So here goes... Also, this is a long post...
After getting tagged in a article on Examiner.com accusing
Roundup of causing Celiac disease, my first thought was, “Wait, isn’t that a
genetic condition?” Well, I read through the article and was offended. It’s not
just that I’ve been reading Chipotle propaganda all weekend or arguing with a
poorly punctuated Facebooker on the evils of HSUS; I’m offended by this article
as a scientist. My main field of
interest is dairy cattle nutrition and methane mitigation, so the topic of
glyphosphate application to crops is only remotely related to my field of
study. However, the persistence of bad science in the direct attacks on my
industry frustrates me mostly because of the blind willingness of the
public to accept antagonism towards food producers using “facts” based in poor
research quality, irresponsible authorship and negligible responsibility.
This glyphosphate article by Nancy Swanson represents
conflicts of interest, horrendous causality implications from lazy
correlations, ignorance of agriculture, misrepresentation of national survey
data, incorrect and dishonest citations, and generally bad intellect. Of
course, that’s not all Nancy’s fault. She is just citing a paper written by two
renowned scientists, right? I wish it were so, but in reality, the scientists
contributing to this paper are both activists campaigning against GMOs in a
field far from their training (both of them are engineers) and likely
cooperating with Nancy. That point is made especially poignant when you
consider that she provided them with some of the data and graphs in their paper
(and “statistical” consulting) even though she is not an author. Nancy
essentially helped feed the data to Samsel and Seneff, and then cited the paper
where they used her correlations.
I would not presuppose myself well-versed in nutritional
gene regulation, but I have certainly received more training and done more
research related to this field than either Samsel or Seneff. You will notice
that in the comments, many people picked up on this, mostly because Samsel and
Seneff have been previously indicted by the Examiner for publishing bad work in reviews outside their disciplines. Just last year,
they “published” an open-source, journal article
in Entropy, hosted by mdpi.com. MDPI knows that many of their works will be
contested heavily by the scientific community and disclaim on their website
that unless plagiarism or falsified data can be proven, the works will not be
removed.
Well, it’s pretty hard to falsify data in a review paper, but Samsel and Seneff
did their best in the current work. And that is the problem with the open-source
literature out there – people take for granted when they see “research” beside
the website title that the work is really research, but instead, you can
publish whatever you want in open-source and not face any backlash for your
actions, except ostracization from any group with intellectual capacity to call
your bull. If you want to get the full range of ignorance and hot-headed
accusations, you can direct to the comment section under the original article;
there is no more place or time for that here.
Working through the article, the first link out goes to
Samsel and Seneff, whom we have already established as PhDs merely interested
in writing their opinions about how GMOs are harbingers of the apocalypse. If we were
to assume that they actually knew what they were talking about, we could
proceed to critically evaluate the data and citations used by the authors in
their Interdisciplinary Toxicology paper. Unfortunately, the paper is not
actually published in Interdisciplinary Toxicology, like Samsel claims onResearch Gate.
Instead, you have to track it down through the website “SustainablePulse”,
where it has been saved as a .pdf file. Again, the paper is not even published
yet in an open-source location. I realize that open-source papers have a value
in contributing data and ideas to the scientific community, but equally often they are instead the mire that drags science down by propagating
misrepresentations of pathways, misinterpretations of data and reviews of
overwhelming amounts of data to try and beat the reader’s brain into submission
on an issue. I have no doubt that this paper is probably waiting to be posted
online and those detractors in the commentary that say it will be rejected are
probably wrong. Someone like Samsel will not submit it to be published where he
thought it would be rejected. But it should be rejected by any self-respecting
journal if for no other reason than the immaturity of the discussion. For
example, the citation of symptoms in fish exhibits ignorance of medical
terminology. Clinical signs would include something like diarrhea (a common
clinical sign in many disease, not restricted to Celiac disease) whereas a
symptom is something reported by the patient as experiencing. Did Samsel and
Seneff ask the fish what they were experiencing, or did the writers of the
paper that they cited? Unfortunately, I will never know because the paper that
they cited is not available online and I refuse to pay $60 US just to find out
what I already know – Samsel and Seneff don’t know what a symptom really is - probably since they lack that training. I
will agree with one thing written in their entire paper – the imbalance of gut
microbiota can be linked to diarrhea. Not surprising to anyone, of course, but
this is within my field of study and I can confirm that if you drink too much alcohol,
poison yourself, catch the flu, ingest Salmonella,
eat tapeworms or take extreme antacids you will change the gut microbiota and
probably experience some gastrointestinal discomfort. That does not mean we all
have Celiac disease, or that all of those conditions caused the disease. The
only takeaway from this paper is that just because you can cite over 200
references, it doesn’t mean that you should. I pity the person who counted all
of these and tried to decide how many of the references were valid papers (also in the comments section), but
their effort is what Samsel and Seneff should have done in the first place. Bad
papers should not be perpetuated into the scientific future, they should be
weeded out (maybe with intellectual Roundup) and never appear in someone’s review paper. I also
noticed early at least one prime case of citation out of context, abusing de
Maria et al. (2006) on the negative effect of glyphosphate on bacteria and
plants. Well, of course glyphosphate should kill plants, isn’t
that the point of an herbicide?
