Dr. Weeks Comment: In 1970 Robert E. Franz did something which I believe history will judge to rank up there with detonating nuclear bombs as regards damaging life on earth: he patented glyphosate as a weed killer while working for Monsanto. The claim was that glyphosate (the active ingredient in RoundUp) was harmless to animals and humans because it only killed plants. The problem? Any high school biology student knows that we humans are host to beneficial flora (plants) in our gastrointestinal micro biome and that we owe our health and wellbeing to the symbiotic relationship with have with these plants within. (Note: there are 10x more plant organisms within us than us- meaning that if we separated all our DNA from the DNA of plants within, there are 10X more of them then us!) So Monsanto SHOULD HAVE known that glyphosate would be toxic to humans because it kills our life-supporting plants within. According to Stephanie Seneff, the brilliant MIT senior scientist,glyphosate had initially been used as “a pipe cleaner due to its uncanny ability to strip metal off of metal pipes”. Thanks to many concerned citizens, Monsanto has been pressured to stop offering the toxic glyphosate and its new RoundUp has …. vinegar instead!
Monsanto’s new ‘glyphosate-free’ Roundup is vinegar!
Claire Robinson / GMWatch
8th May 2017
Has Monsanto, dubbed the ‘world’s most evil corporation’, turned a new leaf? It has taken the ‘probably carcinogenic’ glyphosate out of a new version of its market leading ‘Roundup’ herbicide, and replaced it with vinegar. The bad news is it’s only available in Austria. That, and it may still contain toxic ‘adjuvants’ to increase its effectiveness.
It’s a victory for Monsanto because now it has a product that doesn’t cause harm and a victory for people and the environment. Glyphosate-free Roundup is a product whose time has come.
A new type of Roundup is on sale in Austrian garden centres. It’s the same old bottle with the same familiar brand name and is marketed by Scotts, under licence from Monsanto.
The only difference compared with the old-style Roundup is that the new one has a prominent label on the front saying it’s formulated “without glyphosate” (“ohne Glyphosat” in German).
On the back, on the ingredients label, the ‘active substance’ is defined as none other than vinegar: ‘Essigsäure’.
The new product was bought by Dr Helmut Burtscher, a biochemist who works for the Vienna-based NGO GLOBAL 2000, (the Austrian affiliate to Friends of the Earth International) in a garden centre in Vienna.
He learned of the glyphosate-free Roundup in a brochure sent to his house advertising new products. His reaction? “I laughed – but then I went quickly to the store to see if it was really true or a joke. It was real.”
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