[HN Gopher] Influential study on glyphosate safety retracted 25 ...
___________________________________________________________________
Influential study on glyphosate safety retracted 25 years after
publication
Author : isolli
Score : 228 points
Date : 2025-12-05 13:39 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lemonde.fr)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lemonde.fr)
| jeffwask wrote:
| Faking research data that then leads to the death of citizens
| from your product should result in a corporate death sentence.
| oftenwrong wrote:
| The problem is always how well one can prove that any harm was
| done, or that theoretical harm would be done.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| and criminal penalty consequequences fornthe people who
| prepared and signed the paper in bad faith
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| What is a corporate death sentence? And if true, the list would
| be LONG
| isolli wrote:
| Wiping out shareholders. I bet shareholders would be a lot
| more cautious if that was an option.
| u8vov8 wrote:
| Ideally this:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal
| peppersghost93 wrote:
| Dissolution of a company by revoking the charter and
| liquidating all it's assets to anyone who will buy them.
| dmix wrote:
| It's not clear if the data is fake. Retraction Watch said it
| was retracted because:
|
| > authors didn't fully disclose their ties to Monsanto
|
| and
|
| > He also called out the authors' reliance on unpublished
| studies from Monsanto for their conclusions that glyphosate
| exposure did not cause cancer, though other studies existed.
| zackmorris wrote:
| A mechanism for harm could be that glyphosate disrupts the gut
| lining barrier and flora, which can cause or contribute to
| leaky gut, a loose term for digestive waste and foreign bodies
| entering the bloodstream.
|
| Those bodies can cause chronic inflammation and the strange
| autoimmune disorders we see rising over time. Note that some
| brands like Cheerios (which don't sell an organic equivalent)
| can contain 700-800 ppb of glyphosate, well over the 160 ppb
| limit recommend for children by the Environmental Working Group
| (EWG).
|
| US wheat and other crops seem to have become harder to digest
| for some people due to genetic tampering. They contains
| substances borrowed from other species to reduce pest damage,
| which the body has little or no experience with, which may
| trigger various reactions (this has not been studied enough to
| be proven yet).
|
| All of these effects from gut toxicity could lead to ailments
| like obesity, malnourishment, cardiovascular disease, maybe
| even cancer. This is why I worry that GLP-1 agonists may be
| masking symptoms, rather than healing the underlying causes of
| metabolic syndrome that have been increasing over time.
|
| Many people have chosen to buy organic non-GMO wheat from other
| countries for this reason. I believe this is partially why the
| Trump administration imposed a 107% tariff on Italian wheat for
| example, to protect US agribusiness.
|
| Before you jump on me for this being a conspiracy theory, note
| that I got these answers from AI and so will you.
|
| My personal, anecdotal experience with this was living with
| leaky gut symptoms for 5 years after a severe burnout in 2019
| from (work) stress, which may have been triggered by food
| poisoning. I also had extremely high cortisol which disrupted
| everything else. So I got to the point where my meals were
| reduced to stuff like green bananas, trying everything I could
| to heal my gut but failing, until I finally snapped out of my
| denial and sought medical attention.
|
| For anyone reading this: if holistic approaches don't fix it
| within say 6 weeks to 6 months, they aren't going to, and you
| may need medication for a time to get your body out of
| dysbiosis. But you can definitely recover and return to a
| normal life like I did, by the grace of God the universe and
| everything.
| Havoc wrote:
| Corporations will keep misbehaving until the consequences are
| suitably sized to provide an incentive not to.
|
| One of the reason I've been glad to see EU hand out chunkier
| fines. Or at least attempt it...but there is remarkable
| enthusiasm for defending billion dollar corporation's
| misbehaviour because that would be over regulation
| nathan_compton wrote:
| When are we going to start imprisoning people, I wonder.
| smt88 wrote:
| It's bizarre that the right wing wants to execute people
| convicted of a single murder, but tobacco and opioid execs,
| responsible for millions of deaths, don't receive jail time
| or even fines.
| nielsbot wrote:
| capitalism is our natural environment. like the air we
| breathe. how can you punish it?
| titzer wrote:
| Can't you see the billionaires sprouting in the Spring?
| Didn't you know they spread their delicate flowers just
| like Jasmine has for millions of years?
|
| /s
| onli wrote:
| Right. This is not an area of fines. This is a criminal
| conspiracy with intent to kill on a wide scale. Absolutely
| deserving of prison for everyone involved.
| franktankbank wrote:
| In this economy? We have people murdering CEOs for free!
| antonvs wrote:
| Are you saying Mangione should be tried for illegal dumping
| of assassination services?
| expedition32 wrote:
| Yep. There was a company in my country that got a hefty bill
| after they contaminated a river for a few decades. They
| simply decided to go bankrupt and leave the country.
|
| Apparently corporations can spin up subsidiaries that are
| legally siloed.
| frmersdog wrote:
| When the alternative is regular and predictable violence. The
| corporate elite who don't cause issues will vouch for a
| stronger rule of law wrt their actions, out of fear of
| becoming an undeserving victim of the zeitgeist. It's better
| to get dragged into court and be able to prove that you
| didn't do anything wrong (or even to actually face that
| prison term), than to get dragged into the street and not see
| the next sunrise.
|
| I do think that Thompson and Kirk are finally opening some
| eyes to the possibilities, on both sides.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| When their employers stop giving freebies to politicians?
| 11101010001100 wrote:
| Pay the fine and Pay for pardon is the business du jour.
| SamaraMichi wrote:
| Considering the cogs at corporations are going above and beyond
| to cover for their wrongdoings despite our perceived lack of
| consequences is concerning, it would seem their efforts to hide
| their actions would only balloon.
| delichon wrote:
| I can feel the pull of glyphosate. I want to kill the weeds right
| around my house, but that's where my dog sleeps and rolls and
| eats the grass. Roundup is the popular weed killer and I've got a
| bottle in the garage. So I look up its effects on pets, and it
| says "manageable with precautions", particularly waiting for the
| fluid to dry before letting the dog on it.
|
| I'm not very comfortable with that so looking around for other
| solutions I see a guy on Youtube telling me how to manage weeds
| with vinegar. I figure that must be safe, so I buy a bottle of
| the recommended concentration, but for the hell of it look up its
| safety for dogs before applying it. They say hell no, this is way
| too strong for pets and can cause burns, etc. I would need to
| dilute it quite a bit, making it a lot less effective.
|
| So I ended up using glyphosate, but I'm looking for something
| better.
| moab wrote:
| How about not killing the weeds? One doesn't need to live a
| perfectly manicured pesticide-ridden hellscape.
| GaryBluto wrote:
| How about letting him do what he wants with his own land and
| not insulting his ideal home?
| snapdeficit wrote:
| How about thinking about society and not just every man for
| himself? Clearly you didn't read TFA.
| morkalork wrote:
| No, this is HN where we voraciously advocate for the
| libertarian ideals of "I do what I want" then pontificate
| about the tragedy of the commons from an ivory tower when
| it inevitably all goes wrong.
| moab wrote:
| You're entitled to your own opinion, but imo the point of
| posting anything on HN is to subject yourself to feedback.
| That's what I gave. Feedback.
| striking wrote:
| Their comment asked for an alternative.
| GaryBluto wrote:
| He wanted an alternative method to achieve X, not abandon
| X and do Y.
| oftenwrong wrote:
| What if I want to do something on my land that will poison
| the ground water for the area? What if I want to raise an
| invasive species on my land that will likely escape and
| devastate local wildlife? Should society be permissive and
| wait for the damage to be done before stopping me, instead
| of being proactive and stopping me from doing so before the
| fact?
| GaryBluto wrote:
| Last time I checked that wasn't what he was planning on
| doing.
| nullstyle wrote:
| Last time i checked you were giving out blank checks. We
| live in a society
| filoeleven wrote:
| That is literally what he is doing. None of your lawn
| grass is native.
| delichon wrote:
| I live in an extremely high wildfire risk area. I also have
| an extreme rodent problem. Keeping the vegetation low around
| structures is indicated.
| triceratops wrote:
| Keeping vegetation low is a different problem from removing
| weeds in a targeted fashion. A simple mower or trimmer
| should suffice.
| moab wrote:
| You can do that by mowing, fyi.
| Zach_the_Lizard wrote:
| Can't do that in cracks in a sidewalk, between pavers, on
| a wall, etc. where plant growth can damage them.
