Many worry about pesticides for health or environmental reasons, and the most common target of general concern is undoubtedly glyphosate, the active ingredient in the famous weedkiller RoundUp. I find that the best thing to do when something worries me, is to

find out more about it. I’ve delved into the details behind the 17 most common concerns I’ve encountered. Questions 1-11 are mainly about health, whereas 12-16 focus on environmental aspects, and lastly, 17 delves into the question of the integrity of research. I will do my best to present useful evidence-based resources on all the following topics. If you would like to listen to a summary of this series you can head on over to my guest appearance on the podcast Talking biotech with Kevin Folta – I was very honoured for the opportunity to join his great series.

After receiving valuable feedback from my readers, I decided to break these questions into blog posts of their own, either alone or in groups of a few connected questions per post. This way the list below can also serve as a hyperlinked table of contents:

The basics

Glyphosate is a modified glycine-molecule (the smallest of our essential amino acids) which has a phosphoric acid (or to be exact, phosphonomethyl) group attached at the end (GLYcine PHOSphonATE). You can find out more about the specifics here. This small molecule binds to an enzyme in plants and many bacteria, which they need in order to synthesise a class of amino acids (aromatic ones). If the plants cannot synthesise these amino acids, after a number of days they will die. Animals do not have this enzyme. Instead, we rely entirely on our diet to provide us with these aromatic amino acids (Trypthophan and Phenylalanine – and Tyrosine, also an aromatic, can be synthesized from Phenylalanine), which means that the inhibitory effect of glyphosate has no direct target in our cells.

But as you can see from above, there is a lot more to the discussions about glyphosate – in fact, conversations on the topic often sprawl into so many directions at once that it can be confusing and exhausting for anyone to try to make sense of them. Which directions may warrant real concern and which not? The general impression left may be a vague feeling of unease. If there are so many questions, surely there must be something problematic with glyphosate? Should we use it at all? EU is currently in the process of determining this very question, and according to the vice chair of EU’s environmental committee, their hesitancy is influenced by the vocal campaigns of activist organisations like Avaaz who are calling the reliability of research into question. So instead of another 15 year renewal, glyphosate has been given an 18 month continued allowance period while European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) comes to a conclusion, expected in December 2017.

But there are several comprehensive literature reviews in scientific publications, and other scientific bodies in Europe and elsewhere in the world who have already concluded comprehensive reviews on glyphosate research that can give us a good idea about the topic. Let’s start looking at them, starting with:

We should always strive to honestly evaluate the evidence before forming our views on a topic.

Note: I previously had all the articles in this series both here as one huge piece, and broken down into sections. However, I like to update my pieces when new information comes up, and it was more practical to update each piece separately, and I decided to remove the gigantic version, and leave only the introduction here with links to each sub-article.

If you are interested in other environmental or health topics, you can find my other pieces and further resources under Farming and GMOs, The Environment, and Vaccines and Health. If you would like to have a discussion in the comments below, please take note of my Commenting policy. In a nutshell:

Be respectful. Back up your claims with evidence.