Something that really concerns me

Parent Cafe
1

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/25/dining/ben-and-jerrys-ice-cream-herbicide-glyphosate.html?ribbon-ad-idx=8&rref=dining

I am not saying people should not buy Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream or that the sky is falling, but I think this does raise issues about our food supply. First of all, it sounds like no one really knows what safe levels are of this compound, or what the long term effects are of it being in the food. Unlike other products, like insecticides, glyphosate can’t be washed off like you can with an apple, for example, it is taken in by the plant. This hasn’t been quite the problem in the past, since they wouldn’t spray this on crops (for obvious reasons), but these days they have created GMO plants that are resistant to Glyphosate, so they are happily spraying this stuff on food crops to contain weeds.

From what I know of compounds like this, they also don’t break down over time but go into body fat, you don’t get rid of these…so you might be eating tiny amounts in a cup of Ben and Jerry’s, but what happens when it is in everything and starts accumulating? From what I have read (and it could be wrong, grant you), it doesn’t sound like any long term studies have been done on this, they just went ahead with doing this, and that bothers me. I already have big questions about the quality of the food supply in this country, the kind of food that is being produced, and this makes me worry even more, the same companies that claim things like Glyphosate are safe also said Agent Orange was safe around people and DDT was a miracle insecticide that was ‘harmless’ to anything but insects, and also seem to be running ahead of science with the things they are doing.

2

The fat and sugar content of Ben and Jerry’s is more likely to harm your health. Also anxiety and stress over all these things isn’t helpful to health either.

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I think I’m in trouble, because I eat a LOT of B& J

4

This is why “all things in moderation” is my cardinal rule.
Or “hedge your bets” is another way to put it.
Something is going to get you at some point in your life. Nothing certain but death and taxes.
I like to think that overall people are now living longer than ever because of advances in health care and better science. Not every “breakthrough” or advancement will be great–but we won’t know for years. So right now you do “moderation”.

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@gouf78:
People are living longer thanks to advances in health care, but at what cost? A lot of the cost of medical care are in lifestyle issues and can be attributed to what we are eating and I don’t think routinely ingesting something like this stuff in our food is going to make us any healthier. I am not concerned with B and J ice cream, since that is consumed as a treat (I hope), but what about things we aren’t supposed to consume in moderation, like vegetables? How about the corn that they feed cows, that has this stuff in it, or chicken who eat corn feed that has been treated with glyphosate?

6

Thanks for sharing the Ben and Jerry’s info.

Something that concerns me is Colgate Total toothpaste. It has triclosan in it. I stopped using it years ago, but the idea that it can still be sold troubles me.

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It’s no accident that the same company that made Agent Orange also makes Roundup. And many of the GMO crops developed are designed to be drenched with the stuff. And even if we don’t eat it, we eat the animals that eat it, etc.

There are a lot of things that will kill you sooner but I am also disturbed by this toxicity in our environment and how casual politicians are about it.

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Me too, @1214mom – to the extent that I’m not even gonna read that article!

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All things in moderation.
I’m pretty darn sure I will never eat enough vegetables to hurt me. At least you can go organic and try to avoid pesticides.
Pretty sure I would wear my teeth to nubs before triclosan would harm me.

I worry more about the constant bombardment of wi-fi waves that now surround us. Maybe that’s a lack of knowledge on my part (or a lack of studies) That is something I cant avoid anywhere I go. It’s TV, the internet, your house thermostat, Alexa. It’s everywhere–even travelling down the road in your car. Going into a store. I don’t think it’ll hurt me at my age–I worry about the kids who will have 40 plus more years of exposure. My kids. This is something that is so intertwined in our societal make-up right now that I doubt anyone would stand up to say it is not a good thing. I’m NOT saying it isn’t safe–but I am saying that if you had a study saying it wasn’t safe that it would be buried immediately.

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“The fat and sugar content of Ben and Jerry’s is more likely to harm your health.”

Definitely true. Any harmful health effects from the trace amounts of Roundup found in ice cream are remote and theoretical. The threats to your health from consuming the high doses of saturated fats and sugars found in ice cream are real and certain.

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All these chemicals are probably contributing to this:

http://time.com/4871540/infertility-men-sperm-count/
“A new report reveals that sperm counts among men in Western countries, including men in North America, Australia, New Zealand and Europe, have dropped substantially over the years. According to study authors, in less than 40 years, collective sperm count among this group of men has declined more than 50%.”

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Wow. We can detect tiniest traces of phosphoglycine in B&J yet we have to microwave people to make sure they are not hiding explosives under their clothes - WTH?! There is something wrong here…

Who paid for the roundup B&J study?!!

