Science Facts & Fallacies

Despite the endless stream of dramatic headlines and warnings from environmental activist groups, an overwhelming number of studies indicate that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Bayer's herbicide Roundup, probably doesn't cause cancer. This body of consensus science includes hundreds of independent papers and dozens of safety assessments conducted by 15 regulatory agencies worldwide. So comprehensive is this research, according to cancer epidemiologist Geoffrey Kabat, scientists are running out of ways to confirm the relative safety of glyphosate.

But several experiments conducted in recent years have challenged the mainstream view on Roundup safety, indicating that the controversial weed killer may increase your risk for certain cancers. A study published in July 2019 offers a typical example. The researchers exposed mutant lab mice to glyphosate for up to 72 weeks and reported at the end of their study:

These data support glyphosate as an environmental risk factor for [multiple myeloma] MM and potentially [non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma] NHL and implicate a mechanism underlying the B cell-specificity of glyphosate-induced carcinogenesis observed epidemiologically.

The research was promoted by anti-GMO activists, including Gary Ruskin, co-founder of U.S. Right to Know. The organic industry-funded outfit has played a pivotal role in the ongoing glyphosate-cancer lawsuits against Bayer, supplying evidence to the plaintiffs and providing favorable PR for every case that goes to trial.

There was nothing inherently wrong with the research, but Ruskin failed to mention dozens of serious limitations in the study. For example, mice were given massive doses of glyphosate—enough weed killer to treat 31 square meters of farmland—for a year and a half. This is, needless to say, far more herbicide than any animal or human is actually exposed to in the real world. The study authors acknowledged this in their paper, noting that "an individual would unlikely consume such an excessive dose of glyphosate ...." They nonetheless concluded that "the [acceptable daily intake] for glyphosate should be reassessed ...."

But feeding mice enormous amounts of weed killer was just one of several important issues with this research that need to be addressed. University of Florida plant geneticist Kevin Folta joins GLP editor Cameron English to take a detailed look at the study. What did the researchers really find, and how should we interpret their results? Folta's analysis underscores the importance of approaching news reports and scientific research skeptically, carefully examining the evidence before jumping to conclusions.

Kevin M. Folta is a professor in the Horticultural Sciences Department at the University of Florida. Follow professor Folta on Twitter @kevinfolta and email your questions to kfolta@ufl.

There's nothing quite like a hangover. After a few too many drinks and a night of restless sleep, you wake up with an upset stomach, pounding headache, sore muscles and the desire to do nothing but sit on your couch and sip Gatorade. Most of us are very familiar with the next-day effects of consuming alcohol, but genetic engineering may have finally made them more tolerable.

Zack Abbott

California-based biotech startup ZBiotics has developed a probiotic it claims can help your body more efficiently metabolize alcohol, possibly preventing hangovers—or at least making them a little less miserable. The shot-size drink contains genetically engineered bacteria that break down acetaldehyde, the chemical byproduct of alcohol metabolism responsible for the unpleasant side effects. ZBiotics says its product is FDA-compliant and has submitted a safety study to the Journal of Toxicology, which is available online for free.

The probiotic is an interesting development in its own right, but company founder and microbiologist Zack Abbott says ZBiotics wants to do more than prevent hangovers. Genetic engineering gets a bad rap, Abbott argues, and his startup wants to offer products that ease the public's deep-seated but inconsistent fear of biotechnology by solving practical problems.

Although the public remains highly skeptical of GMO and gene-edited crops and animals, research shows that consumer concern about genetic engineering in medicine is almost nonexistent. The benefits of biotech cancer treatments, insulin and vaccines are obvious to people who need them and outweigh whatever concerns people may have about the technology that made those treatments possible. Therein lies an opportunity to upend the ferocious battle over GMOs that's raged for almost 30 years, Abbott says:

Genetic engineering has given us incredible things .... But this technology remains difficult to understand outside of big corporations and university labs. The result? People have come to question the good this technology can do for the world. ‍We’re out to change that. Genetic engineering is our means to create products that improve your life.

