The Monsanto name may soon disappear… but its toxic legacy keeps marching on.
The latest place the company’s cancer-causing weed killer Roundup has turned up is in breakfast cereals and other products made from what should be “healthy” oats — the kind your kids and grandkids eat all the time — made by big names such as Quaker, General Mills, and Kellogg’s.
Last month, I told you how the German drug giant Bayer, which just purchased Monsanto, made it clear that it was going to be ditching the tainted “M” moniker and absorb the soon-to-be nameless corporation into Bayer – “advancing together as one.”
Well, Bayer can engage in any corporate shenanigans its lawyers say to, but it won’t change the fact that Monsanto and its “too-big-to-ban” chemical glyphosate (Roundup’s active ingredient) has contaminated large amounts of the food we eat. And deep-sixing the Monsanto name won’t solve the problem.
Monsanto may soon vanish, but the only way to make glyphosate do the same in your home is to take matters into your own hands.
Amber waves of glyphosate grains
When the Environmental Working Group’s Children’s Health Initiative recently looked at a selection of bestselling foods made from oats, what it found was shocking.
Out of 45 items sampled, glyphosate was found in all but two of the products made with conventionally grown oats. And almost three-quarters of those samples had levels of the chemical that exceeded what EWG scientists consider safe for kids.
Some of the cereals that turned up especially high residues included Back to Nature Classic Granola, Cheerios Toasted Whole Grain Oats Cereal, and Quaker Dinosaur Eggs instant oatmeal.
It’s practically unbelievable that this pernicious poison has been allowed to be used so extensively that it’s now turning up everywhere. Back in April, the EWG learned from internal emails that the FDA has been testing different foods for glyphosate for two years now… but has yet to release any information except to say it’s found “a fair amount.”
That really tells us a lot, right?
Remember, Roundup’s rap sheet is already long enough for it to have been locked up ages ago. For example:
- Four years ago, researchers found that it interferes with the bacteria in the GI tract, which in turn depletes essential amino acids.
- Studies have linked it to kidney and liver damage.
- It’s considered to be a contributing factor in obesity, depression, autism, inflammatory bowel disease, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s disease.
- Three years ago, it was said to be a “probable human carcinogen” by the World Health Organization.
And that cancer finding has now been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to a California jury in the case of Dewayne Johnson.
I recently told you about Johnson, a 46-year-old father of three who sprayed plenty of Roundup while working as a groundskeeper for a school district in California.
He developed terminal non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma that he believed was directly caused by his exposure to Roundup, and a jury agreed, awarding him $289 million in damages.
But don’t think that this was some little matter that a crazy jury had a knee-jerk reaction to. The extensive evidence put forth in this trial, which a stable of Monsanto lawyers attempted to block at every turn, was pure and simple science.
And I’m sure that executives from Quaker and General Mills and every other company that manufactures food products – especially ones for kids – where glyphosate was recently found are having emergency meetings around the clock right now.
Johnson’s case, however, is far from the only one out there. Currently, there are over 700 plaintiffs – people who worked as farmers, gardeners, and landscapers — who are also in the same boat.
They used Roundup without a second thought… and now they have cancer.
The fact that so many products made from oats turned up this toxin is particularly shocking, since Roundup was initially only intended to be used on crops grown from genetically modified seeds (with corn, soy, canola, and sugar beets being the top GMO crops).
But it turns out that it’s often applied to non-GMO commodities, such as wheat and oats, as a drying agent prior to harvest.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that more than two-thirds of the 16 organic oat-based products tested contained no detectable traces of glyphosate — and the rest had amounts well below that EWG safety margin.
These results are perhaps the best evidence yet that buying organic products is an effective way of avoiding glyphosate – as well as other toxic chemicals — in your food.
And if you purchase any conventional, non-organic products that contain corn, soy, canola and sugar, make sure that they’re certified as being GMO-free.
We can’t turn back the clock to the time before Roundup came on the scene, but we can do everything in our power to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe from this poison that Monsanto unleashed on the world.
“Weedkiller found in a wide range of breakfast foods aimed at children” Oliver Milman, August 16, 2018, The Guardian, theguardian.com
