Dr. Andrea Love

speaker

239 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Apr 2025 last heard May 2025

Dr. Andrea Love’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Checkup with Doctor Mike · Are Everyday Chemicals ACTUALLY Harming Your Health · 7 May 2025 podcast

So, naturally derived pesticides are chemicals that exist somewhere in the ether of nature, meaning they've been identified existing somewhere on this planet, and they have an anti-pest impact, right? So think about... A lot of plants try to deter predators, right?

So they produce a lot of noxious things to prevent things from eating them, to prevent fungi from infecting them and so on and so forth. So a lot of the organic pesticides are chemicals that are produced by plants naturally and they've been isolated, studied and they're now produced by industrial chemical companies to be used as organic pesticides. So these are merely chemicals

die irgendwo in der Natur existieren. Also zum Beispiel Pyrethrins sind eine Klasse von organischen Pestiziden, die in organischer Landwirtschaft verwendet oder ermittelt werden. Und ein synthetisches oder ein semisynthetisches Derivative, die Pyrethroide, ist für die Verwendung in konventioneller Landwirtschaft erlaubt.

Now pyrethroids are actually more stable in ultraviolet light, so they don't deteriorate as quickly, which means that a farmer only needs to apply them once or twice in a growing cycle, whereas pyrethrins are very unstable, so they need to be applied repeatedly to have the same pest control effect. And You know, farmers have to use pesticides. There's no way around it.

We have 8.1 billion people on this planet. It's not your backyard affluent garden. Like if we need to feed people when there are food deserts and, you know, malnutrition everywhere, pesticides are essential, right? And so we want to use the fewest amount possible that have the most specificity, the fewest off-target effects and most cost effectiveness, right? So those are actually,

Two related chemicals, one is natural, one is synthetic. They have very similar impact on their target pests. And of course, pesticides have tropism. So an insecticide is not acting on people. An herbicide like glyphosate is not acting on people. Humans don't even have the enzyme that glyphosate targets. But it's kind of a lot of that same rhetoric.

So a lot of the organic pesticides, because they're not legally permitted to be tweaked in order to improve the specificity, improve the stability, reduce the off-target effect, they actually are worse for the farmers because they have to use more of it to have the same desired effect. They're often worse for the environment because they'll target non-target species.

So, for example, there are certain fungicides that are used in organic farming that are designed to... Sorry, certain insecticides that are used in organic farming to, say, target aphids on soybean crops. But they also kill the natural predators of aphids, the insidious flower bug and the Asian lady beetle. So now you're...

was die Aphiden normalerweise töten würde, anstatt vielleicht einige der Aphiden zu töten. Nun, eine synthetische Version oder eine konventionelle Version davon hat Spezifizität gesteigert, also töte es nicht den Insidious Flower Bug, aber es töte die Aphiden.

Darüber hinaus, einfach weil ein Chemikal natural ist, gegen ein Chemikal, das synthetisch geändert wird, bedeutet das nicht, dass es besser, sicherer ist. less impactful to the environment, less ecologically damaging, healthier. In fact, decades of data have studied health impacts from organic consumption versus conventional consumption.

There's no health benefit, there's no nutritional advantage. A lot of people cherry pick a study where they look at trace levels of certain micronutrients like phosphorus and so on. That's not necessarily a reflection on organic versus conventional. It's usually... the soil or the ecosystem that it actually was growing in, right?

Because they'll pull fields in Kansas or they'll pull fields from Europe and they'll try to compare the two. And those are not comparable sites, right? You have to compare within a region that has similar soil. So when you actually look at some of the data for organic pesticides versus conventional pesticides, there are a lot that are actually worse. So for example, um, Ailey lebt in New Jersey.

Blueberry-Farming ist groß in New Jersey. Und in Blueberry-Farming gibt es viele verschiedene Mildews und Fungi, die Blueberry-Pflanzen töten. Es gibt etwas, was Mami-Berry heißt. Es gibt etwas, was Anthracnose heißt. Und wenn wir die Beeren-Kraft retten wollen, müssen wir diese Beeren So.

Dieser Koppersulfat hat eine LD50, also eine 50 Prozent lethal Dose von 300 Milligramm pro Kilogramm per Körpergewicht, richtig? Also eine niedrigere lethal Dose bedeutet, dass das Ding an einer kleineren Dose toxisch ist, richtig? Der Koppersulfat muss bis zu sechs Mal während der Erwärmungssaison zu Berry-Fields verwendet werden.

Wir sprechen also von Frühjahr bis April, März bis Juli, manchmal August, abhängig von der Hybrid-Berry, über die wir sprechen. Es muss bis zu sechs Mal während eines Erwärmungszyklus verwendet werden. Es muss zwischen 1,5 und 4 Pound Koppersulfat pro Hektar verwendet werden. Also 8000 versus 300. So a higher LD50 means it's less toxic because that means a

an individual can be subjected to that much more of that substance before hitting that toxic threshold. So that's 26.6 times less toxic than the organic fungicide that's used on the berry crops down the road on the organic berry farm.

On top of that, Mancozeb, because it's been allowed to be chemically altered using what we know about nature and what we know about science, to improve the specificity and improve the stability, only needs to be applied... two, maybe three times in a growing season, and it only needs to be applied at about 1.5 to 3 pounds per acre.

So, say we look at kind of the ends of application and we say we have a one-acre farm, we are either applying mancozeb or applying copper sulfate. You're going from, you know, anywhere from 26.6 times more toxic on the copper sulfate up to over 100 fold times more toxic if you look at the cumulative application of the entire crop season.

And so this notion that synthetic chemicals are automatically bad, that we want to reduce the exposure of them and we're going to use some sort of arbitrary blood test to look for conventional pesticides, but we're not going to actually look at the organic pesticides that are used.

And ironically, because those are less regulated, they actually don't fall under the purview of the USDA Pesticide Residue Report, which is why they're always left off. And that's why the Environmental Working Group never mentions them, because The USDA doesn't monitor them.

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