On this episode of Biotech Facts and Fallacies, Abbott joins GLP editor Cameron English to discuss the science behind his company's first product and his goal to elevate the conversation about genetic engineering.

Zack Abbott is the founder and CEO of ZBiotics. He holds a PhD in microbiology and immunology from the University of Michigan. Follow ZBiotics on Twitter @ZBioticsCompany

Cameron J. English is the GLP’s senior agricultural genetics and special projects editor. He co-hosts the Biotech Facts and Fallacies podcast. Follow him on Twitter @camjenglish

When Europeans began to colonize North America 400 plus years ago, they brought along the crops they knew how to grow so they could have food – things like wheat, barley, apples, and grapes. Some did well in the New World, but others didn’t. Wheat did great in the Northern Colonies, but poorly in the South because of a fungal “rust” disease favored by the wetter, warmer weather there. The winters in the North were too cold for one of Europe's favorite crops – grapes. When the settlers tried to grow grapes in the South they would grow for a while, but then mysteriously die after a few years.

These unexplained grape deaths were due to an alarming new disease that arose in the 1800s, and it took a long time for scientists to track down the culprit. For decades, the “murderer” couldn’t be identified.

Who among us doesn’t love a good mystery? A whiff of danger and a few threads of misdirection leaves one wondering how the detectives will crack the case! On this episode of Biotech Facts and Fallacies, plant pathologist Steve Savage discusses a murder mystery that nearly went cold: the case of a disease afflicting grapes in the 19th century, and the research conducted by key “detectives” who finally brought the disease under control.

Full show transcript available here.

Steve Savage is a plant pathologist and senior contributor to the GLP. Follow him on Twitter @grapedoc. The Pop Agriculture podcast is available for listening or subscription on iTunes and Google Podcasts.

Plant-based burgers have exploded in popularity over the last three years. Dozens of fast food restaurants and grocery stores around the US already offer these meat alternatives, and more are slated to hit the market in fall 2019. Because they so closely mimic the flavor and texture of ground beef and appear to exact a less severe environmental impact than animal agriculture, these products are poised to become a significant part of the American diet. But Impossible and Beyond burgers, the two most popular versions of plant-based meat, have drawn harsh criticism from anti-GMO activists, "foodies" and meat producers, who view "fake meat" as a serious threat to their interests.

Led by luminaries like ex-New York Times columnist Mark Bittman, "natural food" advocates have blasted Impossible and Beyond as "ultra processed," and thus unhealthy. Typically harsh critics of each other, GMO opponents and meat producers have attacked the Impossible Burger because it contains "unknown" proteins that could pose a risk to human health. Moms Across America and other activist groups have also raised concerns about exposure to the weed killer glyphosate, since Impossible's key ingredient is derived from herbicide-resistant soy.

Breakthrough Institute deputy director Alex Trembath finds these complaints underwhelming. He argues that opposition to plant-based meat has no scientific basis and is rooted instead in food snobbery and distrust of corporations, with the meat industry tagging along to protect its economic interests. Critics, Trembath says, see plant-based meat as an impediment to remaking the entire food system:

I can’t help but notice that when fake meat was the purview of food utopians and visionary chefs, thought leaders were enthusiastically in favor of it. But as soon as fake meat hit the plastic trays at Burger King, they were fretting about how over-processed it was ....

If we can simply replace livestock production and its heavy environmental footprint with a technological alternative .... then all sorts of critiques of the system collapse .... Representatives from both the factory farming and organic beef sectors also .... fall back in some way on .... the idea that unprocessed, or unmodified, or pasture-raised (or not) are the more natural form of beef production and therefore the superior one. (That and, presumably, because it stands to eat away at their market share over time.)

On this episode of Biotech Facts and Fallacies, Trembath joins GLP editor Cameron English to examine the case against so-called "fake meat," challenging critics to be honest about their motivations and offer a more substantive analysis of the nutritional and environmental impacts of these products.

