Environmental Working Group - Know your environment. Protect your health.

Why factory farms are a major threat to food safety

Anthony Lacey — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:02:49 +0000

Why factory farms are a major threat to food safety Anthony Lacey June 5, 2026

Every week, federal investigators track between 17 and 36 foodborne illness outbreaks that can cause extreme sickness and even death. Industrial livestock farming, also known as factory farming, is a main cause.

In 2019, the most recent year with complete data, the U.S. saw almost 10 million cases of foodborne illnesses, including almost 1,000 deaths, from E. coli, salmonella and other bacteria, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The harmful bacteria can contaminate raw produce like cantaloupe, lettuce, and onions or more highly processed foods like meat, poultry and ice cream.

One cause is the way large factory farms operate, including their management of the waste they generate, says the Food and Drug Administration.

Livestock waste can harbor many different types of bacteria, including a strain of E. coli that is particularly dangerous for humans. When bacteria from animal waste contaminate nearby fruit and vegetable crops, the people who eat them can get seriously sick.

Bacteria in wildlife waste and human waste sludge can also contaminate food.

Stronger FDA policies could reduce the number of foodborne illness outbreaks and better protect the health of us all.

Animal waste is more than a nuisance

Factory farms are large, concentrated facilities and feedlots that produce livestock for meat, eggs and dairy products.

In the U.S., over 90% of farm animals are raised in these facilities. If you have eaten meat in this country, you’ve almost certainly consumed some from a factory farm. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of cattle, swine, chickens, turkeys and other animals are raised in large buildings called barns, or open feedlots for cattle.

Lots of animals produce lots of manure. EWG found in 2020 that the animals in Iowa’s largest livestock facilities alone produced nearly 70 times the amount of fecal waste Iowa’s entire 3 million human population generated in the same period.

That waste is more than an inconvenience. It contains hormones, heavy metals and bacteria, including fecal coliform, E. coli, salmonella and listeria. It can also contain pathogens like giardia and pharmaceuticals such as antibiotics.

How factory farms can cause foodborne illness

There are two main ways bacteria from factory farms ends up on the fruits and vegetables we eat.

First, manure can contaminate the irrigation canals that run past feedlots, either by washing directly into the water or by blowing in contaminated dust particles from the feedlot through the air.

Without knowing whether the water is contaminated, produce farmers use it in the canals to irrigate their crops or mix it with pesticides before spraying it on crops.

Second, bacteria-laden dust from feedlots can drift onto nearby fields and settle directly on crops. Though this pathway seems to be less common, it is especially alarming, because dust particles can travel many miles through the air.

Once harvested, contaminated produce can get shipped almost anywhere in the U.S. and beyond – then sold and eaten.

Deadly E. coli outbreak in Arizona

A striking example of how a factory farm likely triggered a major outbreak: the deadly 2018 E. coli contamination of romaine lettuce from Yuma County, Ariz. Five people died and many more were sickened after eating lettuce grown in the region.

The FDA found that the E. coli strain that originated on lettuce from 36 fields on 23 farms was also found in an irrigation canal near one cattle feedlot: McElhaney Feedyard, a facility located close to much of Yuma County’s lettuce farmland.

A pool of cattle manure and wastewater at the feedlot sat within just a few feet of an irrigation canal (represented by the blue line), creating a contamination risk. (See Image 1.)

Image 1. A manure and wastewater pit that is very close to an irrigation canal at McElhaney Feedyard

Source: EWG, from Department of Agriculture National Agriculture Imagery Program, 2021 imagery

The problem isn’t limited to factory farms in Arizona.

It’s a risk wherever these facilities exist, especially in states that grow much of the produce consumed in the U.S. – like California, where farmers cultivate more than one-third of the nation’s vegetables and three-fourths of its fruit.

A recent EWG analysis found that 42% of California’s large factory farms are located within a quarter-mile of a waterway commonly used for irrigation. Some are only feet away. One cattle feedlot was situated just 35 feet from a canal.

What the FDA can do to make food safer

Protecting yourself is harder than it sounds. Bacteria can contaminate both organic and conventionally grown produce. And studies show that washing lettuce, for example, does not significantly reduce E. coli – so even careful consumers can still get sick.

That’s why it’s so important for the FDA to protect people from bacterial outbreaks on food.

A practical first step would be to require tests of irrigation water to catch harmful bacteria and prevent it from getting onto crops.

After a series of E. coli outbreaks linked to leafy greens in the early 2000s, the FDA was required to set water safety standards for farms. While these rules, finalized in 2024, require farmers to assess the risks to their irrigation water, they don’t mandate water testing. This gap in oversight leaves farmers to mitigate their risk themselves.

