Episode #260
Chuck Benbrook: Chemicals In Food DO Make People Sick

Are chemicals in food harming human health — or are concerns about pesticide exposure overblown?

Longtime pesticide risk analyst Chuck Benbrook joins us once again to respond to recent media claims suggesting that chemicals in food pose little to no risk to consumers. Drawing on decades of peer-reviewed research, regulatory data, and real-world residue testing, Chuck explains why the presence of chemicals in food cannot be evaluated solely by whether residues fall below legal tolerances. Instead, he introduces a more meaningful framework focused on dietary risk, cumulative exposure, and vulnerability — especially for children. This conversation offers a clear, science-based rebuttal to misleading narratives and helps listeners understand why how food is grown still matters for public health.

Learn more about ORG-Tracker, a new analytical tool that tracks residues in the crops. (Overview below.)

Our Chuck Benbrook interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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ORG-Tracker Overview

ORG-Tracker provides a mechanism for the organic community to extract key insights from the sizable investment made in residue testing carried out by certifiers and paid for by organic farmers. By compiling the results of a large percent of certifier residue testing, ORG-Tracker will have sufficient samples to track where the risky residues are in organic food chains.

Risky for certifiers striving to comply with NOP policies governing residue testing, investigations, and enforcement actions.

Risks to consumers from exposures to residues in organic versus conventional foods. All residue data from certifiers in a given organic crop will be compared to the residues detected by the USDA’s Pesticide Data Program in the same food, and in both samples raised conventionally and organically.

ORG-Tracker is a new analytical module built upon, and relying on the dietary Risk Index (DRI) system. The core risk-based metrics in the DRI will be applied to organic and conventional samples, so that risk differentials can be calculated and tracked.

ORG-Tracker is a sophisticated analytical system. It has powerful capabilities to identify where high risk samples are coming from, and where they enter the human food supply. The system can spot new, high risk hot spots, and also monitor the effectiveness of certifier efforts to detect illegal residues and drive them out of the organic food supply.

ORG-Tracker will emerge as the “go to” analytical system to identify where likely fraudulent organic crops are being grown, moving to, and reaching consumers. It can differentiate between what we call an “inadvertent residue” likely in, or on a food crop from drift, persistence in soil, or contaminated irrigation water. Such residues are often beyond the control of organic farmers and should not lead to a loss of certification under most circumstances.

At the present time, ORG-Tracker is administered and funded as a “Project of the Heartland Health Research Alliance (HHRA)”. HHRA secured three-years of dedicated funding ($100k/year) to build, vet, refine, and promote use of ORG-Tracker. This funding will run out in the first half of 2026.

ORG-Tracker applications will serve three primary purposes:

1. Assist the organic community in identifying sources of domestic and imported organic food containing residues out of compliance with National Organic Program (NOP) rules and/or containing residues posing possibly worrisome risks.

2. Support researchers seeking to better understand the impacts of organic farming systems on pesticide residues and dietary risk levels, and when carrying out epidemiological research on pesticide impacts on specific health outcomes.

3. Provide useful data and analytical support as the NOP, certifiers, food companies, regulators, and farmers work to more effectively prevent synthetic pesticides from entering organic food supply chains, and especially those residues posing greater than negligible risks.

An important long-term goal and measure of success will be incrementally reducing to, or near zero the share of food or crop-specific pesticide dietary risk levels stemming from consumption of organically grown and processed crops, in contrast to food derived from conventional production, or GMO-based farming systems.

The impact of ORG-Tracker will depend upon how system-generated insights are used by certifiers, organic growers, the food industry, the NOP, and the scientific community.

Producers, handlers, and certifiers can use ORG-Tracker information to investigate the sources of high-risk residues in certain organic food, develop appropriate food-chain interventions, and more effective inspection and enforcement mechanisms.

ORG-Tracker output tables will provide useful data for determining how unusual a given residue is in a specific food. It will do so by generating distributions of residues in a given food from a given region, to compare to a residue level detected in testing commissioned by a certifier.

Concern has grown markedly in recent years over use of prohibited substances in the case of some imported organic feed grains. A special survey of pesticides detected in corn and soybeans was included in the 2022 Pesticide Data Program. The results are in the DRI system and can be used to establish threshold levels for glyphosate and its primary metabolite AMPA (aminomethylphosphonic acid) that are indicative of a typical use of a glyphosate-based herbicide, or drift or cross-contamination along supply chains.

Establishing such levels can assist certifiers in determining the appropriate response when glyphosate or AMPA residues are detected in a sample of domestic or imported corn, soybeans, and/or corn-soybean based feedstuffs.

Another measure of success will be growth in the diversity of individuals and organizations accessing ORG-Tracker data and utilizing it in ongoing investigatory and enforcement activities, or when considering policy reforms and process innovations.

The lack of accurate estimates of pesticide levels in food and beverages has made it near-impossible for epidemiologists to include dietary exposure and risks in many types of population-based studies, despite the fact that most such studies collect extensive food intake information via food frequency questionnaires.

Pending available funding, the ORG-Tracker team will provide graduate student fellowships for individuals interested in doing research on pesticide use, risks, regulation, and pest management system changes and innovation.

Dave Chapman interviewed Chuck Benbrook in the summer of 2025:

Dave Chapman
Welcome to the Real Organic Podcast. I’m talking today, once again, with my friend Chuck Benbrook. Chuck, welcome.

Chuck Benbrook
Thank you, Dave.

Dave Chapman
You’ve been doing this for a long time. You are an academic who has been a very activist-academic, trying to bring the conversation among scientists to the rest of the world. How long have you been involved in – I think we could call it – a fight against cancer and pesticides, and that relationship? How long have you been doing that?

Chuck Benbrook
My professional career focused on pesticides, farming systems, and public health outcomes. It really began in 1979, when I took a job in the Carter administration at the Council on Environmental Quality, towards the end of his presidency, and got captivated into the Washington, DC food and farming policy environment.

Chuck Benbrook
You identified me as an academic – in my almost 50 years doing this, I only held and was paid for an academic position for three of those years. So, most of the time, I’ve held staff positions for various organizations that have carried out work in this area: the US Congress, the National Academy of Sciences, the Organic Center, and other entities of that sort.

Dave Chapman
Okay. You’ve been doing this for, I think if I got my math right, 46 years. I’ve been a farmer for 45 years, so we’ve been working on the same things from two different points of view, but we’re headed to the same North Star.

Chuck Benbrook
Indeed, yeah.

Dave Chapman
There’s a question I’ve been asking people when I interview them lately, and I’ve gotten so many interesting answers. In that time – for you, this is longer than for most people – looking back over 46 years since you began, do you believe that the food system is getting better or is it getting worse?

Chuck Benbrook
I think it was getting fairly consistently and significantly better through the ’80s and into the early ’90s. But I think, by the mid ’90s, things started to turn around again, and since that time, I think there’s been a lot of slippage in both the nutritional quality of food that Americans consume on a day-to-day basis, as well as the safety of the food.

Chuck Benbrook
One thing I feel very strongly about is that the real tragedy is the difference between what the quality of the U.S. food supply in 2025 could be – and by all rights, should be – compared to what it is. That is a Grand Canyon-scale gap.

Dave Chapman
What happened? It was getting better. There was political movement, and we were seeing things improve from a systemic point of view that included government. Then things started to get worse from that same perspective.

Chuck Benbrook
In the 80s, food science and understanding about nutrition was advancing. On the farm, there was a growing interest in returning to some of the management- and practice-based techniques to build soil health, to reduce pest pressure, and to make farmers more resilient in terms of the commodities that they sell, and their dependence on one or a few markets versus multiple markets.

Chuck Benbrook
But the trends toward larger farms, specialized farms, and relatively few crops picked up a lot of steam in the 90s, and started to drive specialization, concentration, dependence on chemicals, and, ultimately, dependence on genetically engineered seeds in corn, cotton, soybeans, and a few other crops.

