The Environmental Working Group knows how to play the media like a goddamn piano. They take a category of healthy things we all use—sunscreen, makeup, vegetables, now cereal—and divide them into “safe” and “toxic” categories. You better know the difference, they imply.
Most recently they looked for glyphosate, a common weedkiller used in farming, in oat based cereals. They found only the tiniest traces, well under anybody’s safety benchmarks, so there’s really no story here. But with the right spin, the report—which is a press release, not peer-reviewed science—made headlines.
What did the EWG do?
The EWG had several oat products tested by an outside lab. To be clear, this is not a published, peer-reviewed scientific study. The EWG is an activist group with an axe to grind, and they set the terms of the study, commissioned it, and sent out press releases to drum up coverage.
The bottom line on the results: The numbers are well under government guidelines, so relax. Your cereal will not kill you. But there is more to the story.
What is glyphosate?
Glyphosate is a chemical that can kill plants, making it an herbicide and thus also a pesticide. It’s commonly used, and fortunately it’s one of the less toxic pesticides out there. It’s best known under the name Roundup, sold by the much-demonized corporation Monsanto. (Technically there is no Monsanto anymore; Bayer bought the company and stopped using its old name.)
“Roundup Ready” crops were among the first commercially successful GMOs, the pesticide is especially high-visibility. But neither GMOs nor Roundup are associated with any serious health risks.
In addition to killing weeds, glyphosate is often used to kill crops, including oats, to dry them out before harvest. That’s why tiny traces of it may end up in food.
Does glyphosate cause cancer?
Nobody knows, and it’s a controversial question. Famously, the International Agency for Research on Cancer decided that, based on research in animals, it “probably” can cause cancer. That puts it on the same naughty list as a bunch of nasty chemicals, but also hot coffee, red meat and working night shifts.
Even if we know something is linked to cancer, we have to consider the dose, and consider how risks relate to benefits. I know that alcohol can increase my risk of breast cancer, but I also like beer, so I drink it anyway. I eat burgers, too, but considering red meat’s link to cancer, I try to work in some less risky sources of protein as well.
So dose is important, and we’ll get to that in a minute. But it’s also important to ask whether the IARC made the right call in saying glyphosate probably causes cancer. They didn’t have much evidence to go on, and other groups have come to different conclusions.
The World Health Organization and the United Nations found glyphosate to not have a credible link to cancer, and so did the US EPA and a commission of the European Union.
Weed scientist Andrew Kniss collected studies on glyphosate and cancer into a handy graphic that shows just about as many found it decreased as increased rates of cancer. If we look at non-Hodgkin lymphoma, specifically, more studies support a risk than not, but there’s still enough doubt in the data that it’s hard to say for sure.
Does cereal contain a dangerous amount of glyphosate?
The Environmental Protection Agency allows no more than 30 parts per million of glyphosate on oats. The EWG found glyphosate levels ranging from undetectable to 1.3 parts per million. So far, so good, right?
But California has a different way of looking at it. The state has proposed a rule limiting glyphosate exposure to 1100 micrograms per person per day. This is a tiny, tiny, tiny amount, well under any amount that has been found to be risky even if you were to eat it daily. They call this the “no significant risk level” (NSRL). At this level, if glyphosate causes cancer, it wouldn’t be expected to cause more than 1 cancer per 100,000 people.
But the EWG didn’t use this level either. They divided California’s NSRL by 100 to represent a “one-in-a-million” standard with a “tenfold children’s health factor.” Then they asked the lab to test a bunch of oat products. Glyphosate is used more commonly on oats than on other grains, says EWG senior science advisor Olga Naidenko, so that’s why they chose to study oats.
At that level, which works out to 0.01 milligrams of glyphosate per person per day, some cereals passed the EWG’s test and some did not. So the EWG gets to send out a press release saying that they found weedkiller in your children’s cereal—technically true—and then you have to click over to their website to see which cereals passed and which failed—even though, by any measure other than EWG’s, they’re all fine.
We should all know better by now
We’ve seen the EWG’s shenanigans before. They love to put out press releases about how some of the products or foods out there are fine, and others are dangerous, and you need to know which are which. But every time, they carefully construct the tests or the ranking systems to come up with that result.
If the EWG had gone with California’s no significant risk level, they would have found that all the cereals were safe. On the other hand, if they had said that any glyphosate was unacceptable, they would have found that most cereals were supposedly dangerous.
When they do this with certain products, including cosmetics and sunscreens, you can browse the rankings on EWG’s website, and order products in a way that gives EWG a cut of the profits. Companies can also pay for an “EWG Verified” seal, giving the group a huge conflict of interest. Currently the seal is only for personal care products, and the company says they don’t currently have any plans to expand into the cereal market.
So it’s a biased study, by a group with a history of publicity stunts in this vein, and yet plenty of news outlets took the bait. Remember how I said the EWG knows how to play the media? They conveniently dropped their report just after a California man won a lawsuit about the chemical.
Dewayne Johnson got non-Hodgkin lymphoma after working a job as a groundskeeper where he often sprayed Roundup on weeds. California law allows citizens to sue companies over substances that are “known to the state of California to cause cancer,” which includes glyphosate. A jury had to come up with a verdict, and they decided that Johnson deserved $289 million. This doesn’t mean that scientists believe the chemical causes cancer—they disagree—just that a jury was convinced. So this doesn’t mean anything in terms of your child’s breakfast cereal, which is almost certainly fine, but it sure looks like the EWG is using a man’s cancer to drive clicks to their scientifically dubious report.