| komali2 wrote:
| Weed whacker and edger? You'll have them out anyway.
| delichon wrote:
| I weed whack acres, it is a huge sink of my free time.
| But there are areas where I don't want to mow, I want to
| eliminate growth, like on my gravel driveway, and the
| area adjacent to my house. I should probably install
| concrete instead of gravel, but that's telling myself to
| just eat cake since I have no bread.
| Zach_the_Lizard wrote:
| Some weeds are quite unpleasant, such as sticker burrs. I'd
| rather not have a dog and children covered in those.
|
| Some weeds can be damaging to property, trees, sidewalks,
| etc. or are poisonous.
|
| It's not always about being annoyed by dandelions in an
| otherwise overly fussed over sterile lawn environment.
| onli wrote:
| Even then, spraying cancer causing chemicals into the land
| is beyond stupid. Killing yourself and the humans around
| your land for having a bit less work, one can't be more
| antisocial.
| derriz wrote:
| Or if you do want a manicured plot, just cut them with a
| lawnmower?
|
| The bane of my young life was having the job of cutting the
| grass around the house - we lived in the country at the time
| and had about 1/2 an acre of lawn as well as fruit trees,
| plants, vegetables, etc.
|
| We never considered using weedkiller - I just can't see the
| need. Isn't it just as easy to pull the weed out of the
| ground as it is to spray round-up on it and wait for it to
| die, before presumably anyway pulling the remains of it?
|
| Ignoring the health implications completely, I can see some
| "value" of using round-up in a commercial environment where
| your dealing with 100s of acres or more but fail to see what
| benefit it provides in a domestic setting when the number of
| weeds is small enough that it would just takes minutes to
| remove them physically and toss them into a compost heap.
| Retric wrote:
| I rarely use weed killer on poison ivy to avoid coming into
| physical contact. Lawnmowers work fine for flat yards, but
| for steps down a steep embankment you really need a weed
| eater and weed eater + poison ivy is a major hassle.
| mrgoldenbrown wrote:
| Digging weeds and their roots up one by one by hand out of
| cracks in concrete/asphalt is much slower than spraying.
| Also much more physically challenging, which is a metric I
| didn't care about when young and able bodies but nowadays
| is very relevant to me. I'm not saying roundup is good, but
| there are plenty of reasons for it to be appealing. I
| haven't tried the boiling water method yet, it seems like
| it'd be easier than digging but harder than spraying,
| unless perhaps one has a mobile, outdoor source of boiling
| water.
| reeredfdfdf wrote:
| What is the point of removing weeds from those cracks in
| the first place? Do they cause some kind of physical harm
| to creatures or objects that move on that concrete or
| asphalt surface?
| hexaga wrote:
| The concrete itself can be damaged further over time by
| expanding root networks / growth.
| analog31 wrote:
| In my area, some weeds will absolutely take over and choke
| out everything else while also spreading throughout the
| neighborhood to the delight of all.
|
| But roundup isnt much of an option when the weeds are next to
| the nice stuff. My compromise is to pull the weeds when I'm
| motivated to and call it a day.
| TitaRusell wrote:
| This is how humans had to do it for millennia- by hand.
| Backbreaking work. But necessary unless you wanted to lose
| half the harvest.
|
| I dislike gardening and enjoy my apartment!
| malfist wrote:
| Pesticides aren't used to kill weeds.
|
| Herbicides are useful, they certainly help prevent invasive
| weed species from taking over native plants and grasses. I'm
| Kentucky I'm always fighting Johnson grass, thistle and
| Japanese knotweed in my bluegrass
| Angostura wrote:
| Pesticide is a catch-all term that encompasses herbicides,
| insecticides, fungicides etc.
| malfist wrote:
| No, it isn't. Pesticide are used to kill pests, such as
| insects in the case of insecticide or rodents. It does
| not include fungicides nor herbicides
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Pesticide are used to kill pests, such as insects in
| the case of insecticide or rodents. It does not include
| fungicides nor herbicides
|
| Wrong.
|
| See, e.g., https://www.fda.gov/food/chemical-
| contaminants-pesticides/pe...
|
| "Pesticides are used in agriculture to protect crops from
| insects, fungi, weeds, and other pests."
| psunavy03 wrote:
| Why is something someone else enjoys a "pesticide-ridden
| hellscape?"
|
| How would you like me to come and pompously shit all over
| something you enjoy?
| jhide wrote:
| I agree about with your claim, but the answer to your
| question is that "weeds" is a set of species that contains
| both invasive, ecologically harmful species, and crucial
| native annual and perennial forbs+grasses.
|
| From the universalizability principle, if everyone merely let
| "weeds" propagate, because of the ecology of invasives that
| are in that set, we would be MUCH worse off for the next few
| millennia than we are now. Until the ecosystems healed and
| the "invasives" become "keystone species". Not sure how long
| that would take but we won't see it :)
| hermitcrab wrote:
| We don't mow one part of our lawn and have sowed it with
| wildflowers) which some people might call weeds) to attract
| insects. Some wildflowers prefer poor soil, so my wife
| scythes it at the end of the season and removes all the
| cuttings. I'm hoping we might get some native orchids
| eventually.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Sorry you think my Japanese garden is a hellscape.
| hammock wrote:
| You sound neurotic. Anyway just pull the weeds out with a towel
| and you hands, or use boiling water to kill them
| Zach_the_Lizard wrote:
| Pulling weeds by hand works for a lot of weeds and is the
| most environmentally friendly solution where possible. It's
| what I've done, for the most part.
|
| I will say for some weed species that can be ineffective or
| counterproductive, unfortunately, and for those a chemical
| (or other) solution may be in order.
|
| Weeds can also be a sign of a potential problem, such as poor
| drainage, a leak, etc.
|
| Nutsedge is an example of that. As I recall, pulling it out
| results in it sending more shoots up if you don't get the nut
| (which can be feet underground).
|
| At that point, you have to continuously pull weeds on a daily
| (or multiple times daily) basis in order for it to use up
| more energy growing than it generates.
|
| It likes water, so if it's there, it might be because there's
| standing water from rain.
|
| I dug up a raised flower bed to get rid of it once. Nuts were
| absolutely everywhere because of poor drainage. I had to go
| down 2 feet I think to get them all, I replaced the bottom
| layers of impermeable clay soil with something that drained,
| along with a drain pipe or two.
|
| Now the sedge is gone, the risk of foundation damage from
| being too wet is gone, and no chemicals were required.
| zzzeek wrote:
| you had to choose between vinegar and glyphosate, I'd use the
| vinegar. your dogs aren't going to roll around in a too-strong
| concentration of vinegar, it has a smell and if it were
| actually going to cause burns (what kind of vinegar is this,
| something from a chemical supply house? ) animals would be
| immediately repelled by it (plus it evaporates quickly anyway).
| whereas with glyphosate, none of that applies, it's a fully
| synthetic chemical that stays in the atmosphere for _days_ ,
| would not send any cues to animals, and its effects on animals
| may be long term, concealed for years, and fatal.
|
| but as someone else said above, if this is a certain area that
| your dog wants to be, you can always pull weeds for that area
| by hand, just make sure you get the entire root.
| delichon wrote:
| Thanks for the advice. I bought 30% vinegar on Amazon. The
| instructions are to add in a little dish soap. Do you think
| that will safely repel the dog when dry?
| quesera wrote:
| The soap is a surfactant to make the vinegar stick to the
| weed leaves for longer.
|
| It's not necessary, but it probably lets you use a little
| less vinegar, so it's probably worthwhile. I don't add
| soap, I just spray straight 30% (agricultural) vinegar in
| the small set of areas where a torch would be dangerous.
|
| Dried vinegar does not irritate dogs. They will avoid the
| area while it smells like pickles.
|
| A better chemist than I will hopefully corroborate this,
| but I think that the strength of smell is directly
| correlated to the reactivity of the acid. So when the smell
| is mild (i.e. near the level of household vinegar (5%)),
| the risk to skin and mucous membranes is low-to-zero.
| kergonath wrote:
| I don't think there will be much left of the vinegar when
| dried. Acetic acid is much more volatile than water. If
| it's dry, it means that it's gone. And it has an unpleasant
| smell even at harmless concentrations, if it's not quite
| dry yet.
| lqet wrote:
| Weeds on the lawn: just use a lawnmower each week, the grass
| will usually handle being cut on a weekly basis _much_ better
| than any weed.
|
| Weeds between tiles / slabs or on gravel: just pour boiling
| water over them. The weeds will become mushy and die within 1-2
| days. Repeat every 6 weeks during summer.
|
| Source: we bought a house with a garden full of goutweed [0],
| which I consider the final boss of any garden owner, and which
| we have in control now through regular mowing / hot water.
| Goutweed will just laugh at any herbicide you throw at it, and
| regrow from its underground rhizomes. I also doesn't seem to
| require sun, because I have seen plants grow to a height of
| 10cm _completely underground_. The joke in my family is that it
| could grow on foreign planets. As Wikipedia dryly puts it:
| "Once established, goutweed is difficult to eradicate."
