Great find! Ironic that it's coming from Sauza, as that's one of the tequilas which DOESN'T specify "100% agave" on the bottle—but a little digging turned up that they also own Hornitos, which is 👍🏼
Re. "Medical science has failed to produce cures for most of the plagues of modern society: depression, obesity, autism, Parkinson’s, Alzheimers…the list goes on.":
Medical science has produced at least 2 good cures for obesity: phentermine and semaglutide. The medical community almost immediately made it illegal for most people to obtain either. In the case of phentermine, they successfully spread the scientifically unsupported misinformation that it's addictive, which you will now find in any reputable layman's website, but not in any refereed journal articles AFAIK.
That's uhhh....a sneak peek at the paid-subscriber content, where I give you the key for figuring out whether or not a wine has added cane sugar 😅
Funny you frame it as "making you feel bad" about your food choices. All the advice I can formulate based on this indepth knowledge of microbial ecology of the human body...it's stuff my mom would've told me.
Try to get most of your food in the form of fresh fruits and vegetables, things like fish, olive oil, etc. Don't eat candy, boxed mac 'n cheese, or anything else that was produced with the absolute bottom-dollar bottom line in mind. If you're gonna drink, wine is better for you than beer, unless it's pretty bad wine.
I said in the post "if you're anything like me, you don't do what someone tells you without hearing a good reason why". Maybe the reality is "you don't do what someone tells you unless you can tell yourself that it was your idea."
In any case, thanks for reading: I'll go add in the list of countries that don't allow chaptalization.
Correlation ain't necessarily causation, but p <10^-5 is something that, in my mind, requires some explaining.
I'm open to other interpretations; maybe HFCS drives all those diseases, and roundup just drives down the cost of corn syrup, leading to its inclusion in more foods.
But it could also be something really weird: folate baked with fructose forms a glycation product (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15969484/) that I could see fucking with the enzymes that are responsible for folate cycling, which in turn is important for neurotransmitter metabolism (COMT and HIOMT require SAM-E, which recharges off of folate) and control of homocysteine, which is linked to heart disease and depression. Sucrose doesn't form nearly as much of the stuff.
So it could be something as random as the combination of enriched wheat flour and monosaccharide sweeteners in baked goods. If that were the case, you'd expect to see an equally strong or better correlation (and better p value) between amount of corn syrup consumed and disease, versus the one seen between glyphosate applied to crops and disease.
1. why is glyphosate (a pesticide) fundamentally more dangerous than other pesticides, even organic ones, or the natural pesticides that are produced by fruits and vegetables themselves?
Let's work backward, starting with the natural deterrents in fruits and veggies. Fruits are unique among living things in that they "want" to be eaten. While it's true that most fruits contain natural chemical deterrents to prevent the *wrong* thing from eating them, it'd be a pretty unfit plant that sickened the animals that it depends on for seed dispersal. Nearly all the fruits that you'll find at the grocery store are [descended from] ones that have a symbiotic relationship with mammals. Peppers are an edge case, because we're masochists. (see my earlier post "Welcome to the Jungle"!)
Regarding veggies, including grains: we've been in an arms race with plants for billions of years. It would be a pretty unfit animal that couldn't deal with the toxins in common plants, considering that photosynthesis is the single entry point for practically all caloric energy in the biosphere. There are also many plants we don't eat, because their deterrents are too toxic—things like creosote and hemlock. On that note: we've also had tens of thousands of years of active, selective breeding to get to where we are today. Modern pigs are not just larger than wild boar, but more docile as well—and grains/veggies have likewise been selected for nontoxicity in addition to size.
As a species, we have between 10,000 and a billion years of learned avoidance, evolutionary adaptation, or active mitigation for most natural toxins. Most beans will fucking kill you if you don’t cook them properly, but most everyone knows that, and raw beans taste bad besides. A toxin invented in the last hundred years, which has no natural purpose and thus no associated warning signs (think of the colorful poison dart frog) is potentially sketchier.
Now, a clarification: glyphosate is an herbicide. Herbicides are technically pesticides, since weeds are considered pests, but it makes a substantial difference in the answer to the first part of question 1, which ties into the answer to question 2.
~Glyphosate is not fundamentally more dangerous than other pesticides/herbicides, but you're eating a lot more of it than any other. As the oldest saying in toxicology goes: The Dose Makes the Poison.~
This gets into question 2:
2. Why is it that we have robust outcome data showing positive effects from fruits and vegetables, whole grain consumption, and so on, even though these foods contain glyphosate in normal amounts?
They don't.
Listen: If I treated an apple tree with enough roundup to kill it, and then plucked one of the withered, dead apples from its branches and offered it to you, I assume you would not eat that apple. Same goes for a head of wilted, brown, dead lettuce, yeah?
