World News

You ever see an article about a "this changes everything" study but when you look at the study you start seeing all kinds of problems?

There is an untested assumption here. Just because glyphosate is present doesn't mean it's having an effect. That's like when we found aluminum plaques in Alzheimer's brains and assumed the aluminum was causing it.

I know that this article mentions new research showing DNA harm. This is counter to all previous studies so it will require a bit of replication to confirm that. The study they are depending on doesn't do a very good job showing it. The DNA damage they focused on was exclusively oxidative stress [OS] and at least twice that I saw they suggested looking to see if this could be counted with antioxidants. I expected it to be mentioned once because I had the same idea myself by the second time I had to fight the impulse to check and see if this was funded by Big Antioxidant.

Prior studies have shown that if you give super doses of GLY to sperm that it does effect motility for up to an hour, but a) this hasn't been shown in realistic dosages or in vivo. Just in vitro. b) hasn't shown to effect DNA. I don't think this study did a good enough job of countering the prior data. As can be seen in these key graphs below. c) they only tested for GLY. By not testing for anything else they get to attribute all variances to the one thing they tested for when it could have been something else. That alone should disqualify the study from being taken seriously without replication with better controls. This is exactly the kind of thing that gets weeded (no pun intended) out in replication and where Regression Towards the Mean rears its omnipresent head.

Only infertile couples were selected to be in this study. That creates a Texas Sharpshooter problem. There is no control group. Without s control you don't have a valid study.

The study found that eating an organic diet had no impact on GLY levels. That's worrying. Either their tests failed to find a difference, the study participants lied about their diet, or GLY is everywhere in the environment (both cities and farms). The study does not tell us how it was determined that the people included that only eat organic are, in fact, organic only eaters. It doesn't tell us if this was a check box or observation. If it was a checkbox what was the wording? Because self reporting and question design is important. "Do you eat only organic?" "Do you eat only certified organic?" "Have you had an diet that consist of only certified organic foods for at least 6 months?" Those are all going to give very different answers and because they didn't find any GLY variation between organic and non-organic diets the way they determined who had an organic and non-organic diet really matters.

There is definitely some shadiness going on with GLY. Bayer said that it was going to stop selling GLY to filthy casuals by January 2023. It is still very much for sale and shows no signs of going away.

Two asides.

1. according to this study being a smoker has a much larger impact than GLY. Given that a third of French people (all subjects in the study were French) smoke this seems like a much bigger concern than GLY.
2. The antinatalist in me is kinda fine with the whole situation because if it does actually reduce births then, sarcastically, this is a self limiting problem. Eventually there won't be enough people to mess things up and this is just a tool to get us there. The unspoken premise behind this study is that not having kids is bad.