Chuck Benbrook
That drove dramatic changes all along the food and agriculture production system, through the value chains, and has now fundamentally altered the forces and factors that are driving change and innovation in agriculture and the food system – and not always in good ways.

Dave Chapman
What is the driving force behind all of that? What’s causing the concentration of power in crop production, and why is it getting worse? Do you have any thoughts on that?

Chuck Benbrook
Sure, almost in every sector of the economy that we all deal with, there’s been a trend towards fewer and larger firms with more economic or political clout. That’s certainly true in food and farming. Although, if you take a part of agriculture like the production of beef cattle, that’s still not terribly concentrated.

Chuck Benbrook
Now, feedlot – finishing and slaughtering of beef – are highly concentrated, but there are still small, medium, and large cattle ranches spread all over the country. There are some examples in agriculture where there are still a lot of family farms, and relatively small family-owned operations represent most of the production. But in other areas, the trend towards larger farms has been strong and ongoing now for three or four decades.

Chuck Benbrook
In food and farming, the biggest factor is that the role of the public sector – the role of public sector research, the research and extension activities across the land-grant university system, the role and importance placed on them in shaping the future of agriculture and food, and hence, the kinds of food safety, nutritional, public health, and environmental outcomes from food and farming and the food we eat – has really dramatically changed.

Chuck Benbrook
When I was organizing, helping the subcommittee that I worked for in the House Agriculture Committee in 1981, 1982, and 1983, we had jurisdiction over ag research, nutrition, and oversight of USDA programs. So, we set up hearings on a wide diversity of topics.

Chuck Benbrook
We had no trouble finding excellent people to testify who worked for mostly land-grant universities with large agricultural and food programs, who were respected scientists, widely published, and they would come and testify before our committee and do a great job of laying out the issues, the challenges that were being confronted by farmers – environmental challenges, food safety challenges.

Chuck Benbrook
Their contributions and testimony formed the bedrock of how the members of our committee – and I would say this is true in other committees of Congress – formed the way that the members thought about issues and sought advice and data to shape the kind of decisions they made about appropriating funds for agricultural research, establishing a new regulatory program, or passing a law to encourage a particular type of farming system or discourage another type.

Chuck Benbrook
But from the late ’80s to the mid to late ’90s, there was a significant and dramatic shift in who controlled the flow of information – not just to the Congress and decision makers, but to farmers, the food industry, the public, and other stakeholders. It shifted from public institutions and scientists that worked for public universities to private entities.

Chuck Benbrook
Now, two decades later, the voice of public universities in all of these issues that we work on, and that the general public cares about – the input and the role of scientists working in land-grant colleges and universities – has become very muted, and is now typically just another part of delivering the typical agricultural industry, farm commodity group, pesticide industry, animal drug industry, and seed industry view of issues and challenges.

Chuck Benbrook
I really regret the degree to which this change has become embedded in the DNA of how decisions get made that shape the future of agriculture, because now agriculture is pretty much being shaped and driven in directions that most reliably deliver profits for the big companies that have such a large share of the market – whether we’re talking about fertilizers, seeds, equipment, pesticides, potato chips, bread, cucumbers, or hamburger. That, to me, is the enormously significant change that’s occurred.

Dave Chapman
Okay. I reached out to you asking to do this second interview because I listened to a podcast. It was Dr. Mike. I encountered Dr. Mike because I was going to interview Marion Nestle, and I was looking for good interviews with her, and I encountered his, and it was excellent. He did a very good job. He was very knowledgeable, respectful. There was a lot of alignment in their concerns about food, nutrition, and health.

Dave Chapman
I started listening to some of his other podcasts. I enjoyed them, and then I encountered one, and it was called, “Are Chemicals Actually Making You Sick?” The question that they posed in the very beginning of it was, “Are the everyday chemicals in our food, water, and homes truly wrecking our health, or are we overreacting?”

Dave Chapman
It was a long, epic interview – two and a half hours, I think – and he was talking with Aly Cohen and Andrea Love – two researchers. They had very different points of view. Dr. Cohen was essentially representing a positive point of view towards organic, and Dr. Love was representing a very negative point of view towards organic and a very positive view of the chemical industry.

Chuck Benbrook
I remember Dr. Cohen had a recently published book called “Detoxify: The Everyday Toxins Harming Your Immune System and How to Defend Against Them,” which Dr. Mike had read, and there were several segments of the podcast that focused on topics covered in her book.

Dave Chapman
That’s right. The topics that I was most interested in were the ones that I felt were not adequately addressed. I was a bit disappointed in Dr. Cohen’s and Dr. Love’s presentations. I had never heard of either one of them before. Dr. Love is actually quite well known in this world. She frequently presents an extremely positive perspective on the use of chemicals in agriculture.

Dave Chapman
The thing that horrified me was at the end, Dr. Mike, who is a very reasonable guy, said, “Well, I’ve listened to both of your arguments, and I have to say, Dr. Cohen, I am unconvinced, and I can’t, based on this conversation, suggest to my clients, my patients, that they should eat organic food.” I thought, “Whoa, this is presented as being the scientific response.”

Dave Chapman
I didn’t believe that it was a very good scientific analysis of the situation. I thought, “Who can I talk to?” I thought, “I think Chuck would be a great place to start.” So, here we are. I’ll just ask you – you’ve listened to the interview. Have you got some responses? I’ve got some specifics, but I’d like to hear what you have to say.

Chuck Benbrook
Yes. I’ve listened to it all the way through three times. I was so intrigued by the degree of misinformation that managed to find its way into this podcast and influence Dr. Mike’s ultimate judgment that I felt putting some time into it to try to understand how such misinformation found its way in was worthwhile.

Chuck Benbrook
I’ve gone through the transcript and started a critique of some of the points to at least ground the disagreements between Dr. Cohen and Dr. Love in verifiable, accepted facts. Unfortunately, this is something we have to put a lot more energy into today in 2025, where many public policy debates involving food, farming, health, and the environment have become unmoored from facts and knowledge about what the issues, challenges, and problems are.

Chuck Benbrook
This strikes me as ironic and deeply regrettable. With all the new knowledge we have from much more powerful and sensitive scientific tools and current research, we understand far more about how to make food healthier, how to help farmers control pests with less reliance on toxic inputs, how to make our soil healthier, and how to make farming more profitable for farmers. But we aren’t acting on that knowledge.

Chuck Benbrook
In fact, the sloppiness of public discussion about these issues is confusing the public and hindering progress. If this continues, it will become difficult for Congress and state legislatures to change laws, appropriate money, and invest in new research and infrastructure that would make a positive difference.

Chuck Benbrook
They never won’t be able to reach consensus about what A) the problems are, and B) what the most cost-effective ways to deal with them would be. The confusion around those points is on full display in that two-hour-and-forty-minute podcast with Dr. Cohen and Dr. Love.

Dave Chapman
Could we pick maybe a very striking and significant point of confusion? What did they get wrong? What were they unable to express clearly? What would you say if you had been part of that conversation that was being missed?

Chuck Benbrook
It covers a lot of ground. Some of it is fairly technical and narrow in perspective. Other parts are 30,000-foot points. A couple of the really major themes. Dr. Cohen emphasized the fact that the American public, through food, water, products in our home, and the air we breathe, are exposed to a number of different compounds – some natural, some man-made.

Chuck Benbrook
It’s really the combination of these exposures on the human body and on our DNA that is having such a profound impact on the health of Americans. It is really driving many of the trends in ill health, cancer, metabolic syndrome, etc.

Chuck Benbrook
Dr. Cohen point out that the most significant distinction between organic food and conventional food is that organic farmers don’t use synthetic chemical pesticides and other synthetic inputs, but rather depend on natural compounds and natural biological processes and interactions to grow both nutritious and healthy food.

Chuck Benbrook
Dr. Love vigorously contests the significance of the difference between man-made and natural by arguing that, and rightly so, the human body is composed of a whole bunch of chemicals. Nature makes a lot of chemicals, from phenolics to arsenic, and the chemical industry synthesizes a lot of chemicals from synthetic versions of a variety of natural chemicals.

