaintiffs are suing the company Bayer, which bought RoundUp maker Monsanto, while a Melbourne gardener has launched Australia’s first legal case and councils are re-assessing their use.
Human exposure to glyphosate is not limited to RoundUp, the popular brand of backyard and commercial weed killer that consumers have been repeatedly told is safe by the company and government regulators.
The chemical is also an active ingredient in more than 500 products approved for use in Australia, many of which can be found on supermarket and hardware store shelves and used by backyard gardeners.
Of the weed killers on the shelves in Bunnings, for example, all but a couple of products from two brands – Brunnings and Richgro – listed glyphosate as an active ingredient.
Public health academic Dr Bruce Armstrong, from the University of Sydney, said it was time for regulators to “get real” about glyphosate instead of “point-blank denying the evidence”.
“I think the most important thing is for the regulator APVMA to stop saying there’s no evidence that it causes cancer and get real and examine it so the public has confidence,” Dr Armstrong said.
“The first place we need to start is to work out why the regulator is making a decision that seems to go against the evidence produced by the International Agency for Research on Cancer which is the pre-eminent cancer research agency.
“They need to take expert international opinion seriously and carefully re-evaluate and do it in an open and transparent manner.”
https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/2019/07/20/roundup-food-cancer/