Nancy next cites the heavy use of Roundup as a desiccant for
crop production. For those of you who aren’t aware, I searched the use of
desiccants in crop production and learned that this is a process where plantsare dried up to allow for an earlier harvest. A
little context here is that a farmer cannot harvest crops when they are too
wet. If you have ever seen corn standing in January, it’s likely because the
corn grain didn’t get dry enough to be harvested due to rain or cold, cloudy
weather and the farmer is still waiting to get out there and bring it in. When
grain can’t be dried enough, it grows molds, toxins and pests – everyone’s
favorite things to see in food. While it would never make it to your plate,
these toxins could represent a devastating loss in crop production, so the
grain must be dried. Grain will only dry once the plant is mature and starts to
die. So some farmers in poor climates will expedite the dying part once the
plant and grain is mature by killing the plant. The herbicide that they would
use is called a desiccant. Roundup is not a desiccant, and on their corporate website
for Canada (Nancy’s target area), they even discourage the use of the productas a desiccant because it will not work very well.
As many might remember from Roundup commercials, it attacks the roots of the
plant and the long delay for attack of the root and death of the plant is not
as effective as a desiccant designed to immediately afflict the leaves of the
target. However, the idea with using Roundup nearer the end of the season is
actually to get weeds that would also be approaching seed storage maturity. By
attacking weeds during their annual reproduction, they can be prevented from
growing back every year. As we all should know, less weeds equals more crop
yields equals lower food cost and hopefully less starving people. Last note,
but if you follow the link for Canada’s recommendations about using desiccants,
they specifically caution against it for risks of testing too high for
glyphosphate in crop residues. Quite the opposite from the encouragement Nancy
implies in her article.
Nancy follows the incorrect assertion of Roundup as a
desiccant by tracking the growth of wheat in the U.S. over the past 25 years.
For those of you who don’t know how to look up crop production numbers, it is very easy. Go to the USDA site and click on what you
want to know. Step by step, the site will narrow down until you get to the
desired data. Unfortunately, Nancy then follows by saying that’s where she got
her glyphosphate treatment data. It is not; there is no way to be nicer about
that. Instead, if you do some searching with keywords such as “glyphosphate”
“crops” “USDA”, you will come up with USDA reports for areas and their
application of fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides. It would seem that the
numbers Nancy presents as the percentage of application are actually the
numbers for application of any herbicide within a calendar year. Well,
any farmer would be stupid not to try and kill weeds during the year to prevent
them from choking out his crop. And it would appear from the high percentages
reported by Nancy (and confirmed in my searches) that farmers in the U.S. are
not stupid; they like to kill weeds and improve their production. This is just
one reason why your food is not getting more expensive at the rate of
inflation. You will notice that winter wheat reports a much lower percentage,
and this is because not all winter wheat is used for grain production. Some
farms just plant it to keep the soil from washing away as part of their
commitment to environmental sustainability. Since they don’t care about killing
the weeds that grow along with the unharvested wheat, no unnecessary herbicide
is applied. I also want to point out that the numbers Nancy uses are not truly
national numbers, but the USDA compiled a recent report of just the Midwest
states, and her numbers directly match those; it’s just another example of
dishonest reporting in this article.
