Today I bring to you another fifteen minutes of rant – me talking to myself in a video, about glyphosate poisoning of food, as in north America, specifically from a Canadian’s perspective.
We are supposed to have monthly brainstorming meetings, to appraise each other of what is going on, and to get folk’s opinion on what to do about it all. Each brings his or her own perspective and view point, and we search for a path out of this topic jungle.
The first of these meetings has not yet happened, as Richard Miller is organizing it. Meanwhile, I could not wait and had to come out with his blog and a fifteen minute video – about lentil, as produced in two countries – Canada and India.
This blog and update is prepared after going through the first 3,000 records entered by CFIA, covering almost whole of year 2015. It also reflects my frustration and bafflement as well as the difficulty in dealing with different entries of similar foods using different names or spellings, which makes it harder for the software to analyze the data. There is a famous saying about computerization – garbage in, garbage out. So I had to consider creating an extra column to the side and re-entering some of the sample identifications using more descriptive and standardized terms, which the computer can then pick up and analyze or compare. But doing that for thousands of records is backbreaking, tiring and frustrating.
Frustration also from the fact that I have not found a single regular wheat item or its derivatives such as flour or bread, in the first 3,000 records. I am extremely puzzled and frustrated about it.
But, in absence of any wheat item in the first 3,000 records, the next major food groups turns out to be rice and lentils. Rice turns out to be reasonably clean of glyphosate, though even here, Canadian Rice fair poorly against most others.
But this blog and video is about lentils, which has reasonably high glyphosate content, especially if it is grown in Canada. Samples from United States has not been considered for this graph and video. Perhaps it will be included for comparative study later on. Also, a large group of food samples that contain lentils are marked “unknown”. I might analyze them as described, i.e. “unknown”, which may not be too helpful, but I cannot help that. I suspect most of the unknown samples are of Canadian origin, but cannot prove it.
Readers may have to reach a decision on them by themselves, for now.
Anyhow, the tale of two lentils is as follows:
Canadian lentils have almost 90% samples containing glyphosate, and average content is 282 ppb.
Indian lentils have 40% samples with glyphosate, and average level is 25 ppb.
Transcribing the data from CFIA on foods tested for glyphosate – thousands and thousands of records, has given me a new insight into the changing scene in North America with regarding to creeping toxicity in most foods, thanks to glyphosate and its indiscriminate use in our agriculture and in nature.
A lot of effort has gone into transcription of the data as well as trying to make sense out of it. A lot of sleepless nights. Somewhere down the line, it came to me that I should consider writing a book on it, perhaps an e-book on Amazon, sold for a couple of dollars, which will contain all the efforts to make sense of the looming catastrophe of increasing amounts of this most controversial herbicide that is likely at the root of all sorts of illnesses in humans and a white swatch of the living world that is exposed to it.
Meanwhile, I have yet to reach the halfway mark in transcribing the data from CFIA, but have covered over 3,000 records already, though proof reading, error correction and more of the same is going on.
But, there is enough material here to talk about, say, rice, in this blog.
The Rice Story
Out of the 3,000 odd records so far transcribed, one item that still eludes me is the major food group comprising of conventional wheat and the wheat products such as flour and bread etc. The only items with “wheat” in their name are fringe grains such as buckwheat, or terms like “wheat less”. Why standard wheat is still missing, out of the first 3,000 records, I do not know. Some friends are speculating that CFIA did not wish to test wheat because so much glyphosate is expected to be found there, that they did not wish to frighten the people.
Well, it is known that wheat mostly in not GMO, not RoundUp ready, and cannot tolerate glyphosate. Therefore glyphosate is used to desiccate wheat just before harvest. Therefore, glyphosate is expected to be in the wheat grains more than a roundup ready crop. And perhaps wheat was the first major cereal to be thus desiccated, and the practice may now be very widespread. So there is justification in the speculation that glyphosate content in wheat might be rather high today, especially for wheat grown in Canada and USA.
Nonetheless, I have not given up hope, and shall wait till I have transcribed all the data to check if wheat and its byproducts indeed does come up in significant number of tests. But its absence has made me wary for now, or wheat, and fostered my resolve to only have organic bread, if I must have bread at all.