Other federal agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, could also more rigorously monitor farm manure management.

Foodborne illness is not inevitable. It’s a public health problem the FDA and EPA have the tools to address, preventing millions of illnesses and saving lives.

Areas of Focus

Food & Water

Farming & Agriculture

Authors

Sarah Reinhardt, MPH, RDN

June 9, 2026

Dirty Dozen Food Chemicals: BHA

rcoleman — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 19:38:16 +0000

Dirty Dozen Food Chemicals: BHA rcoleman June 4, 2026

EWG’s recommendation

Avoid or limit foods containing BHA.

BHA has been classified as a possible carcinogen, or cancer-causing chemical. Studies have shown BHA to produce oxidative stress, which occurs when highly reactive molecules build up and damage cells in the body. This can disrupt cellular function, damage DNA and interfere with the body’s hormonal system.

What is BHA?

BHA, or butylated hydroxyanisole, is a preservative that prevents oxidation, extending the shelf life of fats and oils in packaged foods. BHA is also added to cosmetic products as a preservative.

Which foods contain BHA?

BHA is commonly added to frozen pizza and other frozen meals and appetizers. It is also found in processed meat, including deli meat, bacon, hot dogs and sausage and packaged snacks containing oil, such as cookies and biscuits.

Look for BHA in product ingredient lists, usually below or next to the nutrition facts panel, on the back of the package. It may also appear as “butylated hydroxyanisole.” BHA may also be added to food packaging, which companies are not required to disclose.

How is BHA regulated?

The Food and Drug Administration is responsible for overseeing food additives and other ingredients. BHA was generally recognized as safe in 1958 and approved for use in food by the FDA in 1961.

In early 2026 the FDA identified BHA as a top priority for review of chemicals already in the food supply and requested public feedback on BHA’s use and safety.

In response, EWG described the FDA move as a plan to plan rather than the agency taking decisive action. EWG in its public comment letter on the plan pointed the agency to the abundance of evidence of BHA risks accumulated over decades.

BHA is classified as “possibly carcinogenic to humans” by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer. The National Toxicology Program concluded BHA was “reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen.”

It is also on California’s Proposition 65 list of substances known to cause cancer.

In 2025, West Virginia banned BHA from all food sold in the state, beginning in 2028.

What does the science say about BHA?

When BHA breaks down in the body it can cause an imbalance between unstable molecules and protective molecules, a process called oxidative stress.

Oxidative stress can lead to damaged cells and result in structural damage to DNA and cellular proteins, which is associated with cancer and other diseases in humans. Animal studies have observed DNA damage in tissues like the colon and glandular stomach, organs that are found in the human body.

A study of breast cancer cells has also linked BHA to endocrine disruption, or interference with the body’s hormones. Prolonged exposure to BHA in one rodent study reduced testicular function in mice.

BHA can also interact with other food chemicals of concern, like propyl gallate, to cause hormone disruption, producing both estrogenic and anti-estrogenic effects.

Find out more

Learn more about recommendations relating to BHA – and the full EWG Dirty Dozen list of food chemicals – on EWG’s research page.

EWG’s Food Scores provides ratings for more than 150,000 foods and drinks based on nutrition, ingredients and processing concerns, and flags unhealthy ultra-processed foods to help you identify alternatives.

BHA is also added to cosmetic products as a preservative. EWG’s Skin Deep® cosmetic database helps to identify harmful chemicals in personal care and beauty products. EWG Verified® products meet the strictest criteria for transparency and health.

And the Healthy Living app lets you take these tools with you on the go.

Areas of Focus

Food & Water

Food

Ultra-Processed Foods

Toxic Chemicals

Food Chemicals

Authors

Sarah Reinhardt, MPH, RDN

June 4, 2026

EWG evaluation of food chemicals: BHA

rcoleman — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 19:35:51 +0000

EWG evaluation of food chemicals: BHA rcoleman June 4, 2026

David Andrews, Ph.D.

Sydney Evans, MPH

Dayna de Montagnac, MPH

Tasha Stoiber, Ph.D.

Sarah Reinhardt, MPH, RDN

Jump to:

What is BHA and why is it added to foods?

Where is BHA found in foods?

What is the regulatory status of BHA?

Are foods containing BHA ultra-processed?

Is BHA allowed in organic foods?

What are the potential health harms associated with BHA?

Uncertainties and need for more research

Other product use categories

Cited resources

June 5, 2026

EWG’s recommendation

BHA is an ingredient of concern. EWG suggests limiting consumption of foods with this ingredient.

The National Toxicology Program in 1991 classified BHA as “reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen.” It has been listed as a known carcinogen under California’s Proposition 65 since 1990.

