Monsanto's Roundup Weed Killer: Is It Really That Bad For You?

The Monsanto herbicide Roundup has become the bugaboo of environmentalists everywhere. Originally marketed as a water-based spray that could kill broad-leafed weeds shortly after contact, Roundup at first seemed, at least to those of us who had to go out into fields with hoe in hand when we came home from school, as a truly wonderful technical innovation.

How Roundup Works

Roundup is a combination of about 99% water, a tiny amount of a weed-killing chemical called a glyphosate, and a tiny amount of of a "wetting" agent that helps disperse the glyphospate through the solution and ensures that it sticks to plant leaves. The glyphosate is always listed on the label. The wetting agent sometimes may not be.

Glyphosate interferes with the ability of plants to make the amino acids tyrosine, tryptophan, and phenylalanine. When the plant can't make these amino acids, it can't make the enzymes it needs for life, and in just a few days, it dies.

Not every kind of plant is susceptible to glyphosate. It doesn't, for instance, in the Roundup formulation, have much of an effect on trees. It is of no use at all as a pre-emergent herbicide.

And since it kills all kinds of broadleaf plants and grasses, and many of our most important crops are grasses (such as all the true grains), until Monsanto got into genetic engineering, it only reduced the farmer's need to do weeding, rather than eliminating it.

Roundup and Genetically Engineered Crops

The people at Monsanto who do marketing aren't dummies. They recognized that farmers would line up to buy their product even back when all it could be used for was controlling weeds before crops came up (since Roundup also kills crops).

And Monsanto recognized that its patents would expire in 2000, and they have. What used to be called Roundup is now sold as Accord, Aquamaster, Aquaneat, Buccaneer, Bronco, Campain, Clearout 41 Plus, Clear-up, Expedite, Fallow Master, Genesis Extra I, Glypro, Glyfos Induce, GlyStar Induce, GlyphoMax Induce, Honcho, JuryR, Landmaster, MirageR, Pondmaster, Protocol, Prosecutor, Ranger, Rascal, Rattler, Rodeo, Razor Pro, Roundup I, Roundup Pro Concentrate, Roundup WeatherMax, Roundup UltraMax, Silhouette, Touchdown IQ.

The chemical is still made by Monsanto, but it is also made by Bayer, Cenex, Dow, Dupont, Platte, Riverside/Terra, Helena, and Zeneca (and this is not a complete list).

But what if it were possible to spray fields even after crops have emerged from the seeds farmers plant? That would reduce the farmer's expense for tractors and fuel even more, and generate a new market for Monsanto.

So Monsanto found its new market in "Roundup Ready" farm seeds. These are genetically modified plants that are able to make amino acids even if they are sprayed with Roundup. The farmer gets greater leeway on when spraying is necessary. It takes a lot less fuel to spray than it does to plow. And crop yields go higher and higher. While a corn crop of 40 bushels per acre would have been considered good when I was a teenager in the 1960's, now corn crops of 120 bushels per acre are commonplace since the introduction of Monsanto products.

More and More Production Isn't Necessarily a Good Thing

And that's the problem. When farmers produce more, the prices they get go down. They then have to produce still more, and since they borrow hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars every spring from their bankers, they may have absolutely no choice about which products they use. They will be told to use Roundup or find their money elsewhere. So far, all the marchers against Monsanto haven't passed the hat to take up a collection to fund farmers who want to produce their crops without the chemicals or the GMO seeds. And they haven't found the wisdom to tell the world how the system can support burgeoning populations without the tools that tripled agricultural production. They just complain about things they don't understand.

Three Facts About The Effects Of Roundup On Human Health

But isn't Roundup a horrible poison? Isn't Monsanto an evil company that doesn't care about destroying the environment and creating super-weeds? (Those super-weeds, by the way, are just plants that are resistant to Roundup. If you aren't going to use Roundup, then there's nothing about them that's "super.")

I won't speculate on the ethics of Monsanto as company, although they are not on my personal list of faves. But the ethics of squeezing farmers into having to use their products and the effects of the product on human health are two different things. Here's what we know, and don't, about the direct health effects of Roundup on humans.

1. The main health effects of Roundup aren't attributable to the glyphosate component that kills weeds. The really toxic component in Roundup is the wetting agent polyethoxylated tallow amine.

The ingredient that makes Roundup stick to plant leaves is the most toxic component of the product. It's essentially chemically modified beef tallow (which is to say, there is no such thing as a vegan product that has been treated by Roundup). Most of the toxic effects of Roundup in the environment are due to this wetting agent, not due to the glyphosate that kills weeds.

When I was in my 20's and had gone off to college, one of my neighbor's favorite farm hands was near death. The farmer had been told that glyphosate had no ill effects on human health, so Shorty, the farm hand, had worked with it without protective gear. The information from the Roundup salesman was correct as far as it went. Glyphosate has few or no direct effects on human health. The wetting agent does. Shorty, however, recovered, and lived another 30 years to the age of 77, working with some protective gear from then on.

2. Glyphosate breaks down quickly in the environment. We don't know about the tallow amines that are packaged with it.

When pro-Monsanto scientists tell you that Roundup breaks down fast, in as little as three days in a hot climate like Texas (although it takes up to two years for the product to break down in forests in arctic Sweden), they are telling the truth. Any effects of Roundup on the bacterial life, fungi, and worms in the soil are likely to be very short-term. But again, it's the wetting agent that's the problem.

There have been 453 impartial, scientific studies of the environmental effects of glyphosate. There are, as far as I know, only three studies of the health effects of polyethoxylated tallow amines. We know that in a test tube, this second major ingredient, that always is included with Roundup, breaks down the membranes of human cells as soon as it comes in contact with them. We actually don't, even 40 years since the product was put on the market, know exactly what this part of the Roundup formula really does. It's not unreasonable to assume it's toxic, but we don't know how toxic, or how long it's toxic.

3. The genetically modified (GMO) crops that tolerate Roundup may or may not have unusual effects on human health. The science just isn't getting published.

My first reaction to the assertion that eating genetically modified foods could cause various toxic reactions in human health was skepticism. After all, there isn't any food we eat that doesn't contain DNA. Our digestive tracts digest, for instance, a cheeseburger, without any risk of us developing a yellow complexion, or growing tufts of wheat behind our ears, or having strange urges to graze in a pasture and moo. That different genes are modified to make crops resistant to Roundup shouldn't cause different problems, because our digestive tracts digest that DNA, too. And even they didn't, it's not like you can plug in a soybean gene into the human genome just by physical contact.

Sometimes proteins made by plants can pass into the bloodstream without being broken down in the gut. And it's possible, although, again, not proven, that those proteins could cause various kinds of problems resembling autoimmune diseases.

So, is the solution to pick up a sign and protest Monsanto?

That's where the GMO corn and soybeans go. If you simply eat less processed food, you will avoid much of the impact of Monsanto's products on daily life. And you will have reduced the market for their possibly toxic foodstuffs. If you are an agricultural worker and you can't avoid exposure to Roundup, at least make sure you get fresh fruits and vegetables every day and take an antioxidant supplement. It can be something inexpensive, like alpha-lipoic acid. The antioxidant will mitigate the effects of exposure to the product.

When I was a teenager, I was in great shape. Part of it had to do with my father's imposition of an after-school "swing a hoe" exercise routine. Let some farm kid somewhere get into great shape now by eating as naturally as you can.