Alex Trembath is Deputy Director at the Breakthrough Institute, a California-based think tank advancing technological solutions to environmental challenges.

Few people would object to the government financing children's health research. But how would taxpayers feel if they were funding organic food activism masquerading as children's health research? The question is worth asking because that's been happening for almost two decades. Since the 1990s, children's health research centers at major universities have used millions of federal dollars to fund questionable studies on chemical safety and organic food that have little to do with children's health. Environmental activist nonprofits then utilize this research to lobby for bans on the studied chemicals and sow doubt about the safety of America's food supply.

This arrangement went mostly unnoticed until the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced it would cut its half of the funding to these centers, with the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) continuing to provide the other half. EPA's decision didn't sit well with the Environmental Working Group (EWG), one of the "partner organizations" that utilizes the questionable research to advance its anti-chemical lobbying. "The Environmental Protection Agency is cutting off its funding of a network of research centers that focus on the risks to children from toxic chemicals and industrial pollution," EWG complained in May. ".... [T]he cuts will endanger important studies underway at 13 colleges and universities from California to New Hampshire."

Angela Logomasini

Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) scholar Angela Logomansini examined the situation in a three-part article series. Among the many odd programs subsidized by EPA and NIEHS, she found an Emory University-sponsored campaign encouraging pregnant women to take up organic farming:

For example, eating organic food is touted among stakeholders as a way to reduce health risks, despite the fact that there’s no reason to believe that organic food is healthier than other produce. The video even features a stakeholder who trains people how to farm organically in urban settings .... Is the center actually suggesting that it’s more convenient and healthful for pregnant women to set up their own urban farms rather than take a bus to a grocery store?

But the situation gets even stranger. The EPA, for example, is currently battling an activist-proposed ban of the insecticide chlorpyrifos in federal court. The research being used to justify the ban, which the federal agency's scientific advisory panel rejected as inadequate in July 2016, was conducted at Columbia University’s Center for Children’s Environmental Health—and funded by the EPA. This prompts an obvious question: why would the regulatory agency fund research it's now challenging in court? Logomasini joins GLP editor Cameron English on this episode of Biotech Facts and Fallacies to explain the origins of these research grants—and how they're often used to inspire unnecessary fear of important technologies.

Angela Logomasini is a senior fellow at CEI.

Thanks to dramatic advances in technology, less than 2 percent of the US population works in agriculture today, growing the food the other 98 percent depend on. Such a highly productive farm sector plays an important role in maintaining America's status as an economic powerhouse, but it's had a less desirable impact as well: Most consumers don't know the first thing about farming.

This knowledge deficit has created an environment in which misinformation about biotechnology, pesticides and animal welfare spreads unabated. A recent study found, for example, that consumers with the poorest understanding of genetic engineering are the most hostile to the technology. As the study authors noted:

Our findings highlight a difficulty that is not generally appreciated. Those with the strongest anti-consensus views are the most in need of education, but also the least likely to be receptive to learning; overconfidence about one’s knowledge is associated with decreased openness to new information. This suggests that a prerequisite to changing people’s views through education may be getting them to first appreciate the gaps in their knowledge.

Under such circumstances, persistent myths about agriculture just won't go away, no matter how many times they're debunked by experts, including farmers themselves. The introduction of the herbicide glyphosate in the 1970s, for instance, greatly reduced farmers' exposure to harmful chemicals, but we continue to see questionable news coverage regarding glyphosate's cancer risks. We also see continued coverage challenging whether so-called "factory farming" is harmful to our food supply, despite overwhelming evidence that farmers are keeping livestock healthy and productive.

The public's ignorance of agriculture, if not addressed, could become an even greater problem. As the world's population explodes and farmers scramble to meet the resulting boom in food demand, they'll need the help of technologies including gene editing, robotics and artificial intelligence. These modern tools have already begun to make a positive impact in agriculture, but as they grow more powerful, regulators will need guidance from informed consumers to help ensure that these important innovations are put to use as efficiently as possible, says Robert Saik, author of the new book Food 5.0: How We Feed the Future.