BHA is also shown to produce oxidative stress, which can disrupt cellular function and damage DNA and cells (Esazadeh et al. 2024; Ousji & Sleno, 2020; Sasaki et al 2002). These mechanisms are associated with cancer development.

Multiple animal studies have identified BHA as an endocrine-disrupting chemical, affecting reproductive health through estrogenic and androgenic activity (Pop et al 2018; Ham et al 2020).

Science analysis

What is BHA and why is it added to foods?

BHA, or butylated hydroxyanisole, is a preservative that prevents oxidation, extending the shelf life of fats and oils in processed foods.

Where is BHA found in foods?

BHA is typically added to packaged and frozen foods like frozen pizza, meats, biscuits and other processed goods that contain oil.

BHA is used in 1,726 of the 172,081 foods added to EWG’s Food Scores between 2023 and 2025.

Top 15 food categories with the most products containing BHA (by supermarket shelf)

^{Source: EWG’s Food Scores. Label created between 2023-01-01 and 2025-10-22}

What is the regulatory status of BHA?

The Food and Drug Administration classified BHA as GRAS in 1958 and approved it for use in food in 1961.

It is commonly added to food as an antioxidant, with the limitation that the total antioxidant content not exceed 0.02% of the total fat or oil content of the food.

In early 2026, the FDA identified BHA as a top priority for review of chemicals currently in the food supply and issued a request for information on its use and safety. EWG has also issued a statement and comment letter in response to this request.

BHA was first evaluated for use in food in the European Union in 1989, following the international safety benchmark established that same year by the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives. Both that committee and the EU Scientific Committee for Food set an acceptable daily intake (ADI) of 0.5 mg/kg body/day.

In 2011, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) re-evaluated BHA and established an ADI of 1.0 mg/kg bw/day. This change occurred because the safety authority concluded that the forestomach tumors observed in rodent studies were not relevant to human risk assessment, since humans do not possess a forestomach.

However, EFSA noted data gaps, including questions about BHA’s potential for endocrine effects.

Recent research shows that BHA’s risks extend beyond the forestomach. Studies have shown DNA damage in human-relevant organs like the glandular stomach and significant endocrine-disrupting effects on reproductive health (Sasaki et al., 2002; Pop et al., 2018).

BHA is classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as a Group 2B carcinogen, and the National Toxicology Program concluded it was “reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen.”

BHA is also on the state of California’s Proposition 65 list of substances known to cause cancer.

In 2025, West Virginia banned BHA from all food sold in the state beginning in 2028.

Are foods containing BHA ultra-processed?

BHA and other synthetic preservatives are common ingredients in ultra-processed food, or UPF. As an ingredient synthesized in a laboratory, it falls into the NOVA framework as a UPF ingredient. (Monteiro et al 2019).

Under a recent California law defining UPF, BHA would qualify as a UPF based on its property as a flavor enhancer. (California Assembly Bill 1264).

Is BHA allowed in organic foods?

Under Department of Agriculture organic standards, synthetic substances like BHA are prohibited in certified organic foods.

What are the potential health harms associated with BHA?

As an antioxidant, BHA protects food from spoilage. But its breakdown in the body into metabolites can trigger production of reactive oxygen species, which causes oxidative stress and subsequent cell damage. Oxidative stress is associated with cancer and numerous other diseases.

Research also stresses the potential of BHA to cause genotoxicity at high concentrations, resulting in structural damage to DNA and cellular proteins (Xu et al 2021; Zhang et al 2023).

DNA damage was observed in vivo within animal tissues, the colon and glandular stomach, which are shared by humans, whereas the forestomach (the site of BHA-induced tumors in earlier rodent studies) is not (Sasaki et al 2002).

Furthermore, a study in breast cancer cells has linked BHA to endocrine disruption, exhibiting both estrogenic and androgenic activities (Pop et al 2018). Prolonged exposure to BHA in one rodent study reduced testicular function in mice (Ham et al 2020).

There is potential for BHA to work additively with other food chemicals of concern, like propyl gallate, to induce anti‐estrogenic activity (Pop et al 2018).

Uncertainties and need for more research

BHA can metabolize into TBHQ, another EWG Dirty Dozen food additive (Ousji & Sleno, 2020).

Biomonitoring studies of TBHQ and examination of exposure through consumption of foods containing BHA are needed to see whether typical intake is higher than the acceptable daily intake.

BHA has been detected in human breast milk (Zhang et al 2020), the placenta (Du et al 2019), and adipose tissue (Conacher et al 1986), indicating a need for improved safety assessments of BHA.

Older studies observed the development of cancer cells in the forestomachs of rats exposed to BHA (Ito et al 1983; Ito et al 1986; Hirose et al 1987). But research on humans has