Where shall we go from there? If you follow the link for the
UK residue report, it is actually a link to an activist group, but a commenter
was kind enough to share the correct link.
Or we could talk about the EPA raising the maximum concentration of
glyphosphate allowed in food in the U.S. The levels of up to 400 ppm listed in
this and other places are actually for animal feed. Livestock consume leftover
product, and they turn it into protein for people at very high efficiency. This
is why we don’t care if there are high ppm in grass, hay or feed corn; no
humans will be consuming this product, no glyphosphate will be residual in the
animal products, and the animals wouldn’t even be alive for 75 years to
complain about it because their natural
lifespan is only 20 years, or 40 years with a horse. Considering the claim of
the EPA concealing a flaw in agricultural safety for the U.S., it should
be suspicious that any sane person would ever accuse the EPA of colluding with any
part of U.S. agricultural industries. It just doesn’t happen and any farmer can
tell you that.
So, the papers thus far have been faulty, the links were
deceiptful and the data was manipulated. It was at this point in the article
that I decided to stop trying so hard to prove Nancy was wrong and instead
focus on why she wanted to seem so stupid. Quotations are always a dangerous
thing and with activist writing they nearly always signal information taken out
of context. This was also true with Nancy’s quote from Gasnier et al. (2009). I
saw some commentary below the article about the redacted papers from this lab,
but I don’t know the whole backstory on this. Instead, I do know that Gasnier’s
paper is not taken as poorly out of context as I thought it would be. It would
seem that Gasnier instead is just blind to the true value of the results and
sensationalized the data to prove a point that the data does not. The high
concentrations of the Roundup mixture exposed to human cells is supposed to
mean instant death to humans. Of course, no humans were actually used in the
experiment (rightly so) and this extension of the data is a criminal
undertaking in the scientific community. Further, there doesn’t even seem to be
cause for concern as it looks like I would have to probably drink Roundup in
order to be sick. As it turns out, the glyphosphate by itself isn’t dangerous,
but the concoction together makes it better absorbed and lethal to the plants
(or human liver cells in this study). This actually tells me that Roundup is
even safer than I thought it would be, and the significance of this work is
lost on the authors. It is also lost on Nancy who merely pulls a line she likes
from their abstract without reading the full paper.
I saved the best for last and will let the trail of
self-entertainment lead you on. In one of my stats classes in the day, we talked about interesting correlations that can be made and use it as a
funny illustration of why correlation does not equal causation. I have to
credit our statistics professor (who will be happy to remain unnamed here) for
the next 2 examples. Consider first, the correlation of Catholic mass
attendance the church offering plate cash received by protestants. Both of them
are highly correlated, but we can obviously expect that one is not caused by
the other. How could increasing the number of people at one church increase the
money received at another? That would mean that the best plan for protestant
churches to make money and grow would be to recruit Catholics to their
neighboring church. Common sense should dictate this is absurd. His other
primary example is the relationship between marriage and death. Being married,
I find it particularly funny that over time as more people have gotten married,
more people have also died. The two are highly correlated, and no wonder as our
country’s population has also grown during the same time. Another outside
source that highlights the plight of poor regression was Bobby Henderson in his
2005 letter to the Kansas State Board of Education when he proposed the ideas
that led to “pastafarianism”. In that letter, he highlights how as global
temperatures rise, the number of pirates has declined steadily over the past
200 years ().
Both of these are highly correlated and he stipulated that he was concerned
global warming could wipe out our pirates. Laugh if you will, but Nancy’s abuse
of correlation is not really funny.
Correlation is supposed to help us see where things might be related but cannot be attributed as cause and effect. Even worse is when bad correlations are made with fudged data. Unfortunately, Celiac disease is genetically inherited and while historically these people would have died off, we have ffound ways to help save them and treat their condition. This is good. Blaming the perpetuation of a disease on farmers is bad, and incorrect. As our population grows and we carry diseases with us in our genes, it is a fact among the shadows of this bad article that Celiac is becoming more prevalent and visible. But we cannot turn and blame the industry that feeds our survival - literally biting off the hands that feed us. They are more invested in quality food production than anyone else, passing on farms to future generations in a tradition of love for the soil and its fruits.
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