Chuck Benbrook
She uses some examples from pesticides like pyrethrins. Organic farmers are allowed to spray pyrethrin insecticides on many crops. They’re very acutely toxic, and they kill insects. The pesticide industry has synthesized pyrethroid analogs – very similar chemicals that also work, kill insects, and are acutely toxic. Some of them have advantages over natural pyrethrins in that they last longer and don’t have to be sprayed as often.

Chuck Benbrook
Dr. Love makes the point that everything is chemicals, and some natural chemicals are very toxic. She cites arsenic several times. There are many other natural things that could be cited. She challenges the fundamental basis of a distinction between organic food and farming relying on nature, and conventional food and farming relying more on synthetic chemicals, as not a relevant distinction.

Chuck Benbrook
The point that I wish Dr. Cohen had made – and she really doesn’t – is that human beings have evolved with natural chemicals, with heavy metals, and with pathogenic microorganisms. They’ve evolved with those over the eons. Our bodies do have some innate capacity, via our immune systems, to withstand exposures to certain levels of those compounds.

Chuck Benbrook
Does that mean arsenic is not toxic at a certain level? No. It just means the human body, and other mammals and other creatures that have evolved over time, have innate capacity to deal with natural compounds. Whereas newly synthesized chemicals that never existed in nature can have a much more significant impact on human health, because our bodies haven’t evolved with them.

Chuck Benbrook
That is, in fact, a foundational distinction between organic food and farming and conventional food and farming. It’s important. It’s certainly not the whole story, but it’s not irrelevant, as Dr. Love alleges.

Dave Chapman
As far as I know, arsenic is not permitted in organic certification. It might be natural, but it’s not permitted. Same with nicotine – it’s not permitted. The other thing that’s completely missing is… I know a lot of organic farmers, and I know very few who use any kind of spray on a regular prophylactic basis.

Dave Chapman
I was down in Florida not that long ago, and I interviewed Hugh Kent. Their beautiful, amazing King Grove Organic Farm grows 20 acres of blueberries in Florida. The neighbors are spraying prophylactic conventional pesticides every five days because they’re fighting a war with the insects. At King Grove Organic Farm, they’re not fighting a war. They have balance in their fields because they don’t use pesticides.

Dave Chapman
There’s a natural ecology that exists there, so there are natural predators keeping things in balance. There’s a lot of life in that field, but nothing’s getting out of control. I felt that Dr. Love was completely missing the point of organic agriculture. It’s not just a theory – it’s a reality.

Dave Chapman
I’m sure there are examples of industrial certified organic – I wouldn’t call it real organic – in California that are just knockoffs of chemical farming, and they use exactly the same way of thinking. They just put a different thing in the spray tank. But that is the exception, not the rule.

Chuck Benbrook
It’s clear that Dr. Love is aware there’s no comparison between the number of pesticide sprays and the toxicity of pesticides applied on a conventional farm growing a given crop compared to a nearby organic farm growing the same crop. The dependence on chemical sprays on the organic farm is one-tenth to one-hundredth of what it is on the conventional farm.

Chuck Benbrook
The enormous difference in the number of products that are sprayed, the number of applications, and the toxicity of the products drives this huge difference in the environmental and public health impacts and consequences of pesticide use on organic farms versus pesticide use on conventional farms. This distinction is by far the greatest in the production of fresh fruits and vegetables for a variety of reasons.

Chuck Benbrook
In Florida, for many fruits and vegetables, there will be three to five herbicides applied, four to six insecticides applied – some of them multiple times – and three to four fungicides applied, some of them three, four, five, six times.

Chuck Benbrook
The volume of pesticides applied on an average acre of high-value fruits and vegetables in Florida – if the public understood – it would have a much bigger impact on demand for organic, I assure you. It’s almost unbelievable.

Chuck Benbrook
You have to remember that in Florida, a lot of these crops are eight-week, ten-week, or sixteen-week crops. If you’re spraying twelve times in a sixteen-week crop, that’s like once a week, and you’re spraying multiple compounds each time.

Chuck Benbrook
It’s a level of pesticide use that inevitably has adverse effects on the environment, on the people spraying the chemicals, on the farm workers working in the fields, on the neighbors subjected to drift, and in some cases, on the consumers who eat the produce.

Chuck Benbrook
That is an unfortunate and harsh reality of conventional agriculture that most agricultural commodity groups, the pesticide industry, and most government agencies, including the USDA, simply will not acknowledge. They will not accept that this is part of the reality of modern agriculture in the United States in 2025. But that doesn’t make it go away.

Dave Chapman
I think that you just officially became, in Dr. Love’s mind, a fearmonger. And boy, does she have a great mothering instinct to protect us all from being needlessly afraid. She thinks it’s damaging our health. Is that fear unfounded? Is there scientific study to support what you said – that this is actually a problem for us, the people who live on this planet? We’re part of this ecosystem. We know that we all have glyphosate in our bodies. We all have PFAS in our bodies. Is that a problem?

Chuck Benbrook
Yes, it is a serious problem, and it appears to be getting worse rapidly. By rapidly, I mean every decade, life expectancy is going down in many countries, and the birth rate is going down in many countries. There are some countries around the world where the birth rate is barely half of what would be required to maintain their population level.

Chuck Benbrook
There are smart people who have studied the science and have looked at the trends in reproduction, sperm quality, and life expectancy, and they say that if humanity on Planet Earth keeps going down the same roads we’re currently moving along, dealing with population growth is not really going to be a significant issue. In another 10 or 20 years, it will be about dealing with depopulation.

Dave Chapman
Are we convinced that that is being caused by the the large diet of chemicals that are introduced to our world?

Chuck Benbrook
I think that exposure to chemicals of all sorts is definitely, if it’s not the… I’d say the two biggest drivers are chemical exposures from before a woman becomes pregnant, through the life of a child, adulthood, and through old age, and the declining healthfulness of the food we eat.

Chuck Benbrook
The fact that here in America, we’re having trouble getting safe and healthy food to the public – onto the shelves of our supermarkets – is all our fault. It’s not because that’s the only way we know how to provide 2,200 calories to 330 million Americans every day.

Chuck Benbrook
We have the kind of food system that we chose to have through our public policies, through our public and private sector investments, and it’s proving to be very, very difficult to change it, even though we understand many of the ways that it definitely should be changed, needs to be changed, and could be changed without significant disruption. Yet we don’t do it.

Chuck Benbrook
Donald Trump gets elected for a second time to the presidency, and he appoints Bobby Kennedy to be the Secretary for Health and Human Services. We’re not even a year in – I think we’re getting close to day 200 of the administration – and apparently the synthetic dyes are on their way out. The science supporting getting synthetic dyes out of the food system has been in place for 20, even 30 years, but it hadn’t happened. But now it looks like it is happening.

Chuck Benbrook
Some people say, “Oh, the food industry really won’t do it,” but it’s a sign that there’s nothing holding us back from significant improvements in the nutritional quality of food and the safety of food. The fact that we’re not making the changes and the investments is on us. It’s our fault that somehow we have not been able to convince our neighbors, our political leaders, our thought leaders that we can do better. We can do a lot better.

Chuck Benbrook
Dave, I got a chance to go to Europe early in 2025. I spent a couple of weeks in Germany and spent time in supermarkets, spent time looking at what people were eating. In two weeks in Germany, I did not see one obese person, and maybe a half dozen overweight people. I just couldn’t believe it. But then I looked at what they’re eating, and what is for sale in the supermarket.

Chuck Benbrook
You can buy some ultra-processed foods in European supermarkets. It’s not all fresh, whole, healthy food, but there’s enough fresh, whole, healthy food and so much less presence and marketing push and institutional support for unhealthy, ultra-processed food that the people in Europe are healthier. They are much healthier.