And in comparison, rice seems to have been tested enough times and the readings are comparatively good. So I decided to check up on the results a bit, and come up with some comparative charts to show how rice from different countries stack up. Also, this has increased my interest in leaning towards eating more rice and less wheat, till he comparable glyphosate content for wheat is available.
There were 208 samples of rice, among the first 3,212 test records, out of which the biggest bunch comprises of rice from unknown source. This “unknown” country designation has vexed me throughout my effort to transcribe the data. However, unmarked bulk rice, which may be available in some stores, are, in my guess, more likely to be Canadian than from any other country. This is just a guess. I have no means to prove it at this point. Anyhow, for the sake of this chart, I combined Canada + Unknown as an added source. So there are perhaps seven countries from which rice has been imported, if we lump unknown with Canada. Out of them, Canada (along with unknown) has the most number of samples, at 43. The other countries are USA, Thailand, India, Italy, China and Pakistan. China and Pakistan each have only two samples so far, so they might not be statistically significant.
The chart, when compared with readings of other major grains such as legumes, and buckwheat, seems to indicate that rice has been comparatively clean, and with much less glyphosate than some of the other grains.
And within them, the best rice is from the bottom four – India, Thailand, China and Pakistan. If we discount China and Pakistan for low sample count as of now, then the major best source of clean rice in Canada might be those imported from India and Thailand.
However, some disturbing news is emerging out of India, indicating rice farming in some eastern provinces of India is beginning to introduce glyphosate desiccation. So, perhaps the story is not as rosy as it seems for the future of Indian rice. I am trying to get to the bottom of this issue and find out if this is true or untrue.
Then comes the top few, with relatively higher glyphosate content, of which Italian and US rice still looks good enough with reasonably low glyphosate count. The worst seems to be Canada, either lumped with Unknown, or standing by itself.
Its both galling and frustrating to learn that, even on a relatively clean cereal, Canada had to be about the worst producer when it comes to glyphosate concentration. Also, if glyphosate is not used for desiccation here in Canada, then the relatively higher concentration might be an indication of general level of glyphosate pollution here in Canada.
That is something that the government as well as the people, should think about and consider addressing.
I had a telephone interview with Judy Hoy on January 24, 2017, regarding effect of glyphosate (RoundUp) on wildlife. Judy is a wildlife biologist that has cared for wildlife all her life and is 77 years old.
She had a lot more to say beyond what is covered in this eight and a half minute video, regarding birth defects through glyphosate affected newborns, and how some of the deformation can be cured through the right kind of treatment, though the doctors do not like to acknowledge that, and claim the deformations are genetic, from the parents and cannot be cured. That conversation has not been recorded for inclusion in this video.
Here is her statement, and the talk recorded over the phone and converted into this video
I would like to address atmospheric transport of pesticides (an umbrella term that includes herbicides, insecticides and fungicides) and the consequences of those pesticides falling in rain and snow downwind of where they are applied. With regard to so called organic crops, rain containing pesticides, especially those extensively applied, like Roundup with its primary ingredient glyphosate, contaminate all of the foliage on which the rain falls, including organic crops. Such pesticides also contaminate the surface water used for irrigation of all crops, including the otherwise organically grown crops. This causes most organic crops to have measurable levels of glyphosate and/or metabolites, but much less than crops that are directly sprayed with Roundup. With regard to pesticides sprayed by aircraft, studies have shown that approximately 20 percent of the chemicals fall on the area sprayed. The rest of the chemicals are carried by the winds far from where they are initially sprayed, sometimes hundreds of miles in just one day.
Studies have shown that the environmental toxins travel across North America in a northeasterly direction so a large amount of the pesticides sprayed here in Western United States goes across the United States and north into Eastern Canada. It has also been shown that most pesticides sprayed in the Northern Hemisphere north of the equator travel around and around the earth towards the north, eventually ending up in the snow and ice above the Arctic Circle. Environmental toxins sprayed in the Southern Hemisphere go around the earth in a southern direction ending up in the snow and ice in the Antarctic.
