Glyphosate weedkiller found in seven famous Italian spaghetti brands

Laboratory tests have detected glyphosate, the main ingredient in Bayer’s Roundup herbicide, in seven brands of Italian spaghetti, according to the Italian food industry website il Salvagente.

Tests were conducted on 20 brands of spaghetti and traces of glyphosate were found in seven of them. The brands testing positive were Divella, Esselunga, Eurospin, Garofalo, Lidl, Rummo, and Agnesi. All the brands except Agnesi were made with wheat from outside of Italy, most likely from Canada.

Italy imports 2.42 billion pounds of durum wheat from Canada each year.

Canadian farmers are known to spray glyphosate on their wheat crop just before harvest to dry it down more uniformly for better harvesting. But the pre-harvest glyphosate practice is known to significantly increase glyphosate residues in foods made with wheat.

Agnesi brand spaghetti also tested positive for traces of glyphosate even though it is made with wheat grown in Italy.

In 2018, Italy reduced its durum wheat imports from Canada to 2.2 million pounds due to concerns about glyphosate but has since increased that to more than 2 billon pounds.

Canada’s largest agribusiness, Richardson International, announced earlier this year that it would no longer accept oats that had been sprayed with glyphosate before harvest.

There are increasing concerns about glyphosate’s negative impacts on human health. The International Agency for Research on Cancer has classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen, and the weedkiller’s manufacturer Monsanto, now Bayer, has lost several lawsuits to people who claim that Roundup caused their cancers.

A recent study by researchers at the University of Turku in Finland and published in the journal ScienceDaily found that 54% of human intestinal bacterial species are potentially sensitive to even small amounts of glyphosate. This means that the herbicide’s effect on the human microbiome with its hundreds of species of bacteria could have grave repercussions for health.

Source: il Salvagente

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https://ilsalvagente.it/2020/11/27/glyfosate-spaghetti-in-italy-7-brands-contaminated/