Chuck Benbrook
My gut sense, as a scientist, is I think it’s the higher-quality food and diet that they’re ingesting, as opposed to them having much cleaner air and water or fewer chemicals in rugs and consumer products. I believe it’s probably the higher quality of food and their diet that accounts for this. There’s absolutely no reason why the American public could not benefit from the same sorts of food that Europeans currently benefit from.

Dave Chapman
Yes. Okay. We get down to this question of being very confused. Americans are very confused. I say, if you’re not confused, you’re not paying attention, because there’s a lot of people trying to convince you of one thing or another, sometimes very different things. I’m trying to convince people of something. I’m not against someone trying to convince people, but I am against people being misled.

Dave Chapman
I think perhaps in my interview with Marion Nestle, we talked about how difficult it is for science to know every truth – not that there isn’t a truth, but it’s very hard to prove things about human health through studies, because we’re very complicated, and what we eat is very complicated. How in the world do you get a group of people to just eat one diet for 20 years, and another group to eat a very different diet for 20 years? It’s impossible. If it was possible, it would cost a great deal of money that no one’s willing to put up.

Dave Chapman
I’ve told you the story that Paul Hawken told me. Paul was very much of an organic activist in the early days of the American organic movement. He was one of the founders of the Erewhon stores in Boston, and they became wholesalers to lots of co-ops and health food stores. They used to have him go out on stage and debate Frederick J. Stare, who was the chair of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard.

Dave Chapman
Dr. Stare was a great believer in the standard American diet. He served on the board of the Sugar Institute. We would consider that to be very compromised in his defense of sugar, which he was a strong defender of. They would have these debates. Paul said, “I always lost, and I was always right.”

Dave Chapman
He lost because Dr. Stare was a very intelligent and learned man, and he could quote many studies to justify his points, but that didn’t make his points right. It just made them very easy to defend from that perspective. I’m asking a long question, but it’s an important question. Do we have the science to support what you’ve been saying, or is that still too complicated, you go, “No, we actually have good studies, and we can show that glyphosate is bad for you and can give you non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.”?

Dave Chapman
It’s interesting. I think Dr. Love would agree with you about ultra-processed foods. I think she was absolutely agreeing that that food is killing us. She just wasn’t agreeing with the problem with how the food is being produced – how it’s being grown – which is with a great deal of chemistry being added.

Chuck Benbrook
Well, a lot is embedded in that question, and I’ll do my best to try to share how I think about it. I have been intensively studying published science and literature in a wide variety of journals for 30 years now. My career, I’ve done a lot in nutrition and food quality, and built analytical systems.

Chuck Benbrook
I’ve been a pesticide analyst researcher for many, many years, and know a lot about the pesticide residues that are in food, and which foods and which production systems, and how the EPA and other regulatory agencies translate a given residue level into an estimate of risk. I understand those systems and the knowledge that comes from them.

Chuck Benbrook
Perhaps we’re at an inflection point where the more we know, the less we know. As Marion Nestle argued quite persuasively in your podcast with her, there are so many compounding variables that affect the health of a single individual that it’s rarely possible to attribute a given adverse health outcome to a single, or even a set of, things.

Chuck Benbrook
Now, if you go skiing and tear up your knee or fall off a ladder and break your arm, there’s a really clear connection. If you’re a lifelong smoker and you get lung cancer, pretty solid evidence that the fact that you smoked for many years, contributed to, and probably was a – if not the dominant -cause of your lung cancer, certainly a major one.

Chuck Benbrook
But with the kind of pesticide exposures through the diet that are occurring now, it’s almost never true that the acephate residues in this serving of broccoli, or that watermelon, or this blueberry caused a miscarriage, a case of cancer, or any adverse health effect. Because most of the bad things that happen to people, particularly chronic loss of health as we age – for example, people moving along the metabolic syndrome.

Chuck Benbrook
I was skinny as a rail up through into my 30s. Every decade, you know, that belly got a little bigger, my weight got a little higher, my glucose management got a little less well controlled. Ten years ago, I was definitely bouncing back and forth at that pre-diabetic line. I’ve been laser focused to try to understand why and deal with it through eating better and exercise. I’m making some progress, and I’m very pleased about that.

Chuck Benbrook
But I am acutely aware, as Dr. Love is, that there are so many other factors – epidemiologists call it confounding factors – that contribute to adverse health outcomes. Dr. Love feels that it’s her job in a podcast like with Dr. Mike to raise, “Oh, well, it could be copper fungicides that organic farmers apply that’s causing problems.”

Chuck Benbrook
She knows that’s not true. She knows that there’s actually a recommended daily allowance for copper. It’s an essential nutrient. If we don’t get enough copper in our bodies, we aren’t healthy. She knows all that, but she’s still, in the Dr. Mike podcast, says, “Oh, organic farmers use a lot of copper sulfate, and it’s applied at a far higher rate than the synthetic fungicides that conventional farmers apply. So therefore it must be worse.”

Chuck Benbrook
She knows that that’s – I would want to use some barnyard language here, but I won’t – just factually misleading, but she does it anyway. I fault her for that. She’s a very intelligent woman, she’s articulate, and she has an in-depth understanding of this whole topic – actually much more in-depth than Dr. Cohen.

Chuck Benbrook
That’s why Dr. Love really didn’t have a very difficult challenge in presenting more convincing arguments to Dr. Mike in that podcast, because Dr. Love knew how to selectively cite certain facts about organic. Organic isn’t pesticide-free. True for a lot of reasons. But on the other hand, I have to say that I think Dr. Love chose her words more to make a point than to educate.

Dave Chapman
Okay. Here we have an opportunity to educate. Of course, most people listening to this won’t have listened to that podcast. But the basic message I was left with is, she said all of these synthetic pesticides – and, I guess, fertilizers too – have been thoroughly tested by the government for safety, and so you can trust that these are not going to harm you or the farmers in any way. What do you think about that?

Chuck Benbrook
I so wish that were true, but it’s not, and she knows it. How many pesticides has the EPA, over the last 50 years, come to realize that they need to cancel and suspend because they pose higher risk? Well, it’s 40 or 50. There are multiple pesticides that are being used in ways that are having unacceptable, and I would say, patently illegal impacts on either the environment or food safety.

Chuck Benbrook
Let me just give you a simple example. The EPA sets so-called “tolerance levels” that place a limit on the amount of methamphos or acephate that can be in a green bean. Acephate is Orthene. It’s a widely used organophosphate insecticide. It’s likely to pose developmental neurotox risks when pregnant women are exposed or young children. There has been a ton of research on the OP, the organophosphates as a class. They’re among the most worrisome pesticides on the market.

Chuck Benbrook
The EPA has established these tolerance levels, and it says, “Okay, you can’t have more than 0.1 part per million of methamphos in a green bean.” I don’t remember if that’s the tolerance. It’s something around that. But what Dr. Love and the conventional farming community want to argue is that as long as residues are below that tolerance level, they’re safe. That’s not true. It’s not true based on how they would try to convince people that, yes indeed, their statement is justified.

Chuck Benbrook
This is why: tolerance levels are not set based on a safety standard; they’re set based on how much residue remains on the green bean after the field is sprayed with the pesticide. That’s been how all of the tolerances have been set. Many tolerances on the books today, if a residue was present at the tolerance level – so it’d be legal – pose a level of risk that the EPA will not defend as safe under current law.

Chuck Benbrook
It’s not just a few, it’s hundreds. Hundreds of pesticide-food combinations where legal residues are not safe residues. I’ve run the numbers. The Dietary Risk Index system that I’ve spent 30 years of my life developing has the capacity to take all of the individual pesticide residue data from the USDA on conventional green beans, organic green beans, conventional; all of the fruits and vegetables, organic; all the fruits and vegetables, and calculate the risk level that is associated with the actual residue found in a sample of green beans.

