A scientific debate over the danger of Roundup herbicide has been reignited after a report identified potentially dangerous trace amounts of the chemical in oat-based breakfast foods.
Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, has been used to kill weeds for 40 years, according to manufacturer Monsanto. For most of that time, it hasn’t been considered dangerous.
But that consensus might be changing. In March 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancers determined that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic to humans,” meaning it has the potential to cause cancer.
That doesn’t settle the debate. The agency’s parent organization, the World Health Organization, found in May 2016 that glyphosate is “unlikely to pose a carcinogenic risk to humans from exposure through the diet.”
Wednesday’s report from the nonprofit Environmental Working Group comes a week after Monsanto was ordered to pay nearly $300 million to a groundskeeper who alleged his use of the weed killer on the job had given him cancer.
The Environmental Working Group found glyphosate in all but five of 29 tested breakfast foods, prompting an outcry from those concerned with the overuse of pesticides on food.
What is glyphosate?
Glyphosate is applied to leaves to kill grasses and weeds. It is the most used agricultural chemical in the world and experienced a boom in use beginning in the 1990s, Newsweek reported.
Glyphosate use in agriculture previously was hampered because the product often killed not only weeds but the crops it was intended to protect. But in the 1990s, Monsanto began producing genetically modified crop strains resistant to glyphosate, so the herbicide could be applied without damaging the crop.