Animals all over the world now have the same birth defects, many being far from sprayed cropland. For example, Roundup is not used in the extreme backcountry of Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, but the animals in remote areas of both parks have the same facial and male reproductive malformations reported in studies of big game animals and documented on domestic grazing animals here in the valleys of Western Montana. This observation is based on pictures of the animals in documentaries and photos taken by photographers who hike far from roads in the national parks to photograph wildlife.
The Forest Service person I contacted by phone emphatically stated to me that they do not and have not used Roundup on the National Forest here in Western Montana. That is because Roundup kills everything and the forest service does not want to kill the native plants and trees. Yet, the examined hunter-killed deer and elk that live on the Forest Service land full time, well away from the valley where sprayed fields are, have the same birth defects. And the birth defects there appear to be at the same high prevalence as the animals living in the valleys. I would like to state that when collecting the study data from accident-killed big game animals, I didn’t separate the animals I examined into valley animals and forest animals.
My biologist colleague and I have examined a fairly large number of mule deer and pronghorn antelope from Eastern Montana and the same birth defects were higher in prevalence on those from Eastern Montana than on our Western Montana mule deer. We don’t have pronghorn antelope here in extreme Western Montana where most of the white-tailed deer I examined came from. White-tailed deer from Central and Eastern Montana brought to my colleague or to me to examine have an equally high prevalence of underbite and a much higher prevalence of overbite than our white-tailed deer here in Western Montana. My colleague examines the bite of each animal when he cleans the skull for the hunter. Those animals lived on the open prairie or in small isolated mountain ranges until the hunter harvested them, so we don’t find much difference in the birth defects with regard to where the animals live. They all have the same birth defects at very high prevalence. Some birth defects, especially underdeveloped premaxillary bone and male reproductive malformations are close to or over 50%. Biology books state that any birth defect with a prevalence of over 5% should raise a red flag, so the prevalence of those birth defects on wild ruminant species here in Montana is 10 times more. It is far past time to raise that proverbial red flag.
Severely underdeveloped lower jaw or overbite was found on over 5% of the white-tailed deer taken to a butcher shop in New Brunswick, Canada. The butcher who reported the overbite on the deer did not look for underbite on other deer brought to his shop.
The evidence shown by the extremely widespread identical birth defects on the wild and domestic animals and the evidence that Tony Mitra reported was found in the Canadian glyphosate test levels, indicates a high level of contamination in the rain and snow. Most of the pesticides in the weather fronts that come through our area are on dust picked up by the winds as they move across the bare fields in the states to the west of us. The millions of acres of bare fields in states upwind of our Western Montana valley are the source of large dust storms when the autumn months are dry. Even if there aren’t large dust storms, when the wind in the weather front passes over the bare fields, the soil particles on the very top of the dirt in the field is blown up into the air. When Roundup is used as a desiccant and applied just prior to harvest, glyphosate and other chemicals in the Roundup are still on the top layer of soil just prior to winter. When the weather front carrying the pesticide laden dust particles hits the high mountains, it slows down, dropping the contaminated snow or rain on the mountains and into our Western Montana valleys.
The snow is especially significant because the toxins that melt out of the snow during the spring and early summer are released into the creeks, rivers and dams that provide the irrigation water. When the water evaporates after the crops are sprinkled with the contaminated water, it concentrates the Roundup and other toxins on the leaves and in the top surface of the soil. In the winter the highly contaminated soil from organic fields and directly sprayed fields is picked up by winds and carried in the weather fronts to be deposited in the snow and surface water downwind and the whole contamination cycle begins again. It will take years to rid the environment of biologically significant levels of Roundup if they never spray another drop for the rest of time.
As many researchers have stated and shown so emphatically in studies, the biologically significant levels of glyphosate that cause birth defects and health issues in developing young animals are hundreds or even thousands of times lower than what is present on the foliage, in the rain and snow, and in the air throughout North America and now likely throughout the world.
Judy Hoy
Meanwhile, for those interested might read up on a dozen year old report from environment Canada on the spread of pesticides through the Canadian estuarine and aquatic environment, and results of its presence from various such samples.