Chuck Benbrook
That’s what’s in the green bean, presumably when somebody eats it. That’s how the USDA does this testing. If you take the residue level, and what EPA says is a safe level, there are thousands of samples of food tested by the USDA every year that contain residues above this level that the EPA is prepared to say is safe.

Chuck Benbrook
Now those are empirical facts. I’m sure Dr. Love is – I don’t know if she’s read the specific paper where I lay out all the numbers – but I think she understands this, but she doesn’t feel it’s part of her job to explain that to people.

Dave Chapman
Chuck, did I hear you say that one branch of the federal government says it’s safe, and another says it isn’t, for the same level we’re talking about?

Chuck Benbrook
Oh, sure. That’s actually fairly common. Because think of a lot of industrial chemicals – they have to be regulated in air, in water, in food, in medications, in consumer products, and in personal care products. Sometimes the same chemical can be regulated – i.e., setting a safe level – based on different science and different assumptions.

Chuck Benbrook
A huge part of the early part of my career, in the 1980s and 1990s, was dealing with the fact that there was a conflict between what the federal pesticide law, FIFRA (Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act), required the EPA to do on cancer-causing pesticides versus what the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act – which directs the FDA in setting tolerances – required at the time. The FDA was responsible for that until the EPA was formed. There were two different standards, and they were in conflict.

Chuck Benbrook
I spent 20 years of my professional career, with a lot of other smart and well-intentioned people, fixing that conflict to the extent possible. The fix was embodied in the 1996 Food Quality Protection Act. But this occurs, and it’s occurring more and more, where you have California public health and regulatory officials imposing stricter safety limits on a wide range of natural and man-made chemicals in food, water, and air compared to the federal government.

Chuck Benbrook
This is one of the big issues in regulatory science and regulation right now: Should everyone in all industries follow the federal standards or state standards? How do we sort all this out as a country? It’s very complicated. Right now, Dave, it’s very dynamic. There are big changes afoot.

Dave Chapman
I think that the most compelling thing here – I’m trying to get to a point where people feel very confused. They don’t understand, “Well, can I trust the government to tell me what’s safe or not?” Of course, many people do not trust the government at this point, which is why we have so much turmoil in our country, because people don’t think that the government is necessarily taking actions to protect them, but rather to protect companies that are selling products.

Dave Chapman
I think that you’re suggesting that, in fact, they’re very justified in that, in terms of trying to assess whether or not chemical agriculture is, in fact, safe. Have there been studies that show outcomes of just, let’s say, eating an organic diet? Are there studies that are reputable and peer-reviewed that have demonstrated that, over a period of time, eating organic food leads to better health outcomes?

Chuck Benbrook
Yes, there are literally, globally, hundreds of published studies that have reached a conclusion that is supportive of the hypothesis that eating organic food will incrementally lead to more positive public health outcomes. I think there really should be no doubt about this in anyone’s mind, unless they’ve got a reason to be biased. Why would you want to consume food that has toxic chemicals in it fairly regularly, compared to food that doesn’t? Why would you want to eat food that lacks the flavor and the character of good organic food compared to conventional food?

Chuck Benbrook
To me, it’s a no-brainer. If we could grow all fruits and vegetables organically, it would be good for the country, farmers, and for public health. Of course, people like Dr. Love feel that we can’t do that without a significant increase in the price paid for fresh, whole, organic fruits and vegetables.

Chuck Benbrook
If the government attempted to drive a transition from conventional to organic systems in a short period of time – two or three years – there would be economic consequences, and prices would go up. But if the government had invested in the infrastructure required to grow the organic food and farming industries incrementally, with better science, better technology, and better infrastructure, there would not be much of a price premium needed to support organic food accounting for most of the fruits and vegetables.

Chuck Benbrook
In Washington State, where I’ve lived the last few years, there are a number of very large, successful organic fruit and vegetable farms in the middle part of Washington. Some of these farms are over 20,000 acres. They have absolutely cutting-edge technology in every aspect of the farm.

Chuck Benbrook
But instead of mixing and matching a synthetic chemical to a pest problem, they’re matching biology, ecology, and management to keep the pest problem from ever getting to the point where it costs them money. In the few instances and few years when that happens, they do have some organically approved and available pesticides that they’ll apply.

Chuck Benbrook
They typically cost more per acre, and often they’re not as effective by themselves as the best conventional pesticide that a nearby conventional farm could spray to control the same pest. But it provides them with a way to avoid significant losses in crops.

Chuck Benbrook
Certainly in the fruit and vegetable area – which is where most of the pesticide risk is, and these are also the foods that we really need to double, or even better, triple – intake across the American population. If we really want to get as healthy as Europeans, we at least have to double fresh fruit and vegetable intake.

Chuck Benbrook
So, that means double acres across the board, unless we’re going to rely on imports. Sure, imports are going to play an important role in the winter, when we can only grow fresh fruits and vegetables in Southern California, New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of Texas. But it is so eminently feasible now, if the country decided that it wanted to do that.

Chuck Benbrook
Back in the ’80s, when I first got involved with public policy, there would be scientists from land-grant universities testifying before Congress and interacting with the media. There weren’t podcasts back then, but there were other ways that people communicated with each other.

Chuck Benbrook
At that time, there would have been broad support from these public-sector scientists – people that were sort of dedicated to the public good, as opposed to making more money for a particular company. That is one of the things that we have lost.

Chuck Benbrook
Not only have the food companies, the pesticide companies, the seed companies, and the biotech companies reduced the role and impact of public-sector scientists in this arena, they’ve had a comparable impact on state and federal-level regulatory agencies that are responsible for setting the standards, enforcing them, and doing the testing to assure that food is safe and doesn’t pollute water, etc.

Chuck Benbrook
But those agencies and those programs have also been weakened and are unable to take the steps that are required to change things on the ground. One of the best examples is the heralded nitrogen nutrient management plan that the Iowa state government has been developing and trying to promote for 20 years to reduce the contribution from Iowa corn and soybean farms and CAFOs to nutrient problems in the Gulf of Mexico.

Chuck Benbrook
There’s been essentially no progress despite 20 years of effort, investment, and debate about the role that state regulatory agencies are playing. They’re still permitting massive hog and chicken Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations in parts of Iowa that already have such a high concentration of animals that there’s no way to safely dispose of the manure in a way that builds soil health. It’s impossible.

Chuck Benbrook
There’s too much manure for too little land, and so people just have to put up with the pollution and the public health consequences of it.

Dave Chapman
Well, and the public health consequences in Iowa: it’s the second highest cancer rate in the country, and the most rapidly increasing cancer rate. Clearly, there is a correlation that is significant between the way that the land is farmed and the health of the people living on that land. Yes, it goes to the Gulf of Mexico and kills an enormous area of life in the ocean. But, of course, it also creates Cancer Alley on the way there in Louisiana.

Chuck Benbrook
Dave, I had the privilege – I was invited by the Iowa Farmers Union to come do a speaking tour on the preemption legislation that was before the Iowa legislature. I traveled all around the state. I got to visit with a lot of farmers, a lot of people, a lot of public health officials. I’m telling you, there is substantial debate in the state of Iowa on whether anything about agriculture is contributing to any problem, even water quality.

Chuck Benbrook
There are people who will stand up before the Iowa State Legislature and say, “It’s really not a big problem. We’ve got it under control. We have a state nutrient nitrogen management plan. There’s no clear evidence that the fertilizer any farmer sprayed on his corn crop caused somebody’s reproductive problem or cancer.”

Chuck Benbrook
That statement is a correct one – you can’t definitively link an individual’s reproductive problem, child with autism, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, or metabolic syndrome to a particular farm, a particular chemical, or a particular part of production agriculture.

Chuck Benbrook
Because of that difficulty, people whose job it is to defend the current system – people who are paid to do that – use this fact: that you can’t tie any individual’s adverse health condition to a specific agricultural input, a specific field, or a specific practice. They say, because you can’t do that, then we don’t really know whether how we raise food – and the current quality and safety of the American food supply – is contributing to anything adverse.

