Ashley Hunter, ECB Publishing, Inc.
Earlier this month, a school grounds-keeper, Dewayne Johnson, made the national news when he filed a lawsuit against Monsanto after Johnson named the company's weedkiller, Roundup, as the cause for his cancer.
Johnson was one of hundreds of patients that were suing Monsanto, according to CNN, with the claims that the company's products had given them cancer.
Despite the lawsuits, and Johnson's own winning suit, Monsanto stands by their claims that their weedkiller does not cause cancer.
After the news of the lawsuit was spread by multiple news sources, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) commissioned independent laboratory tests of many popular breakfast cereals, and found traces of glyphosate, a herbicide linked to cancer by the World Health Organization, and the active ingredient in Roundup, in all but two of the 45 conventional cereal products.
Three-fourths of the detected glyphosate were higher than what EWG scientists consider protective of children's health.
One-third of the organically grown cereals also contained glyphosate, but at levels that EWG claimed were 'well below' the safety benchmark.
EWG advises that they tested more than a dozen brands of oat-based foods to give Americans information about dietary exposures that government regulators are keeping secret.
“In April, internal emails obtained by the nonprofit US Right to Know revealed that the Food and Drug Administration has been testing food for glyphosate for two years and has found “a fair amount,” but the FDA has not released its findings,” writes EWG in their report.
EWG's Health Benchmark for glyphosate is 160 ppb (parts per billion) – any more could be potentially hazardous to a child's health.
Some popular cereal brands, such as KIND (vanilla and blueberry clusters) were found with no more than 60 ppb of glyphosate.
Other cereal brands, such as Lucky Charms (found with 400 ppb) and Cheerios Toasted Whole Grain
(490 ppb) showed a higher increase of the glyphosate within their products.
EWG also tested instant oats, whole oats and snack/breakfast bars.
The highest levels of glyphosate in each category were found in Quaker's Old Fashioned Oats (930 ppb), Nature Valley's Crunchy Granola Bars - Oats 'n' Honey (340 ppb), and Quaker's Dinosaur Eggs, Brown Sugar, instant oatmeal (780 ppb).
“Each year, more than 250 million pounds of glyphosate are sprayed on American crops, primarily on “Roundup-ready” corn and soybeans genetically engineered to withstand the herbicide. But when it comes to the food we eat, the highest glyphosate levels are not found in products made with GMO corn,” writes EWG. “Increasingly, glyphosate is also sprayed just before harvest on wheat, barley, oats and beans that are not genetically engineered. Glyphosate kills the crop, drying it out so that it can be harvested sooner than if the plant were allowed to die naturally.”
The carcinogenic risk of glyphosate is not a new discovery for researchers, as the International Agency for Research on Cancer declared the chemical to be 'possibly carcinogenic to humans', and has since received ongoing attacks from Monsanto.
Of all the granola, breakfast and oat cereal products tested, only four products had no detectable levels of glyphosate within their cereals: Nature's Path Organic Honey Almond Granola, Cascadian Farm's Organic Harvest Berry Granola Bar, Kashi's Heart to Heart Organic Honey Toasted Cereal and 365's Organic Old-Fashioned Rolled Oats.
To read the full report, with the extend of EWG's findings, visit ewg.org/childrenshealth/ glyphosateincereal.
#.W3w1ln4pCEI.
You must be logged in to post a comment.