80% of Americans Test Positive for Chemical Found in Conventionally Grown Oats That May Cause Infertility
February 16th, 2024Commentary on Cornell Researchers Developing On-Demand Male Contraceptive:
I never got around to writing it, but long ago, in the spirit of Rainbox Six, I envisioned a story that involved a sort of binary bioweapon. If a man drinks a soda containing compound A by itself, he doesn’t become infertile. If he eats a candy bar containing compound B by itself, he doesn’t become infertile. But if he consumes products containing both compound A and compound B within a few hours, he would be infertile for a week, a month or whatever.
The SPECTRE-type group gives up on eat-ze-bugs, etc. and switches to sprinkling these additives in things that sit under heat lamps in gas stations and drop out of vending machines.
It would be very insidious and difficult to find. Medical professionals would shrug shoulders and tell people having infertility problems that they were unlucky. Researchers who got close would commit suicide, etc.
I researched the topic a bit and determined that it wouldn’t make for that thrilling of a story, because it already happened in one way or another.
In a related anecdote, my children learned that students at public schools here in New Zealand are provided with and encouraged to eat snack bars made mostly out of conventionally grown oats.
I sort of half joked: “I wonder what’s in those bars…”
Via: New York Post:
Four out of five Americans are being exposed to a little-known chemical found in popular oat-based foods — including Cheerios and Quaker Oats — that is linked to reduced fertility, altered fetal growth and delayed puberty.
The Environmental Working Group published a study in the Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology on Thursday that found a staggering 80% of Americans tested positive for a harmful additive called chlormequat.
The “highly toxic agricultural chemical” is federally allowed to be used on oats and other grains imported to the US, according to the EWG.
When applied to oat and grain crops, chlormequat alters a plant’s growth, preventing it from bending over and thus making it easier to harvest, per the EWG.
“Just as troubling, we detected the chemical in 92% of oat-based foods purchased in May 2023, including Quaker Oats and Cheerios,” the nonprofit organization said in a report published alongside the group’s findings.
…
Another particularly concerning data point: After testing for the presence of chlormequat in urine collected from 96 people between 2017 and 2023, the EWG’s tests “found higher levels and more frequent detections of chlormequat in the 2023 samples … which suggests consumer exposure to chlormequat could be on the rise.”
Study: A pilot study of chlormequat in food and urine from adults in the United States from 2017 to 2023