Chuck Benbrook
Other than when a kid or adult gets listeria or E. coli, and their kidneys shut down and they die, and it gets traced to a particular microorganism that got into a cantaloupe or a hamburger – yeah, that’s an impact. Beyond that, there are a lot of people in Iowa who unequivocally defend all current agricultural systems and technology as modern agriculture, feeding the world the best thing ever for Iowans and the country.

Dave Chapman
Yeah. One of them was our Secretary of Agriculture for 16 years, I believe, Mr. Vilsack?

Chuck Benbrook
Long time.

Dave Chapman
Yeah, a long time. He was a great champion of that. This reminds me very much of “Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Climate Change,” Naomi Oreskes’ brilliant book that went into the battle to acknowledge, on a federal level, and do something about the fact that cigarettes were very toxic and were making many, many millions of Americans very sick.

Dave Chapman
As beautifully as she demonstrates and goes into the campaign that the tobacco companies conducted, all they had to do was keep saying, “Well, we can’t prove that this person died for that reason. We are positive there’s some things that might indicate that there’s a problem, but you can’t prove there’s a problem.” They killed millions of people in that campaign to delay a loss of profits.

Dave Chapman
Ultimately, the government said, “Well, yes, we can’t prove that this person gets cancer, but we can prove that people get cancer as a result of smoking cigarettes.” I believe that virtually any doctor now would embrace that belief. Of course, when I was a kid, the doctors were smoking, just like everyone else. Go ahead.

Chuck Benbrook
Things have changed. Science has progressed. We have these new tools to sequence DNA, to test whether an individual’s – your DNA, my DNA – has been altered or impacted in some way that increases your risk, or my risk, or my children’s risks, of some adverse outcome. There is definitive evidence of various changes in the DNA in cells in our body and increased risk of adverse health outcomes.

Chuck Benbrook
Plus, there are now tools – and affordable tools. You can have the DNA in your body sequenced. You could do a whole-body sequence for like 200 bucks now. That’s what companies like… what was the name of a couple of them where you could send in a blood sample or some of your saliva?

Chuck Benbrook
23andMe was one of these companies that would sequence your DNA and tell you if you had any genetic polymorphisms or indications that something had altered your DNA in a way that increases your risk of getting Alzheimer’s, or a particular type of cancer, or having autoimmune disease.

Chuck Benbrook
There’s this mammothly important new science about the human microbiome in the gut – the bacteria that make up your gut. It turns out that the human gut plays a huge role in how effective our immune system is in dealing with pathogens, chemicals, viruses – anything that can make us less healthy than we are. In addition, the microorganisms in our gut, and the microbiome they create, have an enormous impact on our brains and nervous system – on our mood, on our behavior, on how we feel about being alive.

Chuck Benbrook
This new science is coming on super fast, and many studies have already documented how exposure to certain pesticides disrupts a normal, healthy microbiome in ways that are known to be associated with problems – whether it’s increased risk of disease, lethargy, problems with autoimmune disease, or new food allergies.

Chuck Benbrook
My oldest son has loved pistachio ice cream for his entire life and eaten it. Three months ago, he had a serving of pistachio ice cream, and he almost died from an allergic reaction. They barely saved him. Why did he all of a sudden have this extremely acute reaction to pistachio ice cream? One of the mysteries – but it happened.

Chuck Benbrook
Dave, the good news is that science is rapidly coming to understand how what’s in food – the nutrients, the phytochemicals, the additives, the pesticide residues, the phthalates, PFAS – all of the things in food that we bring into our body, there are new tools being developed that show how that impacts the microbiome, how that impacts our DNA, how changes in the microbiome and changes in the DNA are associated with the disease process leading to bad outcomes like cancer, food allergies, and metabolic syndrome.

Chuck Benbrook
The dots are getting connected, Dave. They’re getting connected. There are some dots that still are unclear – there’s the interaction of different things, the confounding factors that we talked about before – that’s always going to be really complicated, but we are making rapid progress.

Chuck Benbrook
The question on the table is: are we, as a country, going to take action on the new insight and the new understanding that we have about how to make food safer and more nutritious?

Chuck Benbrook
The first question you asked, “Are we doing better?” Remember what I said. Based on how we are doing in 2025 in terms of the quality of food and how it impacts health outcomes, we are failing miserably to keep up with the opportunities that we now have – to make food safer, to make food more nutritious, and to make Americans healthier.

Chuck Benbrook
I’m absolutely convinced of that. People like David Kessler. He wrote a great op-ed in The Wall Street Journal about ultra-processed foods. Former Commissioner of the FDA, the guy that ran the COVID response during the Trump administration, he is a very, very well-respected guy.

Chuck Benbrook
Like Marion Nestle in your podcast, he rather unapologetically said, “Yeah, there’s a benefit from eating organic food.” David Kessler said, “There are bad things coming from ultra-processed food.” Do we understand everything about them and what makes a particular food really bad for your health compared to other similar foods that maybe aren’t as bad? Sure, there are lots of remaining questions.

Chuck Benbrook
But overall, we are not, as a country, doing what a smart society, an intelligent society, would do to make all of us safer – whereas people in Scandinavia and Europe have done that rather consistently over the last 30 years. If you go to those countries and just look at the people, the difference in their general health is obvious.

Dave Chapman
I was just in the hospital this morning. Someone I’m close to was having a procedure done. Looking around, I was really struck by the fact that there seemed to be an economic class thing going on. All the doctors were quite lean and thin, the nurses had a little more weight, and the patients had a lot more weight. The patients did not look as affluent to me.

Dave Chapman
I just thought, “What a fascinating commentary on our world – that the people with the greatest means are the ones who are leanest, and the people with the least means are the ones who most struggle with too much weight, too many calories.”

Chuck Benbrook
This opens up a very important discussion about access to food and the price of different food products. One of the papers that I was really delighted to read – and I’ll send it to you so you can post it as part of this podcast – was by a team of scientists at Harvard. They analyzed the nutritional quality of 50,000 food products found in typical Target, Walmart, and… there were three stores. I can’t remember what the third one was.

Chuck Benbrook
These were basically the foods in your typical American supermarket. They were able, drawing on USDA data about the nutrient composition of the foods, to calculate the average cost per calorie of different foods based on the degree of wholeness or freshness versus the degree of processing.

Chuck Benbrook
It turned out that ultra-processed foods were quite a bit cheaper than whole, fresh foods. Of course, just think about your typical supermarket. On one side, you’ve got the produce department, and you’ve got dairy and eggs on the other far side of the supermarket, but most of the inner part of the supermarket is ultra-processed food – almost all of it. All of the data shows that about 70% of the calories that Americans consume now are laden with sugar and devoid of significant nutrients.

Chuck Benbrook
Our stomachs can only take in 2,200 calories – 2,600 calories if you’re a big person and you’re in an active job. If we don’t want to gain weight, we’re stuck with that much caloric space every day. If we choose three or four servings of sugar-laden, nutrient-devoid, ultra-processed foods, we’re taking up two-thirds of the space.

Chuck Benbrook
The only way to get enough vitamin C, vitamin K, all of the other phytonutrients, all of the other minerals that we have to have – for which the government has established a Recommended Daily Allowance – is by making sure we get this much. It’s like 23 of them.

Chuck Benbrook
If you have your three servings of ultra-processed food and basically take up two-thirds of the space in your stomach and get nothing out of it, or very little out of it in terms of what you really need to stay healthy, then guess what? You have to pick really nutrient-dense, hopefully low-caloric foods for the other third of what you eat in a day if you’re going to stay healthy. Guess what? That is not happening in America.

Chuck Benbrook
This notion that everybody has a certain amount of caloric space in their gut – and if they don’t put enough nutrient-dense and healthy food in it to meet the RDAs because they’re filling it up first with ultra-processed food, or maybe just eating too much and gaining weight – is critical. Whether you’re gaining weight from organic food or conventional food, that’s bad.

