If glyphosate is so minimal on Gmo crops, why does my daughter only exhibit trichotillomania rips the eye lashes and eyebrow hair our of her face when she eats crops that are GMO or grains such as wheat or oats where glyphosate was used as a dessicant? Glyphosate has real health consequences, and my daughter has struggled with trichotillomania for years now due to glyphosate.

Expert response from Dan Goldstein

Former Senior Science Fellow and Lead, Medical Sciences and Outreach, Monsanto Company

Tuesday, 19/04/2016 14:17

I am a physician who has worked on the safety of glyphosate since joining Monsanto 17 years ago. Without a full medical history, it would be inappropriate for me to offer any personal medical opinion or recommendation for treatment. I will come back to your specific question but first I want to address your concern about health consequences of glyphosate.

Glyphosate-based herbicides are backed by one of the most extensive worldwide safety and environmental databases ever complied for a chemical product. Over the past 40 years, glyphosate has been repeatedly tested for safety in animals, thoroughly reviewed by regulatory agencies around the world and periodically re-assessed for safety as required as a condition of registration in most countries.

In the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has established an Acceptable Daily Intake (ADI) based on animal toxicity studies including short term, long term, reproductive and cancer assessments. The EPA sets the ADI a minimum of 100-times lower than the highest tested dose producing no adverse effects in test animals. For more information on ADI including recent risk assessments conducted by the EPA for glyphosate exposures, please review the response from David Saltmiras- Toxicologist for Monsanto Company.

The U.S. EPA also sets strict thresholds for residues of pesticides that may occur in food and feed, including glyphosate. The use of every herbicide on food crops in the U.S. is considered and evaluated by the EPA against a standard of reasonable certainty that the use would cause no harm to human health or the environment, and total food exposures (estimated based on maximum allowable values and liberal consumption estimates and/or measured residues) must be comfortably below the ADI. U.S. estimates suggest that intake is less than 1/5 (20 percent) of the ADI as a worst-case estimate, and bio-monitoring data suggests that actual exposure is far below this value.

Returning to your specific question, I can tell you that, while the relationship between food allergy (hypersensitivity) and trichotillomania (habitual manipulation of hair) is not well proven, there are case reports and claims of trichotillomania in relationship to various foods, including grains and sometimes said to be related to gluten sensitivity. In contrast, there is no documented evidence of an allergic response to glyphosate at any level. Glyphosate is a relatively small molecule, is not chemically reactive in the body (it is excreted almost entirely in unchanged form in urine), and does not produce allergic responses in animals, making such an allergic response quite unlikely. No documented cases of trichotillomania exist related to glyphosate either in foods or in products, and a relationship to glyphosate would thus seem quite unlikely. In contrast, sensitivity to the underlying foodstuffs would appear to be a well-established phenomenon and at least a plausible trigger for trichotillomania.

You also asked about glyphosate use as a desiccant. This is actually quite infrequent. The National Association of Wheat Growers did a whole series of blog posts addressing how wheat growers use glyphosate:

The Truth About Glyphosate, Part 1: How Do Wheat Growers Use Glyphosate?

The Truth About Glyphosate, Part 2: Growing a Quality Wheat Crop with Glyphosate

The Truth About Glyphosate, Part 3: How does USDA collect farm data?

The Truth About Glyphosate, Part 4: Why does USDA collect farm data?

The Truth About Glyphosate, Part 5: Glyphosate Use in Wheat – A Recap