Click on the image for browsing the file from Environment Canada
Above chart with partial data (2,000 test results out of over 7,000 from CFIA so far looked at) is for buckwheat only. For those who like to eat buckwheat for health or other reasons, but do not like to have glyphosate with it, may consider a few options – consider buying buckwheat from China or Russia and avoid the other sources, or alternately go organic.
Glyphosate contamination in ppb in legumes produced in Canada and US (out of the first 2,500 records)
And above is the chart for legumes produced in just two countries. Samples of legumes tested elsewhere gives a different story. Some countries have far less glyphosate in them, but only a few samples tested. Some countries have very high glyphosate figures in some categories but not others, also with low sample number. Canada and USA stand out as particular bad example for legumes with regard to glyphosate contamination, and garbanzo is the worst.
There is so much data to go through, covering the CFIA test of foods collected in Canada for glyphosate content, that analyzing it meaningfully is a task that demands attention and also an effort to look at it from different angles and present views that might be easier to understand.
I wonder if I might some day have a book on the topic of glyphosate in food as collected in Canada. Some of the details are revealing, while absence of some foods from test is equally galling. Therefore there is likely a need for some effort that fills the gaps. Getting Municipalities to start testing foods is believed to be an excellent opportunity to fill the blanks.
And, here are a few charts from the data so far transcribed, about the CFIA test records.
This is a partial country breakdown, after transcribing 2,000 records. Some countries have low sample numbers so their indications may not be true representation. Canada & USA have high sampling numbers.
And then the table below. Food samples marked as Canadian are turning out less than American foods. I find that hard to believe when samples are being drawn from al corners of Canada. Equally puzzling is the largest chunk of the samples coming under “unknown” origin. I suspect these unknown foods are unlabelled bulk foods picked up from local stores all over the country, and are likely to be more of Canadian origin than any other. Also that makes the Canadian sample count to be almost twice as many as US samples. So I created a row with the combined Canada+Unknown items, and consider that to be a better representation of Canadian foods. This also brings the average glyphosate (and AMPA) count o the foods from Canada and USA closer to each other, which seems logicals since both have similar agricultural practices and Canada is so heavily (and in my view negatively) influenced by American agro-industrial influence.
The table below gives some of the basics.
One kind of presumably healthy food category that has really surprised me with astonishingly high glyphosate content – is gluten free food. So much so that I had to try and separate them from the rest and see how the figures play out.
Out of the first two thousand odd records, I find very very few gluten free items from any country except USA and Canada, so I ignored them and focussed on just these two. USA has 130 samples and Canada 99, that have “gluten free” in their description. Average glyphosate + AMPA readings for the US produced gluten free product is 248 ppb and that for Canada is 286.
These readings are between two and three times the national average for USA and Canada, which are already hight to start with. Somehow, anything that has “gluten free” mentioned has become suspect- in my mind.
This is but a preliminary report. I shall later check if Organic-Gluten free is any better, and if it is any better than standard, non-organic, non-glutens free, off the shelf conventional food.
Gluten Free foods have been among the most baffling due to high glyphosate concentration.
But when you break it down to organic and non-organic of the gluten free foods produced in USA and Canada, the pictures changes dramatically, as below.
Non-organic gluten free stuff is way worse than national averages, and out of the two, the Canadian product sucks more
The confusion regarding Organic stamp and gluten free food
If you go to my blog, and download the initial 803 records, in searchable pdf, you can check each record that has the words “gluten free” and see the test results and what kind of food.
There still will be a problem. CFIA has removed the label and the true description of the source of the food sample.
So, if you find ten cases of gluten free flour of some kind, and see that nine out of those ten are having high glyphosate and only one is clean, it might be impossible to ascertain which specific brand, or store or place one must to to pick up the clean variety and not the nine dirty types. This is one reason I would say that gluten free this or that item is in general suspect, because the average glyphosate content (adding the glyphosate amount of the nine positive samples and dividing by ten total samples) gives a pretty high glyphosate parts per billion figure and chance of me getting a good doze of it from this item is high.
For those that are gluten intolerant, the problem is amplified and becomes circular. eating high glyphosate gluten free food on one side removes the pair or discomfort of taking in gluten, on the other side perhaps ensure that the gluten intolerance (it is now more or less established that gut bacteria damage is one of the root causes of gluten intolerance, and that glyphosate hurts gut bacteria) problem is likely to continue or worsen instead of get better, because of continued intake of more glyphosate.
