Before you pop open a bottle of California Merlot, there is something you should know: trace amounts of glyphosate, the primary toxic chemical found in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, have been found in 100% of California wines tested by the national GMO awareness group, Moms Across America.
The news comes on the heels of a report finding 14 brands of beers tested positive for the likely carcinogen in Germany.
According to Moms Across America founder Zen Honeycutt, who recently penned an article on the findings for EcoWatch, the contamination of conventional wine was 28 times higher than organic wine, with levels ranging from 0.659 parts per billion (ppb) in organic to 18.74 ppb in conventional wine.
The group tested wines from Napa Valley, Sonoma, and Mendocino counties in California. The brand names were not released, but 10 major California wines, all tested at a lab in St. Louis, Missouri, were found to contain glyphosate. In addition to being in Roundup, the poisonous substance is found in 700 other herbicides.
The highest level of glyphosate detected was found in a 2013 Cabernet Sauvignon from a conventional, chemically-farmed vineyard. The lowest was detected in a 2013 Syrah from a biodynamic and organic vineyard that had never been touched by pesticides.
Sick: ‘Intolerable Levels’ of Monsanto’s Glyphosate Found in Breast Milk
Moms Across America speculated glyphosate’s reach goes well beyond its intended target:
“Because Roundup/glyphosate is not permitted on organic or biodynamic vineyards, the results are unexpected and can only be explained by the drift of chemical sprays from neighboring vineyards.”
In EcoWatch, Honeycutt lists some of the many reasons why Roundup/glyphosate should never be sprayed on crops, including vineyards:
- Glyphosate-containing herbicides are showing up in irrigation water, and are likely present in manure used as fertilizer from animals fed GM grains and drift from spraying. In addition to wine and beer, glyphosate residues have been detected in many foods and in breast milk.
- According to wine growers on conventional farms, their family businesses were once able to harvest from their vines for 100 years. Now thanks to chemical farming, vines only last 10-12 years. Glyphosate is a chelator, which strips living things of their vital nutrients and minerals.
- The World Health Organization (WHO) has deemed glyphosate a probable carcinogen. Even a small amount of the chemical has been shown to stimulate the growth of breast cancer cells. California Department of Health data shows the cancer rates in Sonoma, Napa, and Mendocino counties are 10-20% higher than the national average. Many lawsuits are currently pending against Monsanto concerning the link between non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and Roundup.
- A study of piglets showed a repeated 30% increase in birth defects and stillbirths among pigs whose mothers were exposed to sow feed containing 0.87-1.13 ppm glyphosate in the first 40 days of pregnancy.
- The co-formulants of Roundup have been found to be up to 1,000 times more toxic than glyphosate itself, and act as hormone disruptors which may cause breast cancer, miscarriages, birth defects, and numerous other health problems.
Sources:
It looks like Julie is having another of her Chrissy days. How sad. A nice little article on the subject contained the following:
On March 16th, 2015 Moms Across America received the results from an anonymous supporter which commissioned Microbe Inotech Lab of St. Louis, Missouri that show all ten of the wines tested positive for the chemical glyphosate, the declared “active” ingredient in Roundup weedkiller and 700 other glyphosate-based herbicides. The highest level of glyphosate detected was up to 28.4 times higher than the other wines at 18.74 ppb from a 2013 Cabernet Sauvignon from a conventional, chemically farmed vineyard. The lowest level was from a biodynamic and organic vineyard, 2013 Syrah which has never been sprayed according to the owner, with a level of .659 ppb. An organic wine from 2012 mixed red wine grapes, had 0.913 ppb of glyphosate.
Parts per billion! Really! We’re all gonna die! But seriously folks, let’s compare these findings with the Environmental Protection Agency’s incredibly stringent glyphosate tolerances for various food and feed crops. The agency doesn’t set a threshold for wine, so let’s take its threshold for grapes. The EPA’s safe level for glyphosate on grapes is 0.2 parts per million (ppm). So how does the Moms Across America’s finding compare?
The highest level of detection is 10-times lower than the EPA’s safety threshold for grapes. The lowest detection was more than 3,000-times lower than EPA’s threshold.
The Moms Across America then suggest that the organic growers will lose business if customers find out that there is an infinitesmial amount of pesticide in their wines. Organic a process standard which certifies nothing about the nutrition of the product; only that it was grown in certain specified ways.
The final stupidity of the Moms Across America attack on glyphosate is that the IARC has definitely determined that the consumption of alcohol, including that found in organically produced wines, is “carcinogenic to humans.”
So your saying,
You support the toxins in the food chain as well as consumer products, as long as a profit can be attained?
Nice job freelance.
No, the article deliberately deceives by swapping ppb (rarely used because its such an irrelevant amount) for ppm near the end to make numbers seem far scarier. I don’t like toxins in my wine either but don’t try to scare me with your “clever” comparisons of measure.
Actually the numbers are from 2 different scientific studies, where is it required to use the same exact PPM, PPB in research studies. Now that wouldn’t be considered science, would it?
Very good observation on the levels- a lot of readers would not catch the difference. As Gmo Roberts said, most of this is well below the levels that should cause concern. Unfortunately the general public does not understand this very large issue. There are many things in the natural environment, that when concentrated, can kill you. Some are even required by the body in small amounts for proper function. Dosage makes the poison.
The author of this article
“Julie Fidler is a freelance writer, legal blogger, and the author of Adventures in Holy Matrimony: For Better or the Absolute Worst. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and two ridiculously spoiled cats. She occasionally pontificates on her blog. ”
She has no expertise on chemistry toxicology or medicine. She is a writer, blogger and author. She does seem to have a sense of humour and admits she “pontificates”. But her understanding and writing on science needs some work. I maybe pontificating here a bit myself, but I have a degree in chemistry and over 30 years of experience. The value of what she is saying here is limited and deceiving. If anything, it tells people that that their preconceived notions of purity in organic products may be a little mistaken. But I’m here to say, anything with fractions of a part per billion in a substance is relatively pure in a practical sense. For most chemicals, it is also safe. This includes glyphosate.
Castor Pollux perhaps GMO Roberts is your evil twin and both of you work for Monsanto …no level of glyphosate is ok
It’s in the soil. The rain comes down the vapors go up the rain comes down the vapors go up the rains come down, etc. etc. etc. Soon the entire earth is full of Monsanta chemicals. Done
The path glyphosate takes in our Farming Ecosystem is described in this link fron moms across America. I have from my oun tests on my farm calculated the residue left in the menure, and although I do NOT use Roundup, Like the Biodynamic farmer I can still test Glyphosate in my harvested grains, my contamination is coming from menure.http://www.momsacrossamerica.com/how_do_glyphosate_based_herbicides_contaminate_crops
Dosage makes the poison. The levels cited here are so infinitesimal, that they are hardly worth mentioning. But we can let that get in the way of a scare mongering story now can we?
They are worth mentioning, especially if you’re the manufacturer basically trying to get away with murder by having ANY of this poison show up in the soil and the crops grown in it. Sorry Bub but I don’t want ANY RoundUp in my food in any way, shape or form. Even someone with your limited brain power should be able to understand that??? Organic isn’t organic if this chemical is in there period and those farmers & producers should be compensated for this crime…
Just another good reason to enjoy foreign wines. California toxic wine doesn’t even come close to real “old world” quality. Add arsenic in the soil to this and you are just asking for cancer….