I sent that link on to a fellow celiac who is a friend of mine & immediately got this response:
(1) REBUTTAL from the Peterson Farm Bros
This blog has been traveling all over the Internet the last couple of days. Maybe you have seen it. Here is our official response (feel free to copy and paste text in the comment section of someone who has posted it):
"Spraying Roundup on wheat is extremely uncommon where we are from. I would guess the percentage of wheat harvested like this in Kansas (the top wheat producing state) is less than 1%. For this author to say it is "common practice" is ridiculous. (There are places where it is more common, check the comments below) In my entire life we've done that once and that was when the option was to spray one of our fields or lose the crop completely. Even then, it is illegal to harvest that soon after spraying, you have to give it several weeks and the spray will wear off, break down, and no longer be effective. On top of that, none of the spray gets on the seed anyway, and the amount sprayed is very miniscule (.2 gal/acre). I could go on and on about all the inaccuracies, but the bottom line is that articles like these are based on an agenda to remove modern, conventional agriculture that provides cheap, abundant food and replace it with organic, heavy labor driven food production that can only be afforded by the wealthy. If that's the direction certain people want to go, that's fine, but let's use facts and truth to make points, not blatant mistruths. There is room for both organic and conventional agriculture, but we should not be trying to get rid of either one, as only a select group of people can afford that. It is quite frustrating as a farmer to be accused of providing anything but safe and healthy food. If we knew that we weren't, we would change our methods." - Greg Peterson
Original blog post:
http://www.thehealthyhomeecono...
(2) MY COMMENTS about all this?
A while back, the "healthy home economist" once wrote a blog article where she insisted that celiac disease could be "cured" if people just healed their leaky guts and drank bone broth, etc. She said they could eat fermented sourdough bread (gluten) again if they were healed. She only removed the article after being bombarded with people telling her that she was dispensing false information that could be dangerous. I can't find it anywhere on her blog now. She has an agenda (which is fine as long as she has evidence to support her claims) and she is not always science-based or fact-based. I view anything she says with a skeptical eye. I think the farmer's rebuttal makes more sense than her article. IMO
She also has written about the "18 cross reactive foods with gluten, including an inflammatory article about coffee acting gluten in people
with celiac. I don't think she researches anything, she just posts inflammatory articles.
(3)I liked this comment on the article itself by
Jeanmarie Todd November 17, 2014 at 2:48 am
I’m no fan of glyphosate or GMOs, but, you may have jumped the gun on this one. I read the Dr. Davis blogpost that the Keith Lewis quotation comes from. If you read the discussion in the comments section, it comes out that the practice of spraying glyphosate on wheat before harvesting is common in Manitoba, Canada, where Mr. Lewis used to raise wheat (he retired from that and raises hay). He confirmed that in a back-and-forth discussion with another commenter, who researched the situation in Kansas, which produced more wheat than all of Canada. The upshot is, at least as of 2012, no one in Kansas was doing this nor was there any reason to believe farmers there would do so because it’s an added expense without, according to the other commenter’s research, any benefit. (The situation may be different in Canada because of latitude.) Mr. Lewis then confirmed that he was from Manitoba and this practice was widespread there and, he thought, in North Dakota. I’m not sure how much wheat is produced in North Dakota; I haven’t looked into that. But I encourage you to reread the discussion in the comments at the Wheat Belly blog that you linked to.
- See more at:
http://www.thehealthyhomeecono...
