Important Follow Up to Glyphosate/Groceries- Please Read!

-
Science is not about entrenching into a position based on ideology. It is about making interpretations based on the evidence provided, and that evidence can, and does change. 


This is a critical follow up to the discussion of the Food Democracy Now brochure that claims dangerous levels of herbicide in common grocery items.

I was contacted by the laboratory that did the analysis for them and I am comfortable that they did the detection 100% correctly. No question. There was no way that I could have known this from the information presented by FDN or by the company's analytical documents.

This tells us two things:
1. Peer review and complete disclosure of methods is important.
2. The levels are still of absolutely no biological consequence.


If anything, this reputable laboratory's analysis and document tells consumers that their food is safe, because an herbicide aggressive food activists find controversial is detectable at the edge of nothing.

You can see how Food Democracy Now and Vani Hari manipulate the fear of the consumer. They call this poison. It's not.

They wanted non-zero numbers, and that's what today's extremely sensitive analytical chemistry can, and does, provide.  This simply opens the door for misinterpretations.



They still do misrepresent the numbers on the Detox Project website, conveniently removing the asterisks from numbers they want over-interpreted. Many readings on this chart are described by the company as "not reliable", and we don't know the number of samples or any variance between samples.  

I have a verbal recap on a special edition of the Talking Biotech Podcast, as I want to make sure that this is clarified. To be effective we need to be honest and roll with the changes as new information is gathered. Thank you.

Popular posts from this blog

Film Review: The Need to Grow

-
Image
The recurring ads on Facebook pulled at me to watch The Need to Grow , a documentary film about food and farming.  As someone connected with these areas professionally and personally, I thought it would be worth a watch.  Here is a review. First the good things.  The film is nicely shot and well written.  The majority of the work builds on themes such as nutritious diets healthy soils, and efficient energy. Those are the central underlying values of the film, and ones that I wholly endorse.  However, where the film falls apart is in its approaches to achieve those end points.  Two of the "experts" recruited for the film are none other than Jeffrey Smith and Vandana Shiva, two people with little training in science or farming (and no, Vandana Shiva is not a physicist as the film claims).  The narrator is actress Rosario Dawson, who early in the film makes the proclamation, "Agriculture is the most destructive human activity on the planet." It is clear where t
Read more

Food Babe Visits My University

-
Image
It was 6:30 pm in the lab and I was just thinking about the last things I'd need to get done before I could go home.  Typical night.  Usually I'm riding home about 7 pm, but an email popped up asking me if I was going to go watch the Food Babe.  A click on a link would take me to the note on a UF Dean for Students Good Food Revolution Events website.  Vani Hari would be spreading her corrupt message of bogus science and abject food terrorism here at the University of Florida. Oh joy. There's something that dies inside when you are a faculty member that works hard to teach about food, farming and science, and your own university brings in a crackpot to unravel all of the information you have brought to students. She might have started from honest roots.  Her story says she was duped by an organic yogurt stand (join the club) into buying taro toppings that were filled with artificial, non-organic colors.  She realized that she could use social media to coalesce
Read more

Shame on Pediatrics. Rejecting Scientist's Comments

-
 A lot has been said about the journal Pediatrics December 2023 Clinical Report on "Using GMOs on Children". The poor scholarship and citation bias are alarming, and the bias against safe technology is clear.  When I wrote to editor-in-chief Dr. Lewis First, he indicated that I was invited to submit a response to the article that would be posted below the article on its website. I submitted my response, and it was not published on the site. My guess is that it illuminated the bankruptcies of the article in a manner that ran counter to the authors', editor's and journal's narrative.  So I'll publish my comment here.  Dear Pediatrics Readership,  The article by Abrams et al. represents a stunning example of how misinformation spreads- even through a credible conduit. Pediatrics is a respected journal, so when a paper implies a technology is dangerous, physicians and the general public take note. That’s good. But if the message runs counter to the scientific con
Read more