By Isabelle Z. for Natural News
How much Roundup have you consumed this week? This question might sound like a joke, but the amount of the toxic weed killer that people consume unwittingly is certainly no laughing matter.
Most people have no idea just how widely used this chemical is. Now that Monsanto has genetically engineered crops to stand up to heavy doses of the chemical, it’s being sprayed on more food crops than ever. It is then taken up into the plants that we eat – as do the farm animals that we often end up eating as well.
According to a study by Norwegian scientists, American soy crops contain excessive glyphosate levels inside the food crop. In fact, the levels they found were “extreme” even by Monsanto’s own standards, which they defined as 5.6 milligrams for each kilogram of plant weight; the levels found in the study were 9 milligrams per kilo on average.
This might be enough to send you scrambling in the opposite direction of tofu, but even if you don’t happen to eat it, you’re not out of the woods. That’s because GE soy and corn – two more crops that are often engineered to be Roundup-ready – are in the ingredients lists of many processed foods, hiding under terms like lecithin, mono-diglyceride, textured vegetable protein, and soya, to name a few.
In fact, a report from the Environmental Working Group found that 26 out of the 28 common breakfast foods they tested contained higher levels of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, than they consider safe for children. The foods involved will be all too familiar to most American households, including cereals, oat products, and snack bars from popular brands like Cheerios and Quaker.