The US has gotten fat. Since 1980, obesity in the US has climbed from a manageable 11 percent to somewhere between 30-40 percent. So-called lifestyle diseases such as type 2 diabetes have followed a similar trend, according to the US Centers for Disease Control.

Americans know they have a weight problem, too. Each year, consumers spend $33 billion on weight loss products and 45 million people go on diets — most of whom fail to keep the extra pounds off long term. The problem is compounded by ever-changing nutrition guidelines and unsustainable fad diets pushed by TV personalities, movie stars and internet health gurus — most unqualified to offer weight loss advice.

What can be done about this pressing public health issue? Among the proposed solutions, medical devices powered by artificial intelligence could help overweight and obese people customize diets based on their biomarkers. Biomarkers — measurements including blood sugar, cholesterol and blood pressure — are metrics that  help doctors evaluate a patient's risk of developing a disease and devising proper medical treatment.

Richard Williams

Some companies already provide consumers with biomarker-based nutrition advice. San Francisco-based startup Habit offers a subscription-service that analyzes how people respond to carbohydrates, fat and protein and creates a diet suited to their needs. As our understanding of the human genome and individual physiological response to different nutrients improves, AI-powered devices could offer increasingly customized data based on an individual's unique genetic makeup.

Mass collection of genetic data and the advance of artificial intelligence raises understandable privacy concerns among consumer advocates and regulators. As a result, stringent oversight from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is one of the primary roadblocks to getting more personalized nutrition devices on the market. On this episode of Biotech Facts and Fallacies, economist Richard Williams joins GLP editor Cameron English to discuss the future of these AI-powered devices as one possible solution to the obesity epidemic.

Richard A. Williams, PhD, is an economist and author. He served as the Chief Social Scientist at the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition for 27 years. Visit his website and follow him on LinkedIn

Cameron J. English is the GLP’s senior agricultural genetics and special projects editor. He co-hosts the Biotech Facts and Fallacies podcast. Follow him on Twitter @camjenglish

We're often told raising animals for food takes a devastating toll on the environment, consuming ever more natural resources, hastening climate change and turning increasing amounts of land around the world into desert. According to the filmmakers behind the blockbuster documentary Cowspiracy:

Many organizations are studying humanity’s effect on soil degradation, erosion, and eventual desertification but not willing to emphasize the final connection of dots to animal agriculture. According to the UNCCD (United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification), nearly 20 million acres of arable land is lost each year

Among the primary causes, the filmmakers claim, are "deforestation due to cultivation of crops and pasture" and overgrazing from livestock (“eating away grasses and eroding topsoil with hooves”).

This is a compelling, even horrifying, story. But according to food and agriculture analysts at the Breakthrough Institute, the situation may not be so bleak. As animal agriculture grows more intensive, the amount of land it requires shrinks—as does its overall environmental impact. In a June report titled Achieving Peak Pasture: Shrinking Pasture's Footprint by Spreading the Livestock Revolution, Breakthrough scholars Dan Rejto, Linus Blomqvist and James McNamara lay out their counterintuitive argument:

In the past 20 years .... something remarkable has occurred, something that few predicted: global pasture has begun to decline. According to data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, there are 140 million fewer hectares of pasture today than there were in 2000, an area roughly the size of Peru.

Dan Rejto

Going back to the 1700s, global pasture expansion for animal agriculture yielded "severe environmental consequences," Rejto explains on this episode of Biotech Facts and Fallacies. But a combination of better feed, optimized breeds, and improved animal health has dramatically boosted meat and milk production in the developed world, ushering in a "livestock revolution."

While this is a development worth celebrating, we still have a ways to go, Rejto says. The key to advancing this downward trend in land use is to spread these sustainable practices to the developing world, especially sub-Saharan Africa.