But if I sprayed a field of sugarcane with enough roundup to kill the whole thing—then hacked it all down, boiled it, dried the extract into crystals, and offered you some with your tea in a cute little bowl...you might well stir in a spoonful or two, if you didn't know what I'd done to it.
If I killed a field of wheat the same way, then ground it into flour, or took soybeans and pressed them into oil, you wouldn’t necessarily know you were eating poison. This is literally how things are done in modern agriculture, under the euphemism of “preharvest desiccation”. You kill the crop with weed killer.
You might find trace amounts of glyphosate in an avocado, but it's practically nothing by comparison; certainly not an herbicidal amount—as evidenced by the fact that it's not withered and dead. A plant that has absorbed enough enzyme inhibitor to kill it *necessarily contains the poison at high enough concentrations to inhibit the enzyme which it targets*.
Because the enzyme is pretty well-conserved between plants and most bacteria, this is on the same order of magnitude that would inhibit enzymatic function in microbes trying to use that plant matter as growth substrate.
Take another look at the list in the post: "Foods that are grown or harvested using roundup (or some other glyphosate formulation)".
It is mostly *not* fruits and vegetables, things consumed "live" with all these positive health outcome associations. It is primarily grains, pulses, and things that will otherwise be processed; things that are harvested dead—and which can therefore be saturated with herbicidal amounts of roundup to facilitate harvest.
The health outcomes associated with corn syrup, soy products, vegetable oil, sugar, and dairy (just my first guess at most people's most significant exposure vectors) are not good. As for whole grains, those outcomes are usually measured as substitutions: replacing a slice of white bread with a slice of whole wheat, which probably doesn’t appreciably change chemical exposure, but does add some extra fiber.
A general heuristic is, if you are buying something at the grocery store and it is alive, you don't need to get the organic version. I'm not sure if this applies to corn, soy, and beets: these are engineered to be herbicide tolerant, so that you can spray them with lethal amounts of herbicide without killing them, but I don't know if those varieties actually end up in the produce section or not; they may be mostly used for animal feed, corn syrup, etc.
If something is NOT alive when I buy it, the next question is: "did the harvest kill the plant?" Beans? Yes; I buy organic. Rice? No; conventional rice is fine. Oats? Yes; organic. Tree nuts? Chill. Peanuts? Nah. This weeds out things that were likely to be "preharvest-desiccated".
3. Do you have personal experience with eliminating glyphosate and noticing real effects? (This isn't strong evidence, but it would help motivate your stance on glyphosate in contrast to other compounds.)
My stance on glyphosate is motivated by the fact that it is the most widely consumed pesticide, correlates tightly with a number of diseases, and—based on the mechanism of action—is likely to cause harms consistent with a whole bunch of otherwise-poorly-explained adverse outcomes we’ve seen at a societal level in the past 30 years. That said, don’t make assumptions about my stance on other compounds; this is Way #1 of 1000!
But it is the most important, because you can't really eliminate just glyphosate from your diet.
This is what I meant in my earlier comment, about it being very hard to do proper studies where you isolate a single variable. (The occupational exposure in the cancer studies you linked is also very different from eating it integrated into the matrix of your food.)
Even if you did a randomized trial where you assigned people to organic or conventional diets, how would you control for dicamba exposure? Atrazine? Chlorothalonil?
If you cut out the roundup, most of the other sketchy shit invented in the last hundred years goes too—so if you are only going to learn one of the Thousand Secret Ways, this is the one.
But, to answer your question: yes. When I eat right, my skin is clearer, my thoughts are clearer, my poops are solid and regular.
When I stay with friends for the weekend and we get Chinese takeout, or order a pizza (I am not so religious about this that I will refuse a meal with friends), my shits get looser. I get restless legs at night, and when I wake up in the mornings, my grip strength is nowhere near what it should be for the first few minutes after waking. I have no idea why, but it’s one of the things that first convinced me that there is something real to it. After sticking to this kind of diet for a while, my keratosis pilaris—something I’d had my whole life— went away over the course of a couple of months, and has stayed gone.
Your mileage may vary as much as your microbiome. If you’ve heard much at all about gut bacteria, you may have heard of Akkermansia, a species which is found in the guts of nearly all Olympic-level athletes. Akkermansia has a Class II EPSP synthase gene: it is one of few naturally “roundup-ready” bacteria. Maybe if you’ve got a lot of this bacterium in your gut, you’re better equipped to tolerate a high-glyphosate diet than I am.
Hope I answered your questions; thank you for asking them—it always helps to hear where points didn’t come across clearly the first time.