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aegopodium_podagraria
| dwroberts wrote:
| This is just a recipe to spread weeds everywhere. If you mow
| them, most of the time you'll just break them open and spread
| their seeds
| n4r9 wrote:
| But if you then keep mowing the lawn regularly, those seeds
| won't be able to compete with the grass.
| lupire wrote:
| Why wouldn't they be able to compete?
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Usually seeds need soil contact and sunshine to germinate
| and grow. Thick lawn can mitigate that.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| IIRC grass grows from the bottom, which means it is very
| resistant to being mowed or grazed. Weeds/wildflowers not
| so much.
| DeepSeaTortoise wrote:
| Unless you mow your grass too low. Always assume the old
| rule of "your grass reaches just as far underground as it
| reaches up in the air" still holds.
|
| Also if you mow your grass drastically shorter or you let
| it grow for a long time before mowing, do not fail to
| fertilize it from above right or soon after, start
| aggressively plucking the leaves of weeds (or other
| selective methods of fighting them) for a few weeks and
| (optimally, but highly recommended) verticulate it no
| sooner than 1 week after cutting. Also time it well to
| grant your lawn at least 3 weeks of ideal growing weather
| and climate (It won't die because of a week or two of
| awful weather, but you'll have A LOT more work fighting
| weeds ahead of yourself).
| lqet wrote:
| I you mow them after they have developed seeds, you are
| mowing them too late.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Or you can learn the lifecycle of plants and don't let them
| go to seed.
| lupire wrote:
| I don't understand. What we call "weeds" are plants that
| evolved to grow quickly and spread quickly. Many gave
| segmented stems/leaves to resist core damage from cuts and
| pulls.
| DeepSeaTortoise wrote:
| You can also use just heat. Like a long propane torch or one
| of the newer electric infrared ones. It doesn't need a lot of
| heat, a short burn (like a bit less than a second) is
| perfectly sufficient to make them wilt within a few days.
|
| Weeds are the flora equivalent of VC-hype-startups. All
| growth, no substance and no plan B. They pop-up everywhere,
| with seemingly infinite growth resources and hope you'll
| despair and do nothing.
|
| Just going around plucking leaves from everything that looks
| like you won't like it for a few weeks twice a year works
| wonders.
|
| Basically regulatory capture for your lawn. No need to help
| along your darlings (in the beginning), just make everyone
| else play with stupid rules. And once things start going down
| the drain, it's time for subsidies (fertilizer) and public
| contracts (pre-germination).
| pengaru wrote:
| Thank you for making my morning coffee, consumed while
| looking down on downtown San Francisco, presently chock
| full of "AI" weeds, substantially more entertaining.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Never had much luck with burning or cutting weeds from the
| top. They just resprout and grow back. Haven't tried
| boiling water.
|
| I just use roundup, honestly. It works.
| BigTTYGothGF wrote:
| I will hate the ground elder as long as I live (but did
| manage to eradicate it from our garden thru hard work, only
| to see it spring back up in our neighbor's yard, it's their
| problem (for) now).
| whalesalad wrote:
| absolutely insane that you held glyphosate and vinegar in two
| hands and decided to opt for glyphosate. vinegar will not hurt
| your dogs. use vinegar, or fire, or drench the weeds in water
| and pull them out by hand.
| starkparker wrote:
| If it's low-concentration or diluted vinegar, then yes, but
| more for maintenance than to kill established weeds.
|
| But industrial-strength vinegar is corrosive and harmful on
| skin, eye, and lung contact. If OP looked at the bottle and
| saw skin irritant or corrosion warnings required to be
| present on it (in the US, at 8% or higher acetic acid
| concentrations; in the EU, I think it's skin irritant 10-25%,
| corrosion 25%+), then it's probably that.
|
| Garden stores often sell 20%-45% concentration vinegars, and
| YouTube/TikTok influencers often promote industrial-strength
| vinegar at 75% concentrations, at which point it'll damage
| turf on contact. And any repeat or large pour of high-
| concentration vinegar can reduce the soil pH deeper than
| expected, which can be harmful to nearby trees or other root-
| system plants.
| oldandboring wrote:
| As I'm sure you're aware, glyphosate is usually only
| appropriate as a weed killer on your property if you're looking
| to kill all vegetation in/around where you spray it. For
| example if you wanted to "nuke" your lawn by killing all the
| grass and starting over with new grass. It's a non-selective
| herbicide in this context, it kills everything.
|
| If you've got some dandelions or thistle, and it's not out of
| control, the nice safe way is to pull them up by hand or, if
| they're between pavement cracks, pour boiling water on them.
|
| Broadleaf weeds growing in your lawn that aren't easily hand-
| pulled can be killed with a selective herbicide like 2,4-d.
| Tough underground vine-style weeds like creeping charlie or
| wild violet will need a selective called triclopyr. Crabgrass
| is best killed by a selective called quinclorac. Yellow
| nutsedge requires a selective called sulfrentrazone or another
| called halosulfuron.
|
| Selectively kill the weed infestations as best you can, get rid
| of the bad ones before they go to seed, and focus on the health
| of your grass -- in most parts of your lawn, healthy grass will
| out-compete weeds.
| DeepSeaTortoise wrote:
| Don't spray herbicides everywhere (unless you're certain
| that's what you want or need).
|
| Instead, just spray each weed a little bit, right above where
| the leaves connect to the stem.
| itsdrewmiller wrote:
| I get a little paintbrush and paint the leaves of each
| dandelion with round-up - that ends up killing them but
| largely leaving other plants alone.
| ok_computer wrote:
| How is this easier than pulling the plant out of the soil?
| jhide wrote:
| It depends on the target and the surrounding soil. It's
| often easier to pull especially for the random weed that
| sprouts up around your landscaping. However if you are
| trying to manage an infestation of invasive species,
| where the surrounding soil will have a seed bank heavily
| contaminated with seeds from the years of invasive
| reproduction, it's usually a bad idea to merely pull. You
| can expose soil to sunlight and cause an explosion of
| dormant seeds. And some nasty invasives are nearly
| impossible to remove by hand because of their root
| structure -- some species even leave little rhizomes
| broken off in the soil along the root structure when you
| pull off the foliage causing a hydra effect.
|
| tl;dr targeted herbicide is a much less evolutionarily
| selected-for offense, as opposed to hand cultivation
| which mimics attacks plants have evolved to survive for
| eons
| jfengel wrote:
| Dandelions are really, really hard to eradicate by
| pulling. The roots grow very deep, and if you don't get
| them completely, the plant can re-grow from what's left.
|
| Even if you do successfully get it out, it really is
| going to be more work than painting a weed killer on
| them.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| My dad use to have my brother and I work for hours during
| the summer pulling dandelions in the lawn (to be fair he
| was out there with us doing it himself also). We each had
| a knife with about a 4" long blade, we would cut the root
| as deep as we could and pull the top out. Never really
| seemed to reduce the number we had.
| detritus wrote:
| I did much the same, but with a hypodermic syringe, on
| knotweed many years ago.
|
| Yours is so much more.. tender though. Poor dandelions, but
| at least you made it personal!
| BigTTYGothGF wrote:
| I learned to appreciate the dandelions.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Glyphosate is extremely effective as a targeted weed killer.
| It only impact what you spray it with. It does not teleport
| from one plant to another. It's also not strong enough to
| kill heathy mature plants with a small amount of overspray.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| When I really want to nuke it so that nothing grows, like in
| a decorative stone area, I use water softener salt. I
| dissolve it in a bucket of water until no more will dissolve
| then pour it wherever I want the vegetation to stop growing.
|
| Anything there will die, and nothing will grow again for a
| long time. Although, it does spring back to life eventually.
| Usually once a year is sufficient.