It just so happens that “Organic” gluten free food, in general, are a lot cleaner than conventional gluten free food.
One could download the pdf file and check it for any kind of permutation and combination to arrive at suitable decisions that address one’s particular need.
As and when more data is transcribed, cross checked and error-corrected, more of it will be published on line.
Time to time I take a break and make a chart or two to address some things that appear puzzling or surprising to me.
Finding glyphosate content so much higher in gluten free food that the general average of all foods, came as a surprise since I used to think of gluten free as a healthier kind of food. I personally do not buy gluten free, do not have allergy to gluten and do understand that keeping my gut bacteria healthy has gotten to be very important for my immune system and general health.
We are living in a very difficult world, where the US and Canadian Government is constantly changing definitions of food stamps. Today they accept certain kind of contamination even within certified organic label and has invented multiple kinds of USDA-Organic stamp, with different colours accepting different percentage of the food to have non-organic content.
For example, I just learned from a scientist in USA that the “green label” USDA organic stamp allows 5% non-organic food to be within it. The black USDA-Organic stamp will allow 30% non-organic content in it and still have that black circular USDA Organic stamp.
I am trying to figure out Canadian Government standards on this. As far as CFIA records go, the foods are only described “organic” without any clarification.
For any that wish to investigate and help us with the general work, you may wish to read through the Canadian Safe Food (read Organic) regulation standard for 2017 and see if the Canadian Government is also following the US counterpart in allowing various levels of impurity into the food and yet agreeing to stamp it with different flavours of the circular “CANADIAN ORGANIC – BIOLOGIQUE CANADA”stamp. Click on the image below for the full pdf document and download for your study.
Click on image for the full pdf document
Some text here might appear long winded or a bit out of context. That is because I am aiming to eventually prepare a book or an e-book on the topic and am using some of these blogs as a store of some of my off the cuff write-ups.
I know the pro-Monsanto and pro-glyphosate lobby will snigger and pass condescending notes that the amounts mentioned are tiny, irrelevant and is not harmful to humans, based on yada yada yada reports.
But this blog, or my efforts, are not to engage in any argument with these characters. To me, no amount of glyphosate is desirable, because:
Safety test records and data, based on which Health Canada approved glyphosate, is still kept hidden from the people, illegally I might add, and I am having a multi-year long battle to get them to disclose the data, without which I am unprepared to listen to these industry cronies.
Science has been hijacked by industry. We need science funding to be taken away from industry, restriction removed so that Universities can test for both good points as well as potential dangers of glyphosate, without any interference from promoters, and let all the findings be part of the body of science. Let chips fall as they may. Let twenty years pass and enough material be collected to highlight both sides of the argument. Only then am I willing to even consider listening to reports or evaluations of the scientific community, on safety of glyphosate.
Let someone prove Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Seneff wrong by showing that glyphosate is NOT an analog (mimic) of glycine and it does NOT get picked up by our biology into the extra-cellular matrix, does NOT get into our cells, does NOT get used by our RNA to produce peptides or peptides which eventually end up as new proteins where glyphosate replaces glycine with disastrous consequence to the function of the protein. If such a proof is not produced, I am prepared to ignore all comments on mere toxicological tests and studies on safety of glyphosate.
Meanwhile, I intend to analyze the CFIA test record data with my own assumption that the only safe limit for glyphosate is ZERO, irrespective of what guideline CFIA, Health Canada, EPA or anybody else follows. This analysis is based on that assumption. Those that follow my reasoning, they may continue to read them Those that do not believe my reasoning – go someplace else. I have no time nor any inclination, to argue with you all. Just go.
Lentils and Chickpea/ Garbanzo beans
These have been a nightmare – since these readings are so high, often going into several thousand ppb (parts per billion – which is derived by multiplying the ppm or µg/g figures by CFIA) on some of the samples. I shall address those items later on on this blog. Meanwhile, I prepared some charts for India, since lentil is a heavily consumed group of seeds in India and since this is increasingly popular in the west and since North America is beginning to produce a lot of it, perhaps hoping to re-export back to India where production is falling behind rising demand.
