No national health until we fix farming

Despite the multiple challenges facing Britain’s health service, Minister Wes Streeting seems determined to move it in the direction of disease prevention. If he’s serious, there’s one big step he and his government must take to slow the tsunami of degenerative disease that threatens to overwhelm the service. They need to slap a complete ban on use of the weedkiller glyphosate – Roundup – which we’re all exposed to in many everyday foods.

First introduced in the mid-1970s, glyphosate and glyphosate-containing weedkillers are the world’s most widely used pesticides. For decades their manufacturer, Monsanto (now Bayer), claimed they were harmless to humans. Suspicions of a possible public health risk surfaced in 2015 when the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified the compound as ‘a probable carcinogen’. Now a comprehensive study with laboratory rats confirms that it causes a range of cancers including leukaemia and cancers of the skin, thyroid, mammary gland, kidney, bladder and uterus.

Perhaps the most worrying finding is that the chemical causes cancers even at low dose rates, levels that used to be considered safe. In Britain and the EU the safe level is known as the ADI, the acceptable daily intake. The study shows there is no acceptable intake level. There’s no safe dose for this chemical, though it’s now so widely distributed in our foods and drinking water supplies many of us excrete the stuff daily in our urine.

The new research was part of a global study of glyphosate by the Ramazzini Institute in Bologna, Italy. On the multi-disciplinary team was Michael Antoniou, professor of molecular genetics and toxicology at King’s College, London. Commenting on the results, he called for an immediate ban on the chemical. At the very least, the permitted levels in foods should be dramatically reduced, perhaps by one hundred-fold or even one thousand-fold, he suggested. It was impossible to be precise because there was no known safe level.

While these findings alone should result in a ban, the chemical poses many other health risks. It’s known to damage the DNA in our chromosomes so the effects will extend to future generations. Glyphosate contamination leads, not only to cancer, but also to infertility, miscarriages, premature births and birth defects. The younger you are, the more at risk you are to these damaging effects. Most vulnerable of all are the foetus and baby.

After 50 years of the green revolution pesticides are everywhere in our environment, in our rivers and soils as well as in our food. The NGO Pesticide Action Network UK used the Government’s own figures to draw up a Top Twelve of the most toxic foods on sale in shops and supermarkets, the Dirty Dozen as they call it. These are the foods most likely to contain ‘pesticide cocktails’, residues of two or more poisons. Top of the 2023 list, the most recent to be published, were soft citrus fruits such as tangerines. A shocking 96 percent contained pesticide cocktails. Oranges came in second with 95 percent contaminated and lemons third at 89 percent. Lentils appeared mid-table with 63 percent of samples multi-contaminated, just above bread at 54 percent.

The pesticide contaminants included endocrine disruptors, which de-stabilise the body’s hormone systems; neurotoxins, which can interfere with and even paralyse nerve signalling; and out-and-out carcinogens, cancer-causing compounds. One sample of raspberries found in the Government survey contained one known carcinogen, one ‘probable carcinogen’, two ‘possible carcinogens’, two endocrine disruptors, one developmental toxin effecting sexual function and fertility, and one neurotoxin.

Over the years we’ve all come to think of agriculture as a great success story. Today farmers feed twice as many people as they did before World War Two. Never in the nation’s history has so much wheat poured into the grain silos; never have so many bulk milk tankers lumbered up and down the motorways delivering ‘the white stuff’ to processing dairies. Yet. amid all this plenty, we’re suffering ever more sickness. The conditions that afflict us today are not the infectious diseases of old – cholera, typhoid, diphtheria and the like. Instead, we’re succumbing to what the health experts call degenerative diseases resulting, not from invasion by pathogenic organisms, but from a collapse in the body’s own support systems.

The names of today’s illnesses have become frighteningly familiar: coronary heart disease, cancer, diabetes, arthritis, osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s, mental illness and depression. Hardly anyone in western society remains untouched by them. Half of us will develop cancer at some time in our lives, while one in three of us will have heart disease. Three million people in the UK now suffer from diabetes, mostly type 2 diabetes. Though it used to be mostly a disease of the elderly, it’s appearing regularly in young people, even children. Nearly a million people have dementia in Britain alone.

Ecological doctor Jenny Goodman believes these shocking statistics are not the inevitable results of ageing, as we’re often told. We’re not living significantly longer than previous generations, she says, we’re just living with more sickness, our final years becoming ‘a prolonged twilight of disability and suffering’. The sheer speed with which chronic degenerative diseases have increased, over just a few generations, suggests the causes are environmental rather than genetic.

The good news is we don’t have to put up with these hazardous toxins in our food. We in Britain can produce the food we need by chemical-free ecological methods, as we always used to. We’ve added pesticides to our daily substance intake only because, half a century ago, we chose to replace sustainable and diverse mixed farming with crop monoculture that depend on nitrogen fertiliser and pesticides. Or rather, governments decided on our behalf. Now it’s time we demanded they take them out.

We’ll never know how much misery, death and sickness will have been caused in the 50 years we’ve been spreading glyphosate across our fields. The one thing we can be sure of is there’ll be other catastrophes like this as we continue to pour our deadly chemical cocktail on our farmland. Farmers gain little or nothing from the system. They’re currently handing over much of the wealth of our countryside to a handful of global corporations. In doing so they’re putting their own health in jeopardy, too.

We have to end this crazy experiment in chemical food production and return to the tried and trusted methods of the nature. They’ll produce as much food as now, only it’ll contain more health-protecting nutrients without the toxic contaminants. Time to bang the table and shout. Real food, right now.

Notes

Panzacchi et al., ‘Carcinogenic effects of long-term exposure from prenatal life to glyphosate and glyphosate-based herbicides in Sprague-Dawley rats’, Environmental Health 2025. 24:36

Deepika Kubsad et al., ’Assessment of Glyphosate Induced Epigenetic Transgenerational Inheritance of Pathologies and Sperm Epimutations: Generational Toxicology’, Scientific Reports 9, 1 2019: 6372

Roy R. Gerona et al., ‘Glyphosate Exposure in Early Pregnancy and Reduced Fetal Growth: A Prospective Observational Study of High-Risk Pregnancies’, Environmental Health 21, 1. 2022: 95

PAN UK, Soil Association, The Cocktail Effect, 2019

Dr Goodman, Getting Healthy in Toxic Times, Chelsea Green, 2024. 14-16

Goodman, 2

Goodman, 2