| mapt wrote:
| Depending on weather and the site, a weed burner can be very
| effective for what people used to use glyphosate for.
|
| For large areas, tarping can work pretty well in the summer. I
| accidentally cut a perfectly rectangular hole in my lawn by
| leaving a tarp on the ground as I was moving soil into
| containers. Enough sunlight was absorbed through the
| translucent plastic that it quickly baked the area underneath
| to death.
| gnv_salsa wrote:
| Unless you have an old Roundup bottle, you don't have
| glyphosate in it. From the Bayer website:
|
| "The active ingredients found in our Roundup Lawn & Garden
| products in the U.S. are: fluazifop-p-butyl, triclopyr TEA
| salt, diquat dibromide and imazapic ammonium. These ingredients
| have been used safely and effectively in many different weed-
| control products from a variety of companies for decades."
|
| "We have been very transparent about the new formulation of
| Roundup Lawn & Garden products and are no longer producing
| glyphosate-based Roundup products for the U.S. residential lawn
| and garden market. While Bayer no longer produces or sells
| glyphosate-based Roundup products - which are also EPA-approved
| - some quantities may remain on store shelves until remaining
| stocks are sold. "
| rithdmc wrote:
| This is cool, & new to me. Do you know when they made the
| change? "some quantities may remain on store shelves until
| remaining stocks are sold" implies it was recently to the
| post, but I'm not sure when that was.
| pixl97 wrote:
| 2023, so yea, there may still be some older product around.
| oatmealcookie wrote:
| I wonder if that includes Roundup Pro, because they still
| have it as being glyphosate on their website:
|
| https://www.rounduppro.com/products/roundup-promax-
| herbicide...
| qwerpy wrote:
| I had a tree root growing through the driveway asphalt. My
| handyman told me to get Roundup Pro because it will actually
| kill the root, unlike the other herbicides. So I got a
| gigantic gallon tub of it. It was effective. Good to know
| that "the good stuff" is now found to be not problematic.
| BigGreenJorts wrote:
| In Canada while the majority is vinegar now, I still see
| glyphosate roundup products.
| troyvit wrote:
| If it's dandelions, wait a few seasons (now that you've used
| Roundup) and then eat them! The leaves taste like arugula (the
| younger the better). The heads, when they bloom, can be dried,
| ground, and baked into cookie recipes. If you let the heads
| close, pick them before they start transforming into seeds and
| either pop them into your mouth raw while you're doing yard
| work or save them, bread them, and fry them up for a nutty
| flavor. The roots apparently make a good caffeine-free coffee
| replacement but who the hell wants to _replace_ coffee?
| BigTTYGothGF wrote:
| > I would need to dilute it quite a bit, making it a lot less
| effective.
|
| Doesn't the vinegar act pretty quickly? Keep the dog inside
| that afternoon, then hose it down in the morning.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Glyphosate is perfectly safe at the levels we use it
| domestically. If there is a safety issue it's at commercial
| dosages.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| A garden torch is unreasonably effective.
| bluGill wrote:
| Terrible for the environment though what with all the co2.
| DANmode wrote:
| Places with common sense regarding human health do weed control
| with a small torch.
| vinibrito wrote:
| Salt for cattle.
|
| Lasts for a few months.
| rsync wrote:
| "So I ended up using glyphosate, but I'm looking for something
| better."
|
| Not for everyone and not for every situation, but ...
|
| If you get a propane torch - the full sized ones that attach to
| a 5gal. propane tank - you can very quickly point-and-shoot a
| large area with similar effort expended to walking around
| spraying a liquid.
|
| We have a 2500sf veranda made of decomposed granite and it
| takes about four man-hours to fully clear it of all creepers
| and flat broadleafs and all the other things that are
| impossible to pull by hand ... and since it kills them you're
| clear for the season ...
| rybosworld wrote:
| The sole surviving researcher attached to that paper is still
| actively publishing:
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/author/24433485700/gary-m-will...
| samlinnfer wrote:
| So what's the current speculation on how it causes cancer?
|
| Glyphosate acts on the Shikimate pathway that doesn't exist in
| humans.
|
| Is it killing gut bacteria?
| hammock wrote:
| Mechanistic evidence shows low doses cause genotoxicity and
| oxidative stress in human lymphocytes and other cells.
|
| A novel mechanism proposal is that glyphosate may chelate and
| accumulate in the bone, slowly releasing into the bloodstream,
| exposing bone marrow and potentially triggering hematologic
| malignancies.
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S21522...
| pfdietz wrote:
| My theory is that if you torture a chemical with enough diverse
| studies, you can find some where it confesses to causing
| cancer, even if it actually doesn't.
| smt88 wrote:
| If what you say is true, we would know almost nothing about
| pharmacology and modern medicine wouldn't exist.
|
| There are basic scientific and statistical methods to avoid
| this.
| pfdietz wrote:
| There are, but there are also strong incentives for what
| amounts to fraud, on both sides. Glyphosate has become both
| highly politicized -- it's used as an argument against GMOs
| -- and subject to concerted and lucrative legal attack. At
| the same time, the patent is expired, so the motivation to
| continue to defend it has waned. If anything, herbicide
| producers would now benefit if a cheap, public domain
| chemical were illegitimately banned in favor of more
| expensive chemicals still under patent protection.
|
| Even when supposedly honest scientists publish, it's often
| wrong.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Most_Published_Research_F
| i...
| earlyreturns wrote:
| This was and probably still is true about tobacco.
| Personally, I choose to not smoke.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The evidence against tobacco was overwhelming.
| cbolton wrote:
| > the patent is expired, so the motivation to continue to
| defend it has waned. If anything, herbicide producers
| would now benefit if a cheap, public domain chemical were
| illegitimately banned in favor of more expensive
| chemicals still under patent protection
|
| That doesn't square with the fact that Monsanto thought
| it worthwhile to commit scientific fraud to push the
| narrative that glyphosate is safe, in a scientific paper
| published the same year that the patent expired.
| pfdietz wrote:
| They had patents on Roundup Ready seeds. Those patents
| have also now expired.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| When it comes to mechanistic speculation, absolutely.
| NotGMan wrote:
| Human gut bacteria have the Shikimate pathways so it can kill
| them.
|
| Basicaly glyphosate could act like a gut bacteria antibiotic.
|
| >> 54% of the human core gut bacterial species are potentially
| sensitive to glyphosate, which targets an enzyme in the
| shikimate pathway, suggesting that roughly half of gut bacteria
| possess this pathway
|
| https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/11/201120095858.h...
| striking wrote:
| https://archive.is/dRAMg
| pella wrote:
| https://retractionwatch.com/2025/12/04/glyphosate-safety-art...
|
| _" """Their request "was actually the first time a complaint
| came to my desk directly," Martin van den Berg, a co-editor-in-
| chief of the journal, told Retraction Watch. The article was
| published long before he took over, said van den Berg, a
| toxicologist at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, and
| "it was simply not brought to my attention" until Kaurov and
| Oreskes' article. The retraction "could have been done as early
| as 2017, but it is clearly a case of two parallel information
| streams not connecting earlier," he said.""""_
| Zigurd wrote:
| The longest thread on this topic is currently about household use
| of glyphosate as weed killer. As many have pointed out that's
| unnecessary. There are plenty of ways of killing weeds without
| glyphosate.
|
| It's also not a huge problem in the way that industrial use of
| chemicals, like lead in gasoline, are a mass-poisoning event.
| Glyphosate is used to desiccate wheat to make it easier to
| harvest. That's where the big problems could come from.
| masfuerte wrote:
| Oats too.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| Not just wheat. Other crops. I was pretty shocked to see a
| field full of soybeans that were all dead. They were being
| dried before harvest.
|
| Terrible scheme.
| bluGill wrote:
| I've never heardof a farmer spraying soybeans for that
| reason, and I know a fair number of soybean famers. The
| plants naturally die at the end of the year, and farmers then
| wait a few weeks for them to dry
| fransje26 wrote:
| > Glyphosate is used to desiccate wheat to make it easier to
| harvest.
|
| Wheat, soy, lentils, ...
| zug_zug wrote:
| Tl; dr:
|
| One of the cornerstone studies claiming glyphosate was safe is
| now suspected to have been written entirely ghost-written by
| Monsanto.
|
| A recent analysis (2025) shows that this paper has been cited
| more than 99.9% of all glyphosate-related research -- i.e. it
| disproportionately shaped scientific and public perceptions of
| glyphosate's safety for decades.
|
| [ https://undark.org/2025/08/15/opinion-ghostwritten-paper-gly...
| ]
| mhitza wrote:
| Veritasium has a couple months old video that talks about this
| issue, and other various issues around agriculture area (Monsanto
| "seed mafia") in this video
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxVXvFOPIyQ
| jl6 wrote:
| > The disavowal comes 25 years after publication and eight years
| after thousands of internal Monsanto documents were made public
| during US court proceedings (the "Monsanto Papers"), revealing
| that the actual authors of the article were not the listed
| scientists - Gary M. Williams (New York Medical College), Robert
| Kroes (Ritox, Utrecht University, Netherlands), and Ian C. Munro
| (Intertek Cantox, Canada) - but rather Monsanto employees.
|
| Why wasn't the paper retracted 8 years ago?