Indian lentils seem to have rising amount of glyphosate, but nowhere as high as lentils produced in Canada (not shown in this chart)
The chart below shows, among all the foods imported from India into Canada, nearly seventy such samples so far seen out of 2,000 odd records, the worst group is the lentil + Chickpea group, compared to say, rice, or any other item.
Canadian grown lentils are way worse than the Indian grown. I shall show them later. Meanwhile, here is another chart about India, or rather, about the foods imported from India into Canada and tested by CFIA. Its the percentages of samples that contain glyphosate/AMPA.
Percentage of bad food among imported Indian samples. You may click on the image to get to the pdf file of the 800 odd records so far transcribed and put on line.
The above chart means, out of all the lentils imported from India, 50% are having glyphosate. Over 12% of the rice has glyphosate, though mostly trace amount, and among the rest – which include a whole gamut from pickles to snacks, over 71% have some glyphosate. However, the averages as you can see in the previous chart above, are still low compared to foods grown in North America.
I shall come back with more shortly. I am also trying out various chart types to practice on them, for perhaps putting in an e-book I might publish on Amazon kindle, about glyphosate in food.
General North American Food
Since readings between USA and Canadian food samples appear more or less similar when compared to foods imported from anywhere else, I have also combined to two for a general idea of glyphosate contamination in certain categories that appear to have high glyphosate contamination, without separating organic from non-organic labelling. The graph below shows that.
Suspect categories of North American food with regard to glyphosate contamination.
Over 1600 records so far have been transcribed, but error correction going on, and only around 800 of them so far placed on line in this blog.
The details are shedding light on many issues, but raising as many questions. So far, there seem to be no standard wheat, nor flour made from the wheat, nor standard bread, or Asian flat bread, or Pasta, made out of that wheat, has apparently beed tested. If I was a political analyst, a Psephologist and involved in tracking of trends, I might have concluded that CFIA has not tested any wheat or wheat product on purpose, to keep the people and the government in the dark about the one food item that is suspected to have the most glyphosate.
However, I am just an engineer and do not fully understand nor sure about political analysis or psephology. So I shall wait till I have transcribed all the near 8,000 records before I conclude if wheat and wheat products have at all been tested or not. I shall likely be having further communication with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency about it, once the preliminary analysis of all data received is concluded.
One kind of presumably healthy food category that has really surprised me with astonishingly high glyphosate content – is gluten free food. So much so that I had to try and separate them from the rest and see how the figures play out.
Out of the first two thousand odd records, I find very very few gluten free items from any country except USA and Canada, so I ignored them and focussed on just these two. USA has 130 samples and Canada 99, that have “gluten free” in their description. Average glyphosate + AMPA readings for the US produced gluten free product is 248 ppb and that for Canada is 286.
Gluten free foods may be suspect – due to much higher glyphosate content. You may also click on this image for the PDF file uploaded with the transcribed data comprising of the first 803 records. The remaining records going to around 2,000 are still being proof read. There are yet another five thousand odd records to be transcribed, before this lot will be over.
These readings are between two and three times the national average for USA and Canada, which are already hight to start with. Somehow, anything that has “gluten free” mentioned has become suspect- in my mind.
This is but a preliminary report. I shall later check if Organic-Gluten free is any better, and if it is any better than standard, non-organic, non-glutens free, off the shelf conventional food.
Here is a two and a half minute video about eggplants. I made it because so far it looks as if this is one vegetable that somehow has avoided being contaminated with glyphosate.
And then below is a 16 minute video of the first 803 records analysed.
A few of the issues and tems I have so far found puzzling, are:
Wheat – so far, I have not yet found a single record of normal wheat grain, or popular items made from wheat flour such as bread.n The only wheats so far mentioned are esoteric varieties and special grains that carry “wheat” in its name, such as buckwehat flour, Buckwehat kernels, gluten free buckwheat, and more buckwheat this or buckwheat that. Most of the stuff, even organic varieties, appear to have glyphosate. But regular no-fancy basement variety wheat grain, and the vast type and name brand of bread that is made from such bargain basement varieties of wheat grain – are so far completely absent from the records. Thus, a major part of human food in these regions, are without a test result. Meanwhile, all sorts of foods that are wheat-like, are tested, and their results do not look good. I am getting increasingly careful and worried about where I get my bread from and how much of it I should consider consuming regularly. My bread intake has been cut from two slices a day to three slices a weak, and I only buy organic bread, but at this point, I am not sure what they contain.
