"Is There Herbicide in Breast Milk?"

"A new study highlights a huge data gap: The U.S. has no ongoing monitoring of glyphosate in food or people."

"Last spring, an NGO called Moms Across America paid to have ten women’s breast milk tested for glyphosate, the United States’ most widely used weed-killer. According to Moms Across America founder and director Zen Honeycutt, the testing was not intended to be a scientific study, but rather a small, pilot effort undertaken in hopes of prompting further research.

Use of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, has ballooned in recent years and Moms Across America was concerned about a lack of data about its presence in the human body. From 1987 to 2012, U.S. farms went from using less than 11 million pounds a year to nearly 300 million pounds, thanks largely to the rapid adoption of corn and soybeans genetically engineered to withstand the chemical. So, said Honeycutt, “We citizens had to do something that government and manufacturers were not doing.”

Now, Washington State University assistant professor Michelle McGuire has said Moms Across America, whose testing found glyphosate in three of the ten women’s samples, “flat out got it wrong.” This conclusion came late last week when WSU announced that its reasearchers had conducted a study that found no glyphosate in any of the 41 women’s breast milk samples that McGuire tested. She and her colleagues went on to conclude that “our study provides strong evidence that glyphosate is not in human milk.” The study shows that “glyphosate, the main ingredient in the herbicide Roundup, does not accumulate in mother’s breast milk,” said WSU in its press release."

Elizabeth Grossman reports for Civil Eats July 30, 2015.