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| It's hard to admit we're wrong
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| Trust the science. The World Health Organization on glyphosate
| in 2016: "The only large cohort study of high
| quality found no evidence of an association at any exposure
| level" "Glyphosate is unlikely to be genotoxic at
| anticipated dietary exposures" "Glyphosate is unlikely to
| pose a carcinogenic risk to humans from exposure through the
| diet" "The Meeting concluded that it was not necessary to
| establish an ARfD for glyphosate or its metabolites in view of
| its low acute toxicity"
|
| https://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/agphome/documents/Pe...
|
| Tptacek in 2018: "There are no credible studies
| indicating that glyphosate is a carcinogen, and it would be a
| little bit surprising it if was, since it targets a metabolic
| pathway not present in animals. Meanwhile, many of the
| herbicides that glyphosate displace, plenty of which remain in
| use, are known human carcinogens. The most widely reported
| declaration of glyphosate's carcinogenicity, by IARC, was
| disavowed by the WHO, IARC's parent organization...The evidence
| seems to suggest that glyphosate is basically inert in humans"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17043887
|
| When Dr. Oz in 2015 spoke out against glyphosate, ten prominent
| physicians wrote a letter to Columbia University in demanding
| his removal from the faculty for an "egregious lack of
| integrity" and for his "disdain for science and for evidence-
| based medicine." He replied "I bring the public information
| that will help them on their path to be their best selves" and
| provides "multiple points of view, including mine, which is
| offered without conflict of interest."
|
| https://www.agrimarketing.com/ss.php?id=95305
|
| Here is Reuters with a 3000-word Special Inverstigative Report
| filed under "Glyphosate Battle" carrying water for Monsanto,
| after IARC declared the chemical 2A (probably carcinogenic):
|
| https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/who-iarc...
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Big Dr Oz fan eh? Got any quotes from Oprah or other HNers to
| balance the epistemic master class?
| superxpro12 wrote:
| even a broken clock can be right every now and then
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _even a broken clock can be right every now and then_
|
| But a broken clock isn't a _reliable_ indicator of time:
| You don 't know when it's right unless you have another,
| known-good indicator -- in which case just use that other
| one.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| No the opposite. I trust Monsanto, they know this chemical
| better than anyone.
| davidw wrote:
| I wouldn't really trust either one. Plenty of big
| companies have known how horrible their own products are,
| like cigarette companies, or fossil fuels. We'll probably
| learn about social media companies in a few years.
|
| That said, just because a product comes from a big
| company doesn't mean it's bad either. I want to see
| independent research.
| isolli wrote:
| We already know about social media companies (allegedly,
| at least):
|
| > Meta buried 'causal' evidence of social media harm, US
| court filings allege [0]
|
| > In a 2020 research project code-named "Project
| Mercury," Meta scientists worked with survey firm Nielsen
| to gauge the effect of "deactivating" Facebook, according
| to Meta documents obtained via discovery. To the
| company's disappointment, "people who stopped using
| Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of
| depression, anxiety, loneliness and social comparison,"
| internal documents said.
|
| > Rather than publishing those findings or pursuing
| additional research, the filing states, Meta called off
| further work and internally declared that the negative
| study findings were tainted by the "existing media
| narrative" around the company.
|
| > Privately, however, a staffer insisted that the
| conclusions of the research were valid, according to the
| filing. "The Nielsen study does show causal impact on
| social comparison," (unhappy face emoji), an unnamed
| staff researcher allegedly wrote. Another staffer worried
| that keeping quiet about negative findings would be akin
| to the tobacco industry "doing research and knowing cigs
| were bad and then keeping that info to themselves."
|
| [0] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-
| regulat...
|
| Edit: it was discussed here a few days ago [1]
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46019817
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Got any hot tips from Marlboro I should read as well?
| mistrial9 wrote:
| Thank You for Smoking !
| jibal wrote:
| Great movie, opened the Santa Barbara International Film
| Festival years back.
| cbolton wrote:
| Is this sarcasm or are you seriously saying you trust
| Monsanto on a thread about them committing scientific
| fraud to influence our perception of their product?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Sarcasm, given the previous comments.
| xenophonf wrote:
| CGMthrowaway writes:
|
| > _Trust the science._
|
| Science is a process, not a result. Retractions like this
| promote the integrity of scientific research and evidence-
| based medicine.
|
| > _When Dr. Oz in 2015 spoke out against glyphosate..._
|
| Oz also promoted MLM dietary supplements, antimalarial drugs
| as COVID treatments, gay conversion "therapy", colloidal
| silver, and vaccine skepticism. He has zero credibility and
| cannot be trusted.
| KK7NIL wrote:
| > > Trust the science.
|
| >
|
| > Science is a process, not a result. Retractions like this
| promote the integrity of scientific research and evidence-
| based medicine.
|
| He was obviously poking fun at people who say "trust the
| science" when what they really mean is "trust these
| scientits" or, even better, "trust this one study".
|
| Undoubtedly "trust the science" is little more than an
| appeal to authority when used in a casual debate, not some
| appeal to skepticism, peer review and testability.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| "Trust the science" ... always when talking to a flat-
| earther or similar huckster.
|
| There definitely needs to be more nuance to the phrase in
| the general case. Eg: "trust established science" Let's
| be honest though, it's a lack of nuance in some world
| views that need science as an authority the most.
| Lord-Jobo wrote:
| "Trust x,y" will also basically never mean "trust,
| completely, always, equally, and blindly".
|
| Trust the science was a shorthand for "you, or even I,
| may not understand this thing in perfect detail, but the
| people working on it do, and they GENERALLY aren't making
| catastrophic mistakes that you can detect as an amateur.
| And when these people collectively stand behind a
| conclusion the odds of it being completely wrong are
| exceptionally low. We don't have a more accurate
| alternative regardless. Please stop JAQing off about it"
|
| But writing all of that over and over again is annoying.
| And a lot of """"critical thinkers"""" can't be bothered
| to read it. So the shorthand emerges. Sometimes used
| incorrectly? Definitely.
| KK7NIL wrote:
| > Let's be honest though, it's a lack of nuance in some
| world views that need science as an authority the most.
|
| I agree but if they're flat earthers they've already
| rejected established science, so what's that appeal to
| authority going to do?
|
| This is why "trust the science" is so memeable, it's a
| lazy appeal to authority the other party has already told
| you they don't trust and yet people are shocked when this
| argument doesn't work.
| DustinEchoes wrote:
| > The only large cohort study of high quality found no
| evidence of an association at any exposure level
|
| Was that the retracted study or a different one?
| hshdhdhj4444 wrote:
| How many retractions has Dr Oz published?
|
| Has he retracted his claim that "raspberry ketones" are a
| miracle for burning fat in a jar?
|
| Idiots look at people who never admit they were wrong and
| think those are the people to follow.
|
| People with the slightest bit of intelligence look at the
| people (or process in this matter) who are constantly
| checking themselves and willing to admit they were wrong (or
| in this case misled by frauds) when they find the truth.
|
| Meanwhile, the real issue here is not the science. The real
| issue here is the American GRAS system, because Europe didn't
| allow glyphosates because their political system requires
| stuff going into your food to be proven safe, whereas the
| American system simply requires it to not be proven harmful.
| DANmode wrote:
| This is a lot of words to make no real point to who it's
| replying to.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| The guy they replied to didn't make a point, instead
| threw together some quotes by an HN user and Dr. Oz,
| relying on you to make the point for them.
| collingreen wrote:
| Would be more effective to simply ask for a point to be
| clearly made rather than grandstanding about what stupid
| people vs people with even slight intelligence believe as
| a way to try to indirectly insult other posts.
