For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s Genetic Engineering page and our Millions Against Monsanto page.

If Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide were actually ‘safer than table salt’ as they once advertised, the consumption of GM food wouldn’t be nearly as controversial. The truth, however, is that virtually all GM food today contains residues of this toxic chemical, which disproves that GM and non-GM foods are ‘substantially equivalent,” which is the primary doctrinal justification behind why GM foods are not properly safety tested and millions in this country eating them are living and breathing guinea pigs.

There was a time when Monsanto claimed their patented herbicide Roundup was “safer than table salt” and “practically nontoxic,”  and aggressively marketed this message until 1996, when they were ordered by Dennis C. Vacco, the Attorney General of New York, to pull the ads.[1]

Fast forward 15 years, after millions of farmers around the world bought into the false advertising and who, as a result, are now driving the production and use of several hundred million pounds of the chemical annually, Roundup herbicide is beginning to look eerily like Monsanto’s Agent Orange 2.0.

Indeed, within the scientific community and educated public alike, there is a growing awareness that Roundup herbicide, and its primary ingredient glyphosate, is actually a broad spectrum biocide, in the etymological sense of the word: “bio” (life) and “cide” (kill) – that is, it broadly, without discrimination kills living things, not just plants.  Moreover, it does not rapidly biodegrade as widely claimed, and exceedingly small amounts of this chemical – in concentration ranges found in recently sampled rain, air, groundwater, and human urine samples – have DNA-damaging and cancer cell proliferation stimulating effects.

You don’t have to look very far to find research documenting its extreme and wide-ranging  toxicity.  Anyone with a smart phone can now access the accumulating body of experimental and epidemiological research freely available on the National Library of Medicine’s citation database MEDLINE, proving that glyphosate-based agrichemicals have been linked to over 40 health conditions, from Parkinson’s to Leukemia, and over two dozen modes of toxicity, from causing damage to the DNA to disrupting hormone receptors, from suppressing the immune system to damaging neurons. To view all 26 adverse physiological actions visit our open access, MEDLINE-derived Glyphosate Formulation research page.