Glyphosate, Tea, and Media
Posted on
May 14, 2018
Glyphosate in Tea, and the effect on the tea drinking population.
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I had seen the evidence, from CFIA tests in Canada, that North America produced the most toxic of all seed based foods on the planet, from wheat to rye, barley, oats, to beans, chickpea and lentils.
http://www.ijehe.org/temp/IntJEnvHealthEng712-362183_100338.pdf
I also knew that people were getting poisoned far faster and with a far greater dose of glyphosate from non-GMO crops than GMO, which in general contained far less amount of glyphosate, with rice and quinoa being the only known exceptions.
I had seen further evidence that processed foods were on average lot more toxic with glyphosate than the same food in raw stage before processing. Such as carrots from the field (much cleaner), compared to carrots coming from famous branded tinned variety (dirtier with glyphosate contamination). Besides, most of the popular food processors including baby food and morning cereal makers somehow appeared to add a lot of glyphosate into their products, such as Kelloggs. I even wrote a letter to them about it, but only got a sort of holding message without follow up.
I had not paid too much to beverages, since not much of that was tested, and because it was so hard to guess what ingredients were included in popular health drinks etc.
However,
coming to India, a major tea growing and tea drinking nation with high population, I became increasingly conscious of the issue of glyphosate in tea production. Tea garden owners have told me they have been using glyphosate in tea gardens for a long time, perhaps stretching a generation.
I have found that in rubber plantations, even in remote Himalayan foothills, glyphosate has reached.
Then Sri Lanka imposed a nationwide ban of glyphosate due to suspicion that it was killing farm workers from Kidney failure. Recently commercial pressure has pushed Sri Lanka to selectively open up Glyphosate in tea and rubber production.
So,
when I heard about research papers from the US that seemed to find higher concentration of glyphosate tea compared to lots of processed foods and beverages, I found the authors of the study, but could not lay my hands on the published paper.
So I asked around and am thankful for agro-scientist André Comeau of Quebec, Canada, for sending me the link to the paper, which I have now downloaded and given it a cursory look, saving it for thorough reading in a few days.
Apparently, a lot more glyphosate is noted in people’s urine that have drunk tea in the last 24 hours. I know glyphosate does bioaccumulates, so what is seen in the Urine is only a fraction of the stuff that one drinks. The rest goes into the person’s biology – one way or another, and ends up in all kinds of places it should not be – thus starting a long process of diseases or ill-health.
This chart is from that paper.
I used to think a billion plus people of India are getting mass scale poisoned primarily from imported daal (pulses) from countries such as Canada, Australia etc.
But now that I know how glyphosate has penetrated every aspect of modern farmlands growing virtually anything, from potato to cauliflower to rice, and how it is so visible in processed tea bags, I am beginning to suspect the billion strong population might be poisoned both from imported pulses, as as well most anything homegrown, from food to tea.
I feel increasingly sure the the tea-glyphosate link is not unique to India but across the entire tea producing world, from China to Africa, but we shall not know till someone starts broad based testing all these tea leaves, tea dust and tea bags.
It appears that the people in India, while being focussed on resisting GMO, might have allowed a thousand fold bigger tide of poison through reckless, and unchecked use of glyphosate everywhere on one side, and absolute absence of either any testing to see if any of that is safe, and same time without any test of how much of it is in the average diet of people here.
It looks like an unimaginable tsunami of ill-health is bearing down on India and all tea drinking regions, and I can already see the tell tale signs of it, with a cursory look at my friends and relatives and noticing the inexplicable rise of auto-immune diseases that were virtually unheard of a decade ago.
To make matters worse,
the paper itself does not specifically say if the test also included presence of AMPA, the first metabolite of glyphosate. It is possible that the test excludes AMPA, in which case the actual toxicity from glyphosate/AMPA might be much higher than the figures shown. In absence of a clear mention, I am inclined to believe the data only contains glyphosate.
This should go into my blog –
its too important and worrisome to ignore.
{this article continues}