| baq wrote:
| > The evidence seems to suggest that glyphosate is basically
| inert in humans
|
| It actually might be the case and it _still_ can be damaging
| to people by affecting the gut microbiome:
|
| https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5.
| ..
| RealityVoid wrote:
| > affecting the gut microbiome
|
| That is so vague it can apply to everything. Probably
| drinking a glass of water affects the gut microbiome.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I would disagree with the claim/usage of "inert" if it was
| damaging to gut microbiome.
| tptacek wrote:
| Did you read the paper? I just did. There's no data in it.
| It's a broad statement about research directions in
| glyphosate accompanied by concerns that all chemical
| agricultural supplements are objects of concern,
| epidemiologically, with Parkinsonism.
|
| I think the point about the microbiome is well taken, for
| what it's worth. It's a good response to "humans lack a
| shikemic acid pathway, which is where glyphosate is
| active".
| baq wrote:
| reference [5] (right in the middle of point 3, the one
| about gut microbiome) links to
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.3233/JPD-230206
| which is way too dense for me to unpack in general...
|
| e.g. Rotenone Mouse Oral gavage |
| Firmicutes-to-Bacteroidetes (F/B) ratio, | Rikenellaceae
| and Allobaculum; | Bifidobacterium in both the caecal
| mucosa-associated and luminal microbiota community
| structure [169]
| tptacek wrote:
| I'm definitely not going to go crate digging through the
| cites in this paper! I think for the level of discourse
| we keep here on HN, it's more than enough to note (1)
| glyphosate targets metabolic pathways animals don't have,
| but (2) bacteria do have those pathways, which could
| implicate the gut microbiome. Point taken!
|
| In all these discussions, if I could ask for one more
| data point to be pulled into the context, it's what the
| _other_ herbicides look like (my understanding: much
| worse). I think these discussions look different when it
| 's "late 20th century SOTA agriculture writ large vs.
| modern ideal agriculture with no chemical
| supplementation" than when it's "Monsanto vs. the world".
|
| A very annoying part of the backstory of the "Monsanto
| vs. the world" framing are people who care about
| glyphosate not because they have very fine-grained
| preferences about specific herbicide risks (glyphosate is
| probably the only herbicide many of these people know by
| name), but rather because of glyphosate's relevance to
| genetically modified crops. I'm automatically allergic to
| bank-shot appeals to the naturalist fallacy; GM crops are
| likely to save millions of lives globally.
| sbxfree wrote:
| to build on this further, glyphosate disproportionally
| targets bifidobacterium and lactobacillus (PMC10330715).
| It mimics what happens to the gut as people age
| (PMC4990546) and increasing bifidobacterium, in research,
| improves dementia symptoms. In the guts of people with
| allergies, ibs, asthma, and cystic fibrosis there are
| decreased amounts of certain strains of bifidobacterium.
|
| In mice models, Alzheimer's is transferrable via gut
| microbiota. (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-023-0
| 2216-7?fromPaywa...).
|
| So to say it messes with the gut is no small thing.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >Tptacek in 2018:
|
| Makes me want to punch everyone else on the high score board
| into a search engine and see how they did.
|
| Kinda funny how the "it kills stuff, it can't be good for ya"
| luddite crowd turned out to be right all along.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| [ On second thoughts, retracted ]
| potato3732842 wrote:
| While it's not great I vastly prefer that sort of not
| great behavior to achieving the same results by being one
| of those people who has crappy opinions and then just
| cherry picks links to back them up when called out on it.
|
| Probably a good call on the retraction TBH.
| pstuart wrote:
| Speaking of luddites, I've recently stumbled on posts that
| point out that the framing of "luddites" was intentionally
| misleading and that it was never being against technology
| but how it was wielded.
|
| https://www.brookings.edu/articles/we-should-all-be-
| luddites...
| kalkin wrote:
| Did they turn out to be right? Maybe, I'm not familiar with
| the research here, but no evidence for that has actually
| been posted. This study being untrustworthy doesn't make it
| prove its opposite instead.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| Retracting a paper showing it's safety isn't the same as
| proving it is unsafe. I don't see anything here that does
| that.
|
| The IARC says the 2A designation was "based on "limited"
| evidence of cancer in humans (from real-world exposures that
| actually occurred) and "sufficient" evidence of cancer in
| experimental animals (from studies of "pure" glyphosatese"*
|
| * https://www.iarc.who.int/wp-
| content/uploads/2018/11/QA_Glyph...
| tptacek wrote:
| It's been awhile since I've done any reading on glyphosate,
| which I mostly paid attention to because of a wave of
| bullshit stories about how Monsanto was suing people over
| seeds that blew onto their land (that basically never
| happened). Nothing in the intervening years, including this
| specific retraction, changes what I think about glyphosate,
| which is that it's probably safer than the herbicides that
| are used when glyphosate isn't.
|
| I don't know why you think bringing me into this discussion
| is useful. If you were thinking that some regulatory agency
| made decisions based on the persuasiveness of my HN comments,
| probably no.
|
| I'm generally comfortable being on the other side of whatever
| Mehmet Oz is talking about.
| rsync wrote:
| I think it's quite the compliment - you should be
| flattered!
|
| Unrelated:
|
| I really enjoy "Security, Cryptography, Whatever".
| tptacek wrote:
| I'm not offended, it's just weird. And thank you! We've
| got fun stuff coming out. If anybody knows someone
| involved in GrapheneOS, we'd _really_ like to get their
| perspective on modern mobile platform hardening. I will
| repay them in Monsanto Roundup-Ready(tm) gift
| certificates.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I agree. It's weird to see HN comments turn into cheap
| shots (albeit fallacious ones from someone who isn't
| making a logical argument) against other HN users.
|
| Maybe I'm a little sensitive to this since I've rotated
| HN screen names a couple times after someone tried to
| track me down off-site to argue a (rather benign) comment
| I made about something.
| Teever wrote:
| Yeah but that's a bit of a motte-and-bailey fallacy isn't
| it?
|
| Just because the chemical in question is safer than the
| previously existing alternatives doesn't mean that the way
| that Monsanto promoted it and marketed it for use and the
| way people ended up using it because they believed that
| marketing didn't result in a net greater detriment to
| society and the ecosystem than if we had adopted totally
| different pest management protocols that didn't require as
| many chemicals that a company like Monsanto conveniently
| sells.
|
| I had a boss at a greenhouse tell me once that his old-
| timey agriculture prof at a big university would swear by
| the safety of glyphosate and he would literally drinking a
| shot glass of the stuff in every first year class like he
| was that dude who drank H. pylori to prove ulcers were
| caused by an infection.
|
| This kind of insane grandstanding where a professor openly
| drinks herbicides for years in university classrooms came
| from absurd marketing from Monsanto and neither of these
| things have any place in our society.
|
| Monsanto had a financial interest to make that professor
| into a fervent Jonestown-esque believer of their product
| and the end result was that spread that fervour to
| thousands of students who went out into the industry and
| figured that if it's alright for that guy to drink it then
| it must be alright to spray that shit everywhere as often
| as they want.
|
| The downstream effect of that is you're on HN in 2018
| advocating for glyphosate and then again in 2025 when
| someone points out how ubiquitous confidentially incorrect
| opinions about glycophosate are.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Yeah but that's a bit of a motte-and-bailey fallacy
| isn't it?
|
| Speaking of motte-and-bailey fallacy, pivoting from "Dr
| Oz was right about glyphosate" to this run-on claim:
|
| > Just because the chemical in question is safer than the
| previously existing alternatives doesn't mean that the
| way that Monsanto promoted it and marketed it for use and
| the way people ended up using it because they believed
| that marketing didn't result in a net greater detriment
| to society and the ecosystem than if we had adopted
| totally different pest management protocols that didn't
| require as many chemicals that a company like Monsanto
| conveniently sells.
|
| Is a textbook motte-and-bailey play. The original
| argument wasn't that "society and the ecosystem would be
| better if everyone didn't use chemicals". The claim above
| was that anyone who said there wasn't evidence that
| glyphosate caused cancer was wrong and Dr. Oz was right.
|
| And _that_ argument was a fallacy in itself. The
| retraction of a single paper is not equivalent to saying
| that glyphosate _is_ dangerous, that it causes cancer, or
| that Dr. Oz was right.
