A shocking new study published in Toxicology Reports has shown that the current regulatory assessments of the world’s most used herbicides are wrong, with ingredients such as arsenic being regularly found in Glyphosate based herbicides and other pesticides at toxic levels.

Glyphosate’s toxicity is currently being debated at an international level by regulatory and health authorities, but other formulants in Glyphosate-based herbicides (such as Monsanto’s Roundup), are rarely considered. The formulants used with glyphosate are declared as inert and confidential by the pesticide industry.

Prof. Gilles-Eric Séralini from the University of Caen Normandy, France, and his colleagues Dr. Nicolas Defarge and Dr. Joël Spiroux, have discovered several new findings which crush the pesticide industry’s claim that the ‘inert’ ingredients in glyphosate-based herbicides do not need regulating:

– Glyphosate-based herbicides are shown to contain heavy metals such as arsenic. These are not declared and are normally banned due to their toxicity.

– Tested on plants, herbicide formulants such as POEA are toxic in isolation, while glyphosate alone is not toxic to plants at normal agricultural levels, but apparently only at higher levels.

– Tested on human cells, formulants composed of petroleum residues have a more endocrine disruptive effect and are more toxic than glyphosate.

The comparative effects of glyphosate alone and 14 of its formulations were studied by Seralini’s team. Glyphosate was clearly shown to not be the major toxic compound in the herbicide formulations – Petroleum-based compounds in the herbicide formulations were more toxic than glyphosate.