Chuck Benbrook
This is at the heart of the metric that I’ve developed over the years. The Heartland Health Research Alliance has proposed to the FDA to serve as the foundation for the new front-of-food-package nutritional labeling. We were urging the FDA to basically look at the positive nutrient content of a serving of food compared to, or relative to, the calories in a serving.

Chuck Benbrook
Superfoods are the ones that deliver way more nutrients for the amount of caloric space that they take up. Junk food takes up lots of caloric space and delivers little or no nutrients. How simple can it be? That’s why I’m so excited about this work that I’ve been able to participate in with a bunch of really smart scientists on nutrition.

Chuck Benbrook
I think we know how to help people pick safer, healthier, more nutrient-dense foods if we just could overcome the economic power of the food industry that’s making a lot of money off unhealthy, ultra-processed foods and isn’t going to give that up without a fight.

Dave Chapman
I want to go to that, but I want to conclude this part of the interview with two questions. The first one is, there was talk about, “Well, we’ve tested all these chemicals, and we know they’re safe,” which we’ve already said we don’t really know what safe is. But have we tested compounds? Have we tested the way that two different chemicals used in agriculture might interact with each other in our bodies?

Chuck Benbrook
No, certainly not in any systematic way. This point comes up in the Dr. Mike podcast with Dr. Cohen and Dr. Love in a fairly confused way. It’s one of the things that I’m going to clarify in some comments on their podcast.

Chuck Benbrook
When a farmer buys a pesticide or a homeowner buys a pesticide, they’re buying a mixture of chemicals. There’s the active ingredient – glyphosate, in the case of glyphosate-based herbicides – that is largely responsible for killing the weed or bringing about the pest management benefit to the farmer or the homeowner. But there are other chemicals that are mixed in with that active ingredient that are absolutely essential to ensure that the product works.

Chuck Benbrook
For example, that it sticks to the leaf of the weed long enough to go into the weed so it can kill it – if we’re talking about a herbicide. So, the surfactants in Roundup and other glyphosate-based herbicides – these added ingredients are called surfactants – make it so that the glyphosate sticks to the surface of the weed long enough.

Chuck Benbrook
They also accelerate the penetration of the glyphosate through the epidermis of the weed leaf. It gets inside – because it has to get inside, as opposed to washing off – in order to kill the weed. But what we’ve learned, and what has really become, I think, relatively broadly known now in pesticide risk assessment circles, is that the surfactants that accelerate the movement of glyphosate through the weed epidermis do exactly the same thing when glyphosate spray solution falls on your skin. It makes the glyphosate go through your skin faster. More of it gets in, as opposed to washing off.

Chuck Benbrook
But EPA, in its wisdom, regulates applicator exposures to glyphosate-based herbicides based on studies done with just glyphosate. But no farmer is spraying just glyphosate – they’re spraying a formulation, a mixture of chemicals. One of the big problems with the way we test pesticides, the way we regulate pesticides – it’s a problem in the U.S., it’s a problem in Europe, and it’s a problem around the whole world.

Chuck Benbrook
Big problem number one is that the companies do their own testing. That’s a huge problem. Problem number two is they test just the active ingredient. They don’t test the mixtures. The added ingredients – the surfactants, the adjuvants – change the environmental fate, the metabolism, and often the toxicity.

Chuck Benbrook
Some insecticides and fungicides, Dave – the inert ingredients that are not disclosed to the public because they’re regarded as confidential business information – are benzene and vinyl chloride derivatives. Why would a pesticide company put benzene or vinyl chloride into an insecticide or a fungicide? Well, it’s pretty obvious why.

Chuck Benbrook
They want to get the canopy of the plant that they’re treating. They want that spray solution to go all over it so it comes into contact with the pests. So, they put a volatile compound in it. The fact that most people who have spent a lifetime working in this area are unaware that benzene and vinyl chloride derivatives – which are very toxic and very dangerous because of their volatility – have been as much as half of the formula of the chemicals in some EPA-approved pesticides is outrageous.

Chuck Benbrook
Because nobody knows about it, Congress doesn’t know that it’s a problem, and anybody that comes forward and tries to raise the alarm about the confidential business information protection of the actual formulas of what’s in a formulated pesticide is attacked for a bunch of reasons.

Chuck Benbrook
This is a huge issue. Political leaders and regulators around the world have to change current policy to primarily test formulated products, because that’s what people use and that’s what they’re exposed to. To not have the companies do the testing, but to have independent scientists that don’t have a dog in the fight over whether a particular formulation is safe, do the testing – so that there’s a legitimate reason to place some confidence in the testing. Then, base the regulatory decisions on the data from the pesticides in the chemical form that they’re actually applied.

Chuck Benbrook
If that had been done 30 years ago, when people started to advocate for it, we’d have a much safer set of pesticides on the market today. The three biggest pesticide human health issues, controversies, and concerns today are around glyphosate-based herbicides, chlorpyrifos and other organophosphate insecticides, and paraquat – another herbicide.

Chuck Benbrook
For all three of those, issues around these inert ingredients – the failure to disclose them to the scientific community and the failure to take into account the mixtures in calculating risks – are at the heart of why regulators have so underestimated the actual harm these formulated pesticides have led to.

Dave Chapman
Okay. Last question, and it’s right where we’re at. I felt like Dr. Love was the Joan of Arc of glyphosate. I want to say that from my perspective, glyphosate is just one of many actors in this arena, and if it were banned tomorrow, Bayer-Monsanto and Syngenta would just come up with another thing that is equally bad or worse the next day. It’s not like these chemicals are extraordinarily bad. They’re just extraordinarily widely used, which makes her impact great, in my opinion.

Dave Chapman
But I’m curious about it, because she’s really… I think it was in the Dr. Mike episode that she was just adamant that there is no proof that there’s any health issue with glyphosate. You and I both know people who have sued Bayer-Monsanto for getting very sick from using glyphosate, and they’ve won those lawsuits, which is no great treat for them.

Dave Chapman
My nephew is sick. He’ll have chemo the rest of his life, however long that might be. He has two little kids, and he did this when he worked at a camp and they wanted to go out and spray a bunch of glyphosate, and he got a form of cancer that is extraordinarily rare, unless you use glyphosate.

Dave Chapman
Let me ask you about this, because you have done a lot of work in this world around these lawsuits. You and many others were able to convince courts that, in fact, there was compelling evidence that this is a very dangerous substance and that people are getting very sick and dying from it. Could you talk about that a little bit?

Chuck Benbrook
Sure. All of your listeners know that I have served as a paid expert witness on behalf of plaintiffs in the Roundup non-Hodgkin lymphoma litigation from the beginning. I testified at the Johnson trial in 2018, which was the first trial. I’m proud of the contributions I’ve made to the litigation. I’m the primary regulatory expert and liability expert that many of the law firms have relied upon for my work and analysis.

Chuck Benbrook
I’ve had the unique opportunity to spend an enormous amount of time over the last eight years reading detailed documents, some of them 30–40 years old, from Bayer-Monsanto research – emails and discussion papers where they talk internally about their concerns about glyphosate and Roundup. I have this unusual perspective and understanding of what’s happened.

Chuck Benbrook
I have said for 40 years that glyphosate is certainly one of the greatest herbicides ever discovered. Its combination of physical and chemical properties, lack of mammalian toxicity, and efficacy are unmatched by any other herbicide that’s ever been discovered and marketed. It has, I think, the second highest chronic reference dose of any pesticide ever evaluated by the EPA.

Chuck Benbrook
What that means, Dave, is that the EPA, based on the industry studies – the Bayer-Monsanto studies – done on glyphosate toxicology, considers glyphosate to be the least or close to the least chronically toxic pesticide that they’ve ever evaluated.

Chuck Benbrook
The safety levels are set at a really high level because it’s not very toxic. But because I have followed the science, there’s absolutely no question in my mind that the chronic reference dose of glyphosate needs to be reduced in light of recent science. By recent, I mean the last decade or so, including very compelling data from the National Cancer Institute and the NIH – from government research.