This source shows that agave is probably free from glyphosate and other common pesticides:
https://www.casasauza.com/en/tequila-process/undergrowth-control-agave-field
Great find! Ironic that it's coming from Sauza, as that's one of the tequilas which DOESN'T specify "100% agave" on the bottle—but a little digging turned up that they also own Hornitos, which is 👍🏼
Re. "Medical science has failed to produce cures for most of the plagues of modern society: depression, obesity, autism, Parkinson’s, Alzheimers…the list goes on.":
Medical science has produced at least 2 good cures for obesity: phentermine and semaglutide. The medical community almost immediately made it illegal for most people to obtain either. In the case of phentermine, they successfully spread the scientifically unsupported misinformation that it's addictive, which you will now find in any reputable layman's website, but not in any refereed journal articles AFAIK.
Great piece! Will at least make me feel bad about what I eat
Note that there is a trailing sentence "Wine is complicated. If it’s from"
That's uhhh....a sneak peek at the paid-subscriber content, where I give you the key for figuring out whether or not a wine has added cane sugar 😅
Funny you frame it as "making you feel bad" about your food choices. All the advice I can formulate based on this indepth knowledge of microbial ecology of the human body...it's stuff my mom would've told me.
Try to get most of your food in the form of fresh fruits and vegetables, things like fish, olive oil, etc. Don't eat candy, boxed mac 'n cheese, or anything else that was produced with the absolute bottom-dollar bottom line in mind. If you're gonna drink, wine is better for you than beer, unless it's pretty bad wine.
I said in the post "if you're anything like me, you don't do what someone tells you without hearing a good reason why". Maybe the reality is "you don't do what someone tells you unless you can tell yourself that it was your idea."
In any case, thanks for reading: I'll go add in the list of countries that don't allow chaptalization.
Very hard to control for confounders in a study like that, especially long-term. How do you feel about population-level data
https://www.organic-systems.org/journal/92/JOS_Volume-9_Number-2_Nov_2014-Swanson-et-al.pdf
Correlation ain't necessarily causation, but p <10^-5 is something that, in my mind, requires some explaining.
I'm open to other interpretations; maybe HFCS drives all those diseases, and roundup just drives down the cost of corn syrup, leading to its inclusion in more foods.
We know there's mercury in HFCS (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2637263/), which isn't good for you.
But it could also be something really weird: folate baked with fructose forms a glycation product (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15969484/) that I could see fucking with the enzymes that are responsible for folate cycling, which in turn is important for neurotransmitter metabolism (COMT and HIOMT require SAM-E, which recharges off of folate) and control of homocysteine, which is linked to heart disease and depression. Sucrose doesn't form nearly as much of the stuff.
So it could be something as random as the combination of enriched wheat flour and monosaccharide sweeteners in baked goods. If that were the case, you'd expect to see an equally strong or better correlation (and better p value) between amount of corn syrup consumed and disease, versus the one seen between glyphosate applied to crops and disease.
1. why is glyphosate (a pesticide) fundamentally more dangerous than other pesticides, even organic ones, or the natural pesticides that are produced by fruits and vegetables themselves?
Let's work backward, starting with the natural deterrents in fruits and veggies. Fruits are unique among living things in that they "want" to be eaten. While it's true that most fruits contain natural chemical deterrents to prevent the *wrong* thing from eating them, it'd be a pretty unfit plant that sickened the animals that it depends on for seed dispersal. Nearly all the fruits that you'll find at the grocery store are [descended from] ones that have a symbiotic relationship with mammals. Peppers are an edge case, because we're masochists. (see my earlier post "Welcome to the Jungle"!)
Regarding veggies, including grains: we've been in an arms race with plants for billions of years. It would be a pretty unfit animal that couldn't deal with the toxins in common plants, considering that photosynthesis is the single entry point for practically all caloric energy in the biosphere. There are also many plants we don't eat, because their deterrents are too toxic—things like creosote and hemlock. On that note: we've also had tens of thousands of years of active, selective breeding to get to where we are today. Modern pigs are not just larger than wild boar, but more docile as well—and grains/veggies have likewise been selected for nontoxicity in addition to size.
As a species, we have between 10,000 and a billion years of learned avoidance, evolutionary adaptation, or active mitigation for most natural toxins. Most beans will fucking kill you if you don’t cook them properly, but most everyone knows that, and raw beans taste bad besides. A toxin invented in the last hundred years, which has no natural purpose and thus no associated warning signs (think of the colorful poison dart frog) is potentially sketchier.
Now, a clarification: glyphosate is an herbicide. Herbicides are technically pesticides, since weeds are considered pests, but it makes a substantial difference in the answer to the first part of question 1, which ties into the answer to question 2.
~Glyphosate is not fundamentally more dangerous than other pesticides/herbicides, but you're eating a lot more of it than any other. As the oldest saying in toxicology goes: The Dose Makes the Poison.~
This gets into question 2:
2. Why is it that we have robust outcome data showing positive effects from fruits and vegetables, whole grain consumption, and so on, even though these foods contain glyphosate in normal amounts?