|
| These threads are frustrating because a small number of
| people are trying to share real papers and talk about the
| subject, but it's getting overrun with people who aren't
| interested in discussing science at all. They've made up
| their minds that chemicals are bad, glyphosate causes
| cancer, and Dr. Oz was right and they're here to push
| that narrative regardless of what the content of the
| linked article actually says.
| tptacek wrote:
| I don't know what you're talking about. None of my
| opinions about glyphosate have anything to do with some
| stunt where somebody drank glyphosate. I wouldn't drink
| glyphosate. Nothing has happened between 2018 and 2025
| that has changed my (not very strongly held) beliefs that
| glyphosate is broadly safer than the herbicides that get
| used when it isn't. I also don't give a shit how Monsanto
| is promoting glyphosate; Monsanto's success or failure as
| an enterprise simply doesn't factor into my thinking _at
| all_.
| Teever wrote:
| I'm not saying your views came from some professor
| drinking glyphosate. I'm saying the social and regulatory
| environment around glyphosate was distorted by decades of
| industry driven messaging, ghostwritten research, and
| normalization of reckless demonstrations.
|
| That environment shaped the baseline assumptions many of
| us including farmers, scientists, regulators,
| journalists, and yes even minor-celebrity HN commenters
| such as yourself.
|
| My point is that the issue isn't whether glyphosate is
| 'safer than alternatives' but whether the entire
| ecosystem of evidence and perception surrounding it was
| manipulated. This paper that we're talking about is but
| one example of that. So the question isn't about your
| personal motives but how you came to believe what you
| believe about Monsanto products and who stands to gain
| from you believing those things and expressing them on
| social media.
| tptacek wrote:
| _That environment shaped the baseline assumptions many of
| us including [...] yes even minor-celebrity HN commenters
| such as yourself._
|
| No it isn't.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| Very US-centric POV. The herbicides that would be used in
| the US to replace glyphosate, that are potentially worse
| (paraquat/diquat, atrazine, and 2,4-D), are are already
| banned in the EU.
|
| If the EU were to officially ban glyphosate, their food
| supply would increase in quality as a result, since these
| worse pesticides are not available.
|
| The US needs to catch up. Eliminating glyphosate is not a
| one-shot kill for human health and never meant to imply
| that
| quickthrowman wrote:
| Sounds like you might be confused as to which crops use
| glyphosate as an herbicide, it's not being used on
| vegetables and fruits being sold in the produce section,
| so it would do nothing for the quality of European
| produce. It's possible that glyphosate overspray touches
| some human foods crops, but I wash my produce before
| eating it, I hope you do too.
|
| Here is a list of plants that have glyphosate tolerant
| varieties: _soybeans, alfalfa, corn, canola, sugar beets,
| and cotton._ There is no glyphosate tolerant wheat plant.
|
| These plants are used to make ethanol, sugar, soy animal
| feed, canola oil, cotton fabric, and feed corn. Humans
| consume canola oil and sugar, both of which are refined
| in a distillation process. Possibly some of the corn ends
| up as cornmeal or corn flour. All of the soy and alfalfa
| are sold as animal feed.
|
| I'm not afraid of glyphosate or microplastics until the
| evidence shows otherwise.
|
| Edit: I am out of replies, I hadn't considered either of
| those routes for glyphosate to enter the human food
| supply. The concentration of glyphosate in a cow that
| eats feed grown with glyphosate has to be much more
| concentrated as well. Thanks for replying, my apologies
| for making a bad assumption.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| Confused where you think I said fruits and vegetables.
| There is glyphosate in beef and other meat, just because
| an animal eats it does not wash it away.
|
| And glyphosate is also used for burndown and/or
| dessication on a number of non-glyphosate tolerant crops
| such as wheat, oats, beans, potatoes, etc that go
| directly to the grocery store
| tptacek wrote:
| By the logic you're using here, the epidemiological
| impact of glyphosate should be widely observed across the
| population (you're going so far as to look at traces of
| it left in the meat supply). And yet the correlations we
| have all tend to focus on agricultural workers dealing
| with it in large volumes directly. Can you square that
| circle?
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| Study funding (or lack of)
| ephelon wrote:
| While there isn't a commercially grown glyphosate
| tolerant wheat; there is a significant pathway for
| glyphosate into the wheat you eat through the process of
| desiccation[1]. It is common practice to kill the plant
| with an herbicide shortly before harvest, which helps to
| maximize yield.
|
| Personally, I suspect that many people who present as
| wheat/gluten sensitive may in fact be reacting to the
| herbicides present in the wheat. [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_desiccation
| samdoesnothing wrote:
| The precautionary principle clearly states that if you have
| a chemical that kills living things and you have a company
| who stands to make a lot of money off of this chemical as
| long as it's safe for humans, that you should be very very
| careful about it. Probably should be avoided until there is
| not just proof from a lab or from paid off scientists.
|
| Kind of crazy that this isn't just obvious to everybody.
| tptacek wrote:
| It's not obvious to everybody because it's false. The
| Precautionary Principle is deeply problematic. For
| instance: it is generally interpreted to favor existing
| fossil fuel power sources over nuclear, despite the fact
| that fossil fuel power generation and extraction kills
| enormous numbers of people every year. Precautionary
| Principle thinking is extremely vulnerable to narrative
| capture. A closer-to-home example: Precautionary
| Principle thinking cautions against adoption of
| genetically modified crops. The status quo agriculture it
| favors instead have both lower yields (and thus greater
| ecological impact) and _more_ pesticide /herbicide use.
|
| Precautionary Principle thinking, taken on its face,
| would have immediately halted the rollout of COVID-19
| vaccines (VAERS data almost immediately showed things
| like blot clots), because Precautionary thinking tends to
| fixate on individual risks rather than a global risk
| picture; fortunately, Precautionary thinking failed to
| win the day and vaccines saved millions of lives instead.
| Note that this example flunks your Extended Precautionary
| Principle logic: there were certainly big companies that
| stood to profit from the right decision there!
|
| You can put together a coherent and persuasive defense of
| the Precautionary Principle, but if you just cite it in
| passing and say things like "crazy everyone doesn't agree
| with me about this", expect pushback.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Trust the science.
|
| I haven't kept up with research. Do you have any actual
| science showing that glyphosate is a carcinogen?
|
| Retraction of a paper doesn't automatically mean the opposite
| is true. It doesn't make Dr. Oz's methods right.
|
| Using the retraction of a paper to elevate a known
| pseudoscience pusher who constantly makes claims without
| scientific basis is intellectually dishonest. It's a common
| tactic among pseudoscience and alternative medicine peddlers
| who think that any loss for the other side is validation for
| their beliefs.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| Non-Hodgkin lymphoma odds ratio 1.41-1.45 (AKA 41-45%
| higher relative risk):
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31342895/
|
| NHL odds ratio 2.26:
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18623080/
|
| Positive trend of NHL risk with exposure:
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12937207/
|
| 7x risk of follicular lymphoma in those ever exposed:
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8082925/
| zug_zug wrote:
| On what basis should we blindly trust this fao.org study as
| conclusive? If Monsanto ghost-wrote one paper, how many other
| studies did it put its finger on the scale for?
| DANmode wrote:
| It takes time for conspiracy theory to become conspiracy fact.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> The scientists are suspected of having signed a text actually
| prepared by Monsanto._
|
| I think that this kind of thing has been happening for decades.
| I'm hoping that these types of things start getting discovered,
| now that advocacy orgs can do things like run an LLM on a huge
| pile of old records, reports, and news articles.
| observationist wrote:
| Can even do things like stylometric analysis, and make good
| predictions about the authorship of any particular line or
| paragraph or paper. Semantic search and RAG aren't the only
| thing you can do with a high quality vector database system.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| Many such cases. Aspartame, BPA, tobacco, Paxil (paroxetine),
| neonics (pesticide) all have documented trails of how
| researchers and policy makers were working for the industry and
| often hiding the fact
| reeredfdfdf wrote:
| I can understand the use in agriculture, but I've never
| understood why anyone would use the stuff on their own lawn. Who
| cares if there are some weeds growing, when you can cut them down
| with lawnmower anyway?
|
| Heck, my relatives in the countryside don't even have lawn, they
| just let the dandelions and other natural plants grow, and only
| use lawnmower in areas where they need to walk. Much better for
| the environment, and even looks pretty nice. Of course areas
| where they grow food or fancier flowers require some digging to
| keep weeds away.
| Stevvo wrote:
| Cutting dandelions with a lawnmower just sends the seeds
| everywhere making the problem worse.
