My name is Chris Meador and I'm the founder of Permasystems. I try to practice permaculture as much as I can and I try to eat as healthy as I can. After all, we are what we eat!
To me, eating healthy means getting food from happy and healthy sources, basically, as regenerative as possible. Sometimes I eat regenerative food and sometimes I don't. Although I wish I could have regenerative food all the time, the reality is that I'm just not there yet. The the important point for me is that I'm moving towards eating more and more happy healthy food - because even baby permaculture steps are awesome!
To me, eating healthy means getting food from happy and healthy sources, basically, as regenerative as possible. Sometimes I eat regenerative food and sometimes I don't. Although I wish I could have regenerative food all the time, the reality is that I'm just not there yet. The the important point for me is that I'm moving towards eating more and more happy healthy food - because even baby permaculture steps are awesome!
One of the big reasons I want to eat regeneratively grown food is to avoid ingesting poisons. Poisons are bad right? Unfortunately our mainstream food system uses tons of poisons to grow our food - from pesticides to rodenticides to fungicides to herbicides. In 2014, farmers sprayed enough glyphosate to apply 0.8 pound/acre on every hectare of U.S. cultivated cropland and 0.47 pounds/acre on all cropland worldwide.
For this post I want to focus on glyphosate, a type of herbicide, and an ingredient in Roundup and other products primarily used to kill plants. There is a lot of debate out there on whether or not certain amounts of glyphosate ingestion in humans is safe. There does seem to be a trend. Obviously the maker of glyphosate, Monsanto, says it is safe and they have funded many studies of it, but there seems to be an increase in the number of studies finding glyphosate is not safe, and even carcinogenic. Additionally, more governments throughout the world are beginning to place warning labels on glyphosate bottles or even restrict the protect and in some cases outright ban it.
For this post I want to focus on glyphosate, a type of herbicide, and an ingredient in Roundup and other products primarily used to kill plants. There is a lot of debate out there on whether or not certain amounts of glyphosate ingestion in humans is safe. There does seem to be a trend. Obviously the maker of glyphosate, Monsanto, says it is safe and they have funded many studies of it, but there seems to be an increase in the number of studies finding glyphosate is not safe, and even carcinogenic. Additionally, more governments throughout the world are beginning to place warning labels on glyphosate bottles or even restrict the protect and in some cases outright ban it.
To me it seems like there are some obvious dangers of putting glyphosate in my body so why not just avoid it, play it safe. After all, our modern civilization seems to unfortunately be really good at accepting things into our mainstream society without conducting the proper due diligence to see if they are safe. We do this over and over - like with cigarettes, DDT, agent orange or a host of other products/chemicals.
This is why I decided to test my own glyphosate levels. There have been a number of recent articles discussing the increasing levels of glyphosate found in people and the possible risks.
Time Magazine - time.com/4993877/weed-killer-roundup-levels-humans/
This is why I decided to test my own glyphosate levels. There have been a number of recent articles discussing the increasing levels of glyphosate found in people and the possible risks.
Time Magazine - time.com/4993877/weed-killer-roundup-levels-humans/
After doing some research I decided to use the Health Research Institute for my test. They utilize highly sensitive equipment and are conducting a large-scale study documenting glyphosate levels in people - I thought it would be good to add my data to their system. It was about $100 - pee in a cup and send it in.
Results
Results
Here is an information sheet that accompanied the results.
Unfortunately they did detect glyphosate metabolite in my sample, meaning there had been glyphosate in me. Although my levels are pretty low it is still quite shocking to see my levels as high as they are because I try to be quite conscious in what I eat. This will push me harder to only eat happy, healthy food grown regeneratively and grow more of my own. I look forward to reading further studies that objectively assess the risks of glyphosate and other poisons.
Even if we put aside the argument if glyphosate is safe for humans or not, the fact remains that the large-scale practice of using glyphosate in farming is completely unnecessary and degenerative. We'll talk about this subject in another blog post so stay tuned and hopefully stay away from poisons!
Even if we put aside the argument if glyphosate is safe for humans or not, the fact remains that the large-scale practice of using glyphosate in farming is completely unnecessary and degenerative. We'll talk about this subject in another blog post so stay tuned and hopefully stay away from poisons!
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