Chuck Benbrook
There have been three or four really important papers published just in the last three years that solidly link use of glyphosate-based herbicides to exposures – i.e., it’s in people’s blood, it’s in people’s urine – and increased risk, increased frequency of adverse health outcomes. It’s all there.

Chuck Benbrook
Now, are there ways to raise questions about these studies? Sure. Bayer-Monsanto and the pesticide industry and its surrogates, like Dr. Love, do that very well and with considerable zeal. But it doesn’t remove the fact that science has now connected enough of the dots that I think most people – who aren’t influenced by the pesticide industry and others who share that worldview – think that it’s more likely than not that exposure to glyphosate-based herbicides is contributing to non-Hodgkin lymphoma risk, particularly among people that spray it often in a year and over several years.

Chuck Benbrook
If you look at the plaintiffs in this litigation – there are 177,000 cases that have been filed – most of those people used glyphosate for a decade or three decades, and they sprayed it 10, 20, 30, even 80 times a year. Some of them sprayed it for four to six hours a day, if they were like a landscaper or a professional applicator. It’s those people that sprayed it a lot over a long period of time.

Chuck Benbrook
The damage to their DNA from the low levels… Dr. Love is right: it’s a low level of exposure to glyphosate, and glyphosate is not a very toxic chemical. You can put your hand right down into a barrel of glyphosate and pull it out, and you’re not going to collapse and die. But if you get enough of it in your body – into your bloodstream – it goes into your bone marrow, and it affects the DNA in your stem cells in a way that can start cell growth on the way to non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

Chuck Benbrook
If your immune system doesn’t do its job and snuff out those aberrant cells that are moving toward non-Hodgkin lymphoma, then tragically, you get non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and you’re on that horrible treatment schedule that people have to go through to try to stay alive when they have this disease.

Chuck Benbrook
We understand all of this. Does that mean I think EPA should ban glyphosate? No. But I do think EPA should take very easily implemented steps to dramatically reduce exposures – both for the general public and for applicators.

Chuck Benbrook
The fact that Bayer-Monsanto has resisted these simple, common-sense ways to… when I say “dramatically reduce,” I’m talking about a 20-fold reduction in exposure risk, maybe a hundred-fold reduction in exposure and risk. If we could do that and still have farmers using glyphosate-based herbicides in most of the ways that they’re being used today, why the hell wouldn’t we do it?

Chuck Benbrook
Well, we aren’t doing it. And the reasons why are that the pesticide industry has adopted an “I’d rather fight than switch” attitude. They just will not allow EPA to take any action that restricts their right to sell their pesticides to a certain group of farmers to be applied in a certain way.

Chuck Benbrook
If the EPA feels that there needs to be a requirement for personal protective equipment – like just wearing gloves when you’re mixing, loading, and applying the pesticide – Bayer-Monsanto historically has refused to do that. Even after EPA required them to do it in 1986.

Chuck Benbrook
This is one of the obscure facts that has been presented to all the juries. In 1986, the EPA issued a registration standard for glyphosate-based herbicides. Of course, the only glyphosate-based herbicide on the market was bayer-Monsanto’s Roundup – it was still on patent. Bayer-Monsanto said, “No, we don’t feel that that’s necessary. We don’t feel it’s justified, and we’re not going to do it.”

Chuck Benbrook
EPA could not justify banning Roundup because bayer-Monsanto refused to put a requirement to wear gloves on the label. The law doesn’t allow them to do that. This is an example of a nuance in the law that really keeps the regulatory agency from having sufficient clout to force a company to put something common-sense – like “wear gloves when you apply this product” or “reformulate to a safer surfactant” – on the label.

Chuck Benbrook
The EPA hasn’t done that. The Europeans did it. The Roundup-type herbicides in the U.S. with polyethoxylated tallow amine (POEA) surfactants were banned in Europe in 2017 – all 28 countries. The industry, including Monsanto, took the POEA surfactants out and put in safer surfactants, lowering the risk of DNA damage by 20-fold, maybe 50-fold.

Chuck Benbrook
Then the Europeans said, “Okay, based on that change, we’re going to re-register it.” So since 2017, the glyphosate-based herbicide sold in Europe – the Roundup sold in Europe – has been way safer than the Roundup sold in the U.S.

Chuck Benbrook
Guess what? Every jury that has found in favor of plaintiffs had that fact drilled into their heads over the entire case by the plaintiff attorneys – even quoting an email from a Bayer-Monsanto scientist and regulatory official in Europe that said, in effect, to his colleagues – he was trying to convince the Bayer-Monsanto brass in St. Louis not just to reformulate Roundup in Europe to make it safer, but to do it all over the world for all of their customers.

Chuck Benbrook
He writes in an email, “Why should we keep making a hazardous pesticide when we know how to make a safer one?” Seriously, that’s what it says. It’s in an email. The juries see that email three, four, or five times during a four- to six-week trial. I guarantee you, it’s had a big impact on how the juries feel when they’re asked to award punitive damages – which is the money to punish Bayer-Monsanto for bad behavior.

Chuck Benbrook
This is the kind of down-in-the-weeds minutia that I’ve lived with now for eight years. It really heightens my anxiety and frustration about how things are actually getting worse in the area of pesticide regulation. The current EPA is likely to allow chlorpyrifos to come back on the market again. They’re backing off on a lot of things that were baby steps toward making pesticides safer.

Chuck Benbrook
Now, is the MAHA movement and this new recognition by Republican politicians that food quality matters, pesticide exposures matter, and the worrisome trends in American public health? I certainly hope so, but there’s been a lot of talk and not a lot of action, and we’ll just have to see how it plays out.

Dave Chapman
I would like to have another interview with you, Chuck. I want to talk about the MAHA movement and Food Is Medicine movement. Those are two significantly important developments in our world, but I think we’ll leave them for today. I just want to say that, listening to you for the last hour and a half, it’s very clear why people don’t trust authority so much, and why they feel that it’s up to them to take more responsibility for their food choices – because authority isn’t always trustworthy. We wish it were, but it isn’t.

Dave Chapman
So, people do the best they can with what they’ve got. We know that, in the end, we really need to develop a government that will protect us from large, monied interests that don’t have our best interests at heart. That’s not their purpose. Their purpose is not to protect us; their purpose is to protect their investors. We have our work cut out for us, but in the meantime, things like the Real Organic Project are pretty important.

Chuck Benbrook
Indeed. Supporting investments in the infrastructure that will make organic farming more productive, more profitable for farmers, and lower the premium. There’s a lot of published research, Dave, that shows a quarter to a third of the price premium is simply related to the lack of economies of scale as food moves along the value chain: from the farm to the processor, to the distributor, to the supermarket.

Chuck Benbrook
I’ve seen this play out in Washington State, where, 15 years ago, there were no fruit packing houses dedicated solely to organic fruit. As a result, organic fruit picked up fungicide residues routinely from the fungicides used when the packing houses were running conventional apples, pears, and cherries through the processing plant.

Chuck Benbrook
But now, organic has reached – I don’t know – 12%, 14%, maybe 15% market share, and there are plants 100% dedicated to running organic fruit. Guess what? There are no fungicides on them. None. Zero. It’s simply an infrastructure investment, an economies of scale investment.

Chuck Benbrook
Dave, just think: if one-tenth of one percent of the money that has been invested since the late 1980s in genetically engineered corn, soybeans, cotton, and a few other crops – by the private sector and by the public sector – had been invested in organic food and farming infrastructure, how much farther we would be along in this.

Chuck Benbrook
It’s an inevitable transition. It has to happen. It will happen. But why we are going so slow and so willing to accept unnecessary compromises of our own and our family’s health just mystifies me.

Dave Chapman
All right. Let us raise a glass to the day where the future that you envision is true. Chuck Benbrook, thank you so much for talking with us today.

Chuck Benbrook
Thanks, Dave.

Dave Chapman
All right.