Chickpea and Garbanzo : These are turning out to be, nasty stuff. There are hardly any sample containing these foods have good readings. There are 20 samples tested with Garbanzo – not one of them are organic and all of them have glyphosate – a 100% record. Many have astronomically high glyphosate content and categorized as in “Violation” of whatever standard that CFIA is following. All these samples are picked up in only two regions of Canada so far – The Atlantic and Ontario. No samples from Quebec or West. Some of the very worst samples have been collected from Ontario and originate from the US. I have already gotten rid of unmarked chickpea and Garbanzo we had, and decided to either get organic versions, or do without them.
Brand Name and labels are missing from processed and packaged food. This makes it hard for people to distinguish one sample from the next, when their descriptions are very similar but their glyphosate content may not be.
Regions within Canada have food growing provinces areas missing. The sample data, containing over 800 records so far transcribed – gives the areas within Canada where the samples were picked up. There are only four such areas mentioned so far – Atlantic, Quebec, Ontario and West. I presume Atlantic to mean the east coast maritime provinces of Lewfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edwards Island, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. I presume West to mean the land west of the Rockies, but basically British Columbia. This leaves aside Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba as the three major food growing regions of Canada. While many of the samples picked up elsewhere must have originated there, I wonder why no local collection has so far shown up in the records. Is there a story here or I just have to wait till those turn up too. Its very odd that these three provinces are missing, as are the northern territories. Not much food may be growing there, but one aught to pick up what food is being sold there, transported from elsewhere. I have been to White Horse, Yellowknife and Tuktuyaktuk. Most foods are packaged and processed, and there are not much food labelled organic there anyway. What are the average glyphosate intake in those foods? I would have wished those to be showing up in the tests too.
Atlantic and Ontario stand out negatively with some of the high glyphosate food items. This has been another major ensuing puzzle for me. Food items that appear to contain measurable and high amount of glyphosate, seem to only appear in samples collected i Ontario and Atlantic. The other two regions so far identified as sollection points – Quebec and West, seem to contain a few items with “trace” glyphosate content and zero measurable amount. How come? Also, where do the missing provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta fit in? The data so far transcribes answers some questions, but raises many more, and presents quite a few major puzzles.
USA & Canada: There are always more samples showing up from the US than Canada. This is extremely odd when all samples are collected in Canada,s since Canada is a major food producing nation, just as the US. Also, the foods identified as of “unknown” origin number higher than both USA and Canada. This is also very odd. I therefore suspect, but cannot prove at this point, that most all of the “known” (meaning unidentified) foods were picked up in food stores where origin was not mentioned, especially for unpackaged bulk food, such as some grains, seeds, flour made from ground seeds etc that were being sold in stores in bulk and without packaging.
I suspect most of these are of Canadian origin. Therefore I have also combined both the Canadian Origin and those that were entered as of “unknown” origin. This way, the total samples in Canada overtakes US samples, which makes sense for foods collected in Canada. This also brings the average glyphosate content below that of USA. The average glyphosate content should be of great interest for Canadians, but the US value is, I suspect, not a true representation of foods in USA. They at best represent American Grown foods that are available in Canadian stores. To get a better idea of what kind of food Americans are buying and eating, one would need to collect similar high number of food samples, local and imported, that are available in American food stores, and then analyze them for glyphosate and AMPA.
I am told EPA had started testing local foods in USA for glyphosate, but stopped its efforts soon after. The reason for stopping it, I am told, is that it ran out of funds and would need more money from congress. I find it strange that USA would not have funds to test its own food. Something very strange going on.
Meanwhile, I am extremely thankful that I managed to get this Canadian food test result treasure trove, and aim to do as good a job as possible, to bring it out to the people.
Tony
An older 10 minute quick update after 500 readings out of 7,000 transcribed.