Rejto also addresses important developments including CRISPR gene editing, the plant-based GMO Impossible burger and social movements to cut animal consumption and food waste.

Dan Blaustein-Rejto is a Senior Food and Agriculture Analyst at Breakthrough. Follow him on Twitter @danrejto

Cameron J. English is the GLP’s senior agricultural genetics and special projects editor. He co-hosts the Biotech Facts and Fallacies podcast. Follow him on Twitter @camjenglish

Is farming for the aging? While Paul McCartney ponders, “Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m 64?” plant pathologist Steve Savage wonders who will farm now that 62% of U.S. farmers are at retirement age.

Today, particularly in affluent societies like ours, only a small subset of the population is required to do the actual farming needed to feed the rest of us. We recently got to see a profile of that small part of our society because in April of this year, the USDA published the 2017 Census of Agriculture—a detailed survey that is completed every five years. It includes key data that speaks to the question of who it is that will be feeding us.

As of 2017, there were 3.4 million total agricultural “producers” in the U.S. (that means people who are directly involved in making decisions on farms). As part of a theme that is consistent with earlier surveys, the age distribution of those producers is decidedly weighted towards older people. The average age of the producers in 2017 was 57.5 years, and that fits the somewhat concerning, long-term trend that our farmers are getting older.

Over the past 15 years, the proportion of young farmers (say under 35), has stayed virtually constant at just under 10 percent. The proportion of “middle aged” farmers has dropped steadily from 47 percent to 30 percent. It is the “55 and over” segment of farm operators that has increased 17 percent, rising from 45 percent in 2002 to 62 percent in 2017.

On this episode of Biotech Facts and Fallacies, Savage examines the barriers beginning farmers must overcome as well as the vast job opportunities available in agriculture today.

Full show transcript available here.

Steve Savage is a plant pathologist and senior contributor to the GLP. Follow him on Twitter @grapedoc. The Pop Agriculture podcast is available for listening or subscription on iTunes and Google Podcasts.

Mary Mangan. Image: Cornell Alliance for Science

In October 2018, former Reuters journalist and anti-GMO activist Carey Gillam spoke at a small church in Cambridge, Massachusetts as she toured the US promoting her book White Wash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer and the Corruption of Science. The book is an investigation into Monsanto's alleged efforts to hide evidence that its weed killer Roundup (glyphosate) causes cancer. It builds on four years of open records requests filed by U.S. Right to Know, the organic industry-funded nonprofit Gillam works for.

The audience that night was largely sympathetic to Gillam's thesis—except for one attendee, cell biologist and science writer Mary Mangan. Mangan wrote a scolding review of the book—Hogwash! A review of Whitewash by Carey Gillam—but offered the author and her publisher a chance to answer 10 questions before releasing the review, which they refused to do. Knowing that Gillam had ignored evidence that refuted her arguments, Mangan decided to ask Gillam the questions in person [watch a video of their exchange here].

On this episode of Biotech Facts and Fallacies, Mangan joins GLP editor Cameron English to discuss the interaction with Gillam and her unique approach to spreading science literacy on Twitter, through animated videos and evidence-based articles aimed at a popular audience. Contrary to the psychological research suggesting that evidence doesn't matter to consumers, facts can change people's opinions on controversial science topics, Mangan says. The key is to adapt to your audience and present the science in a compelling manner.

Mangan also tackles recent biotech controversies, including overheated fears of the Impossible burger, produced with genetically engineered yeast, and Facebook's recent decision to ban infamous anti-GMO activist Mike "the Health Ranger" Adams, who once compared Monsanto to the Nazi regime and promoted "juice detoxification" as a cancer prevention strategy. While Americans view freedom of speech as an inalienable right, does that constitutional protection extend to demonstrably false health claims that can kill people?

Mary Mangan holds a PhD in cell, molecular, and developmental biology from the University of Rochester. She co-founded OpenHelix, a company that provides awareness and training on open source genomics software tools. Follow her on Twitter @mem_somerville

Cameron J.