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I read years ago that the sperm count of an organic farmer is 4x that of a non-organic farmer. It’s hubris to think that a chemical that attacks the cells in the nervous systems of other organisms somehow leaves ours alone.

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We are mixing pesticides and herbicides here. Roundup is the latter. It is not a nerve agent, unlike the wasp and bug sprays.

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Roundup is a carcinogen, and at least one thing I read said it also is a hormone disruptor. Yes, the level in B and J ice cream is small and is likely not the cause of problems, but sperm count dropping in half in 40 years says something is up, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out something is afoot there, and it certainly isn’t genetic. A lot of chemicals that end up in the environment are phytoestrogenic, and that could be a possible cause. In order to increase crop yields and in theory make more food and cheaper, agriculture is centered around using large quantities of herbicides and pesticides that gets not only into the food itself, but also of course gets into the animals that eat things that have ingested it, and it gets into people’s bodies…and many of these compounds do not get passed out of the body easily, organic chemicals tend to be fat soluble from what I recall from organic chemistry class and from what I learned in bio, so it can add up.

Corn and Soy have been modified as GMO’s to handle roundup, and it is being dumped on the fields where they grow. This is troubling, because these days corn isn’t just what you eat with salt or butter on the cob, studies of food products (Mark Bittman wrote an article about this in the times) show that corn shows up in some ridiculous percent of the food products being sold out there, especially packaged foods, bread, you name it, and yep, that roundup shows up there as well. Another problem is the factory farming of meat is still relying on hormones, and those get into the environment through waste as well as the meat, and if someone thinks that isn’t a big deal, it is, I have read reports in places like Nature (a peer reviewed journal) of seeing problems with animal life in the water, and they are tracing it to hormones and hormone-like compounds, and eventually that can get to us all.

One of the big ironies is people are complaining about the cost of health care, but almost every study of it is showing that that cost is heavily influenced by what people are eating and also the environment, so the billions of dollars the pharm industry is spending on for example statin drugs or on cancer drugs can be tied to things like the chemicals allowed in our foods, and the whole cheap corn/cheap meat/sugar as filler food industry out there…but because all those represent big businesses, the big 3 of health issues, cancer, diabetes and heart disease, is 1.5 trillion dollars, or the 10th largest gdp in the world…not to mention how big the chemical industry and pharm industry are and the vested stake they have in 'better living through chemistry" or “without chemicals, life itself would be impossible” …("Hey, Al, why don’t you have some of this H2SO4, after all it is a chemical and without chemicals, life itself would be impossible).

16

What about when you have trace amounts of various chemicals (not Roundup specifically) in your ice cream, onions, carrots, apples, oranges, beef, chicken, seafood, water, etc? The problem is that eventually tiny trace amounts add up when they’re in practically everything.

Anyway, somebody please do a study on Talenti Gelato, since that’s my go-to grocery store ice cream. :wink:

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@nomander:
If you like gelato, try Gelato Fiasco, my S got hooked on it last summer when he was staying in Brunswick, Maine (they have a store there), it is even better than Telenti

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This appears to be a myth: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10448320. I’m just amazed they’ve done studies on this.

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On the other hand, the difference in sperm counts between 40 years ago and now is very much a real study, the data was taken from a number of studies, and also medical journals are full of reports of Testosterone levels declining…it isn’t just marketing PR for these “miracle male supplements” you hear on the radio.

The real problem is that while chemicals have allowed for in some ways a ‘green revolution’, there are parallels to this in health care in a sense. The standard party line is that without chemical fertilizers and weed killers we would go back to a world where there isn’t enough food, people would be starving, etc, and that only these things can sustain our food supply, but the reality is that those are the only things that have been researched, efforts at sustainable agriculture, large scale organic farming , alternatives to those have been the work of individuals, whereas the department of agricullture sponsors all kinds of research into next generation insecticides and pesticides and fertlizers, as of course do the big chemical companies like Monsanto and Union Carbide and Baer and the like (and I doubt very much that is going to change much, except in a negative way, when it comes to the government). We haven’t even really tried, who knows if they serialize techniques requiring little or no synthetic fertilizers and chemicals what can be done…but given the profits around the synthetic forms, gonna take a pretty good fight to even attempt to move away from them as much as possible. Lot more easy to dump a ton of fertilizer on crops, then pesticides and herbicides the plants don’t react to, then actually come up with intelligent methods rather than brute force, easy methods.

20

Ben & Jerrys got bought by unilever years ago. Hopefully they didn’t put undesired ingredients in the ice cream.