nbomb wrote:Wumpus wrote:nbomb wrote:Stephanie Seneff is 100% accurate about glyphosate.
What makes you so certain?
i've read your posts. You like to cherry pick the evidence and refute anything you disagree with. So i'm not going to waste my time.
Keep lsitening to the medical doctors with their fancy degrees. I'm sure they will lead you to salvation.
That's rather a nasty-spirited response to an invitation to share your reasoning, especially for someone so confident in the quality of their reasoning on this topic. Even if I totally miss the point, you'd have the chance to share your reasoning with other people viewing the thread and help persuade them of Seneff's correctness -- or don't you want to do this? Remember that you aren't only claiming that she's much better at assessing glyphosate's risks than any concensus in a reasonably defined field of scientific research -- itself a tall order -- you are claiming that her claims about glyphosate are 100% accurate.
In this context, it's not unreasonable to mention her defective claims in related topics, like her ideas about vaccines, autism, and serum cholesterol. If she isn't accurate here, it suggests that her methods are also inaccurate in the topic of glyphosate and health. Besides, these topics don't seperate very well in the belief system that she presents; she uses one brand of dubious belief to support another. For example she thinks autism is caused in part by the effect of glyphosate on the availability of cholesterol sulfate in the developing fetus/infant, but a recent attempt to test her hypothesis through a more accurate chemical assay shows
no statistically significant differences in plasma cholesterol sulfate between autistic and non-autistic children.
More to the point, she
endorses Swanson's plot as a strong indicator of causations between glyphosate and autism. There are a number of problems with this. For one, she ignores the fact that IDEA statistics most directly measure entry into a social program, not the actual prevalence of autism. There seems to be pretty good reason to think that
they are a poor measure of actual prevalence, especially with respect to timing the onset of autism, which a simple model of unlagged causation would require. But far worse, she joins Swanson in mangling the statistics, saying that "you never see correlations like that (0.99) in [unrelated data]".
Really, never? There is actually a
website dedicated to the idea that you can pull strong correlations in demographic time series that have no plausible relation at all.
Accusing someone of "cherry-picking" without substantiating evidence is too often the last refuge of the weak. It may sound science-y, but being so fast and loose with the charge of bias allows people to be biased themselves, hermetically sealed off from any counter-argument they find to be too uncomfortable. To really make a useful charge of cherry-picking, you need to be clear about the space from which the opponent is pulling evidence, and draw an example of the credible evidence which they fail to consider because of bias. If you were yourself interested in validating Seneff's reasoning on the possible relation between glyphosate and health, you would have looked for and considered
some opposing views, at least
one of which has the ingredients for a formal charge of cherry-picking against Seneff that I believe to be sufficiently legitimate.
Checking the
referenced paper, tables 1 and 2, it is clear that Seneff is neglecting to pass on direct empirical evidence that glyphosate is less active on CYP enzymes than other organophosphate pesticides even when she examined the source in order to mine out the claim that organophosphate pesticides like glyphosate tend to inhibit these enzymes. The
second source confirms that the IC50 level of 3.7 micromolar measured for glyphosate in the first study far exceed the levels that would be achieved in actual consumer exposure. A National Estimated Daily Intake of 0.02 mg/kg is over ten times greater than what the study actually found for pregnant women. The molecular weight of
glyphosate is 169.07 g/mol. So a 100kg person would probably be getting no more than 100*0.02/1000/169.07 mol = 11.829 micromoles, and in 100kg*77/1000*55% L = 4.235 L
of blood plasma, that's a plasma concentration of 2.79 micromolar, meaning that even with large estimated intakes, more than 50% activity would be left in all CYP enzymes studied, barring specific evidence for strong accumulation of glyphosate in the liver or something like that. At any rate, it is really unusual that a rigourously written article examining the potential evidence that the inhibition of P450 enzymes by glyphosate is a particularly strong cause of problems, would ignore such easily accessible evidence that out of 10 explicitly studied P450 enzymes, only one is reasonably evidenced as possibly inhibited to worrisome levels by glyphosate in the view of the authors. In particular, the study she cites finds no detectable inhibition of CPY1A2
at all, even though she waxes on about it as a plausible mechanism for the promotion of breast cancer by glyophasate in her
paper.