| quesera wrote:
| Only if you wait for them to go to seed. If it's important to
| you, don't do that.
|
| I let them grow. Dandelions are harmless.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Some neighbors spray poison ivy --- I just cover it with
| stones/bricks when I see it.
| quesera wrote:
| Peer-reviewed science is the best scale of measurement we have.
| When that standard is subverted with intent to deceive, there
| should be severe repercussions for the beneficiaries.
|
| There have also been numerous, extremely confident and
| impassioned, defenses of Monsanto and glyphosate here on HN over
| the years. These might deserve some reexamination.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Imo, the best defense of glyphosate is that if occupational
| cohorts can't even be shown to have a strong, reproducible jump
| in effects like cancer at 100s of times the exposure than
| genpop, then we shouldn't go Kony 2012 on dietary exposure.
| quesera wrote:
| OK, but that is _not_ how you properly test pesticides for
| safety.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Well, don't leave me hanging.
|
| Though I didn't prescribe a test. I set a low bar of
| evidence that we should at least pass before we Kony up
| over our bowl of Cheerios.
| quesera wrote:
| Are you asking me to describe modern pesticide safety
| testing protocols? I'm not qualified to do that
| authoritatively.
|
| But I'm certain that "spray it everywhere for 30 years
| and see if people die" is not the way.
|
| Bypassing the proper protocols, publishing dishonest
| research, is the issue under discussion today. Glyphosate
| might be safe, or safe enough. Proper research could
| reveal more subtle effects than mortality numbers.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| I still don't understand what you're responding to.
|
| Glyphosate is already out there.
|
| We have large papers that look into occupational and
| dietary exposures of real world cohorts, and they don't
| converge on much of anything that should make us
| concerned about our dietary exposure.
|
| Yet you have some sort of "testing protocol" in mind that
| would somehow be more robust than the analyses already
| being done on real world populations that were
| inconclusive?
|
| At least pitch a rough idea of what these experiments
| look like.
| quesera wrote:
| This is outside my field.
|
| If you tell me that EPA doesn't have a better process
| than "dunno, seems OK", then I'll humbly defer.
|
| Not holding EPA up as infallible, just asserting that
| intentionally-deceptive research should not be tolerated
| -- and should demand a higher degree of skepticism of
| other research from the same entities or with the same
| beneficiaries.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| > This is out of my field.
|
| This is what I've come to expect from discussion on
| things like glyphosate, cholesterol, seed oils, etc.
|
| You supposedly are raising an issue, yet you can't even
| squeak out the smallest concrete claim.
|
| You're "in the field" enough to claim they didn't do the
| proper "testing protocols", but when simply asked what
| you mean by that or how it's different from the existing
| research, you're so "out of the field" that you can't
| even elaborate on the words you just used -- that's a
| task for the experts.
| quesera wrote:
| I never claimed to be "in the field" or anywhere
| adjacent. One does not need to be an expert to know that
| dishonest research is bad for the world. Why are you OK
| with this??
|
| And I'm not raising an issue. The article is.
|
| For the record, I do not have an opinion on the safety
| profile of glyphosate _at all_. And I 've spent zero time
| even wondering about cholesterol, seed oils, etc. You're
| dropping me into the middle of the wrong argument.
|
| I do have strong opinions about research integrity, and
| this story about Monsanto is unfavorable. Do you disagree
| with that?
| zug_zug wrote:
| Well we have no idea what the effects of glyphosate are
| because almost everybody has it in their system. Is it
| possible that's why autism, depression, add are so much
| higher among us than amish? Who's to say?
| phil21 wrote:
| The public discourse on glyphosate is useless. As witnessed
| by calling it a pesticide, which is quite common among
| those most vocal against its use.
|
| Less is more when it comes to chemicals, which is why
| reasonable uses of glyphosate seems to be the best we have
| come up with so far as a species - regardless of abuses of
| the chemical.
|
| It's probably the most studied herbicide on the planet at
| this point with very little evidence that it causes human
| health issues when used as intended. Doesn't mean it's zero
| risk, but we also feed an incredible number of people off a
| very small amount of landmass at this point in history.
| quesera wrote:
| Herbicides are pesticides. Are you implying that I made a
| mistake with that word? I did not.
|
| Your other points are valid, but would you advocate for
| dishonest research to be acceptable as evidence that a
| pesticide is ready for widespread human field trials?
|
| Assuming you would not, then I think you'd agree that
| there should be repercussions. Monsanto is not Uber for
| agriculture.
| chrisbrandow wrote:
| Herbicides kill plants, pesticides kill bugs, right?
| quesera wrote:
| Weeds are pests, as defined by the EPA at least.
|
| https://www.epa.gov/minimum-risk-pesticides/what-
| pesticide
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| HN is plagued by bots and shills. Arguably is one of the main
| selling points of the site -- it's a news aggregator run by
| Angel Investors
|
| Why would you expect anti-corporate narratives? If I'm F500 and
| am trying to sway opinion here is one of the places I'd direct
| my marketing drones to hit hard, as the tech-bro demographic
| would then parrot it everywhere else
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Scientific fraud here feels like a reaction to people not
| understanding the bargain we have to make given the needs of the
| world's population. It should be punished, but I can't help but
| feel there's a point that doesn't get discussed.
|
| The thing that sucks about this is, past a certain point,
| herbicide/pesticide safety doesn't matter.
|
| We use this stuff, at least industrially, to grow food. Humans
| need food to live. More food, generally speaking, means healthier
| humans, Western processed food trends notwithstanding. There's
| the consumer market that uses glyphosate to make yards pretty in
| North America, but that's not the real reason we invent
| herbicides, and yards themselves are problematic, so we'll ignore
| that for now.
|
| It's not an accident that global starvation deaths have decreased
| since the 1960s[0]. We started applying chemistry and automation
| to agriculture. Food security and yields went up. Some of these
| chemicals we use are, over the long term with chronic low-level
| exposure, hazardous to human health.
|
| However, they're still less immediately hazardous to the general
| public than malnutrition and starvation, so the question becomes
| this: Do you want millions to die of malnutrition _now_ , or do
| you want an unknown number of people to die of various health
| issues (particularly cancer, though there are others) caused by
| chemical exposure at an unknown point in the future, and gamble
| that medicine will, some day, be able to treat or cure the health
| issues?
|
| [0]https://ourworldindata.org/famines
| myrmidon wrote:
| This kind of shit happened before, is happening right now and is
| going to happen again. Something needs to be done.
|
| IMO the best way to stop companies from messing with science and
| law is to hold them accountable for the actual damage, ideally
| both company leadership (CEO goes to prison) and shareholders
| (potentially lose everything) when it comes to light that
| companies prevented regulation or research into negative
| externalities that they caused.
|
| We had the exact situation with leaded gas (paid shills, lawfare
| and discrediting campaigns against critical scientists), the
| exact same thing is happening right now with the fossil fuel
| industry and if we don't change anything it is invariably gonna
| happen again.
| wslh wrote:
| Science and law (in snail motion) are clearly broken. The paper
| "Association between Cancer and Environmental Exposure to
| Glyphosate" [1] shows population groups with significantly higher
| cancer incidence linked to glyphosate exposure. When findings
| like these struggle to gain broad acknowledgment, it becomes
| evident how powerful companies can still "hide the sun with their
| hands"
|
| [1] Association between Cancer and Environmental Exposure to
| Glyphosate
| Beijinger wrote:
| I have a feeling that it is this causing the collapse of our
| insect population.
| chrisbrandow wrote:
| If so, presumably because it kills the weeds that feed the
| bugs.
| Beijinger wrote:
| Research from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and
| related studies shows glyphosate negatively impacts bees by
| disrupting their gut microbiota, weakening immune responses,
| impairing learning/memory, affecting foraging behavior, and
| increasing mortality, with effects seen from both pure
| chemical and commercial formulations at environmentally
| relevant levels, impacting both adult bees and larval
| development.
| shrubble wrote:
| So any misdirection has served its purpose.
| chrisbrandow wrote:
| I'm not actually familiar with current state of scientific
| research. Are there any quality studies that contradict the
| ghost-written report?
|
| I understand the valid reasons for pulling the study, but that
| does nothing to specifically address its claims or evidence.
| lisbbb wrote:
| The same thing is going to happen with that covid "vaccine" study
| that claims there were no excess deaths found. Wait and see.
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