Sweet Turned Sour: Honey Turns Up With Deadly Toxin In Every Sample Tested By FDA

No Sugar Pie Honey Bunch: FDA Discovers Deadly Toxin Present In EVERY Honey Sample It Tested

You may have heard about the pervasive Chinese network of honey manufacturers using eastern European countries as fronts for shipping counterfeit and shoddy product into the United States undetected. Much of the sketchy honey from China also has been found to contain heavy metals, banned antibiotics and other adulterants.

But there’s even more bad news for honey lovers: it turns out that making sure to buy honey that it clearly labeled “Made in USA” might not be enough to keep the toxins at bay.

According to a recent study conducted by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the known carcinogen glyphosate has found its way into our domestic honey–and this is no small problem: the FDA found that every single honey sample they tested contained traces of glyphosate.

That would be 100 percent, for all you mathematicians out there.

So every single honey tested contained a weed killer that is not even used to produce honey–but which is, not incidentally, manufactured by bees. Those are the very same bees that suffered an alarming die-off last year, in which an estimated 44 percent of the animals disappeared in a phenomenon called “colony collapse.”

As many experts have been saying all along, the profligate use of neonicotinoids on U.S. genetically modified crops may well be the culprit–and now it looks like there’s proof.

Alarmingly, in some of the honey samples, the FDA found glyphosate levels that were double what is legally allowed in the European Union. (The U.S. Congress and regulatory structure hasn’t seen fit to establish a legal maximum level permitted.)

And what is particularly irksome about this whole thing is that the agency had to be pressured not only to release the relevant documents–they only became publicly available after Freedom of Information Act requests were filed with the FDA, the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Agriculture–but even to do the tests.

These records also reveal conversations among “residue experts” discussing glyphosate levels in soy and wheat crops, and stating at one point that there could be “…a lot of violation for glyphosate,” meaning that they feared the worst.

Yet, the FDA only undertook the testing in February of this year, largely as an apparent response to a burst of private testing by independent researchers. And while the government has held the Monsanto party line, asserting that any level of glyphosate found in foods like honey will by definition be well below anything that could possibly be harmful, critics point out that without testing, we can never know this.

What we do know about glyphosate is that we have used tons of it all across the U.S.–literally tons. And we know that the U.N. health watchdog has identified it as a probably carcinogen.

How long will our own government bow to the wishes of a corporation that is apparently intent on playing games with the health of its citizens? This testing should just be the beginning. The FDA, USDA and the CDC should ramp up a robust testing regimen on all our foods, as apparently nothing is safe from glyphosate’s tentacles.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carey-gillam/fda-finds-monsantos-weed_b_12008680.html