They don't.
Listen: If I treated an apple tree with enough roundup to kill it, and then plucked one of the withered, dead apples from its branches and offered it to you, I assume you would not eat that apple. Same goes for a head of wilted, brown, dead lettuce, yeah?
But if I sprayed a field of sugarcane with enough roundup to kill the whole thing—then hacked it all down, boiled it, dried the extract into crystals, and offered you some with your tea in a cute little bowl...you might well stir in a spoonful or two, if you didn't know what I'd done to it.
If I killed a field of wheat the same way, then ground it into flour, or took soybeans and pressed them into oil, you wouldn’t necessarily know you were eating poison. This is literally how things are done in modern agriculture, under the euphemism of “preharvest desiccation”. You kill the crop with weed killer.
You might find trace amounts of glyphosate in an avocado, but it's practically nothing by comparison; certainly not an herbicidal amount—as evidenced by the fact that it's not withered and dead. A plant that has absorbed enough enzyme inhibitor to kill it *necessarily contains the poison at high enough concentrations to inhibit the enzyme which it targets*.
Because the enzyme is pretty well-conserved between plants and most bacteria, this is on the same order of magnitude that would inhibit enzymatic function in microbes trying to use that plant matter as growth substrate.
Take another look at the list in the post: "Foods that are grown or harvested using roundup (or some other glyphosate formulation)".
It is mostly *not* fruits and vegetables, things consumed "live" with all these positive health outcome associations. It is primarily grains, pulses, and things that will otherwise be processed; things that are harvested dead—and which can therefore be saturated with herbicidal amounts of roundup to facilitate harvest.
The health outcomes associated with corn syrup, soy products, vegetable oil, sugar, and dairy (just my first guess at most people's most significant exposure vectors) are not good. As for whole grains, those outcomes are usually measured as substitutions: replacing a slice of white bread with a slice of whole wheat, which probably doesn’t appreciably change chemical exposure, but does add some extra fiber.
A general heuristic is, if you are buying something at the grocery store and it is alive, you don't need to get the organic version. I'm not sure if this applies to corn, soy, and beets: these are engineered to be herbicide tolerant, so that you can spray them with lethal amounts of herbicide without killing them, but I don't know if those varieties actually end up in the produce section or not; they may be mostly used for animal feed, corn syrup, etc.
If something is NOT alive when I buy it, the next question is: "did the harvest kill the plant?" Beans? Yes; I buy organic. Rice? No; conventional rice is fine. Oats? Yes; organic. Tree nuts? Chill. Peanuts? Nah. This weeds out things that were likely to be "preharvest-desiccated".
3. Do you have personal experience with eliminating glyphosate and noticing real effects? (This isn't strong evidence, but it would help motivate your stance on glyphosate in contrast to other compounds.)
My stance on glyphosate is motivated by the fact that it is the most widely consumed pesticide, correlates tightly with a number of diseases, and—based on the mechanism of action—is likely to cause harms consistent with a whole bunch of otherwise-poorly-explained adverse outcomes we’ve seen at a societal level in the past 30 years. That said, don’t make assumptions about my stance on other compounds; this is Way #1 of 1000!
But it is the most important, because you can't really eliminate just glyphosate from your diet.
This is what I meant in my earlier comment, about it being very hard to do proper studies where you isolate a single variable. (The occupational exposure in the cancer studies you linked is also very different from eating it integrated into the matrix of your food.)
Even if you did a randomized trial where you assigned people to organic or conventional diets, how would you control for dicamba exposure? Atrazine? Chlorothalonil?
If you cut out the roundup, most of the other sketchy shit invented in the last hundred years goes too—so if you are only going to learn one of the Thousand Secret Ways, this is the one.
But, to answer your question: yes. When I eat right, my skin is clearer, my thoughts are clearer, my poops are solid and regular.
When I stay with friends for the weekend and we get Chinese takeout, or order a pizza (I am not so religious about this that I will refuse a meal with friends), my shits get looser. I get restless legs at night, and when I wake up in the mornings, my grip strength is nowhere near what it should be for the first few minutes after waking. I have no idea why, but it’s one of the things that first convinced me that there is something real to it. After sticking to this kind of diet for a while, my keratosis pilaris—something I’d had my whole life— went away over the course of a couple of months, and has stayed gone.
Your mileage may vary as much as your microbiome. If you’ve heard much at all about gut bacteria, you may have heard of Akkermansia, a species which is found in the guts of nearly all Olympic-level athletes. Akkermansia has a Class II EPSP synthase gene: it is one of few naturally “roundup-ready” bacteria. Maybe if you’ve got a lot of this bacterium in your gut, you’re better equipped to tolerate a high-glyphosate diet than I am.
Hope I answered your questions; thank you for asking them—it always helps to hear where points didn’t come across clearly the first time.