We appear to need another reminder of the point Paracelsus made: It’s the dose which is the poison. Acceptance of this will aid in grasping the importance of what we’re being told by U.S. Public Interest Research Group, that there’s glyphosate in our beer and wine. That importance being none, given that the levels found are what we’d technically call “nothing.”
Perhaps it’s my own professional background in rare earths and weird metals that makes it so obvious to me, but everything is made up of everything else. There’s always some level of contamination regardless of what we try to do to get rid of it. We’d prefer, for example, not to have uranium or thorium in our light bulbs as they’re radioactive. But we actually stop worrying when we get below levels of 1 ppm, or one part per million. There are only 92 natural elements after all, and everything is made up of them. At some point, that residual is just to be shrugged off.
So, this weedkiller, glyphosate, has been found in our beer and wine? Sure it has. PIRG is entirely correct that it’s there. But that’s not what matters. What does matter is “How much?” Or even “How much!” The answer is what we’d generally call nothing.
The highest level is in a certain wine brand at 51 ppb, or parts per billion. We want to know whether that’s a lot or not. The EPA does have standards for how much glyphosate is allowable in drinking water, 0.7 mg/L. That’s 0.7 ppm. (This site is useful to convert the different units used.) To get to the same units, the EPA says 700 ppb is the top amount that’s okay. We’ve got a finding of 51 ppb in the wine. So that means the most contaminated wine has 1/14 of the highest acceptable amount.
We need to go further, however, into how the EPA sets such limits. Roughly, rule of thumb time, the practice is to work out what level isn’t going to cause any problems at all, and then take 1/100 of that. That is, we think that 70 ppm glyphosate in drinking water is safe. Our limit is going to be 1/100 of that. We’re finding 1/14 of that in wine, so we’re at 1/1,400 of what we know to be safe anyway. Or, as we might put this keeping Paracelsus in mind, nothing.
Note that all of this is before we do the important set of calculations. Glyphosate has uses obviously enough, for people do use it. Killing off those weeds makes the food we eat cheaper, thus we eat better. What’s the health effect of a better diet? Furthermore, 99.9 percent of the pesticides in our diet are naturally made by the plants themselves to fend off their own predators. Nicotine is the tobacco plant’s method of stopping insects eating it. Capiscum is the pepper’s defense against mammals. The net effect of glyphosate is almost certainly positive, that diet effect, and it’s entirely trivial compared to our pesticide exposure anyway.
Paracelsus was in fact correct. It is the dose which is the poison. We all know the importance of being well-hydrated these days, but dihydrogen monoxide does indeed kill 3,500 people a year.
The levels of glyphosate in booze is best described as nothing. Terrifying, isn’t it?
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at The Continental Telegraph.