While toxicology is a complex subject and it's hard for me to see to all its caveats, the comment section of that same blog post gives a much clearer example of how Seneff manipulates her sources. Post 12 suggests looking at
reference 259 of
this Seneff paper, where the authors show a possible relationship with multiple myeloma in pesticide workers, but comment that their statistical power is poor due to the low numbers of multiple myeloma cases observed in the study cohort at that time:
Certain limitations of our data hinder the inferences we can make regarding glyphosate and its association with specific cancer subtypes. Although the AHS cohort is large, and there were many participants reporting glyphosate use, the small numbers of specific cancers occurring during the follow-up period hindered precise effect estimation. In addition, most applicators were male, precluding our ability to assess the association between glyphosate exposure and cancer incidence among women, for both non-sex-specific cancers and sex-specific cancers (e.g., of the breast or ovary). Our analysis provides no information on the timing of pesticide use in relation to disease, limiting the ability to sufficiently explore latency periods or effects resulting from glyphosate exposure at different ages. Despite limitations of our study, certain inferences are possible. This prospective study of cancer incidence provided evidence of no association between glyphosate exposure and most of the cancers we studied, and a suggested association between glyphosate and the risk of multiple myeloma. Future analyses within the AHS will follow up on these findings and will examine associations between glyphosate exposure and incidence of less common cancers.
While the authors merely call for a follow-up study to detect a possible strong association as more data is uncovered, Seneff presents the study as if it uncovered a confirmed, strong, unconfounded increase in risk of multiple myeloma:
While glyphosate is not generally believed to be a carcinogen, a study on a population of professional pesticide applicators who were occupationally exposed to glyphosate revealed asubstantial increased risk to multiple myeloma [259]
Then there's the matter of her talks. I note that in
this presentation at least, she tends to abandon peer-reviewed scientific references for her important claims, preferring instead to cite anti-GMO pages from the popular Web. The journal articles that she does select are often dubious on multiple grounds. For instance, her self-citation of the P450 paper, besides the flaws already mentioned, comes from Entropy, whose peer-review process is practically non-existent according to the testimony of
that academic librarian who claims to have published an article with them as part of the process of investigating the journal's credibility. Her citation of
gmojudycarmen's pig study also
appears to be on dubious ground with respect to the credibility of its journal of publication -- and again, have you seriously looked to investigate contrary views of this study and determined that it survives the basic criticism that it failed to perform a reasonable test of statistical significance to determine whether the patterns of gut inflammation were reasonably likely to have been the result of chance? If you haven't examined these criticisms and determined them to be false, can you really claim 100% accuracy in this paper, to say nothing of actual scientific rigor? If you can't claim 100% accuracy in this paper, how can you be sure that Sennef's citation is reasonable, thoughtful, and accurate? If her citation isn't 100% accurate, then how is everything that she concludes about glyphosate 100% accurate?
Remember that you are the one who has claimed 100% accuracy for Seneff's views on glyphosate while presenting absolutely no evidence (much less, no un-cherry-picked evidence) to support that view. You are welcome to show me credible sources with contrary evidence in any threads where you think I'm "cherry-picking". I think that exchanging our reasoning is part of the process of getting around our own biases. But what you are doing so far in this thread is generally worse than cherry-picking, in my opinion. Declaring that you are 100% confident in these claims, but are unwilling to provide any evidence in support of them is the intellectual equivalent of taking your ball and playing elsewhere. Since you can ignore the discussion anyway without professing extreme confidence, and since you can't really persuade others by responding to a question with such a declaration, it makes you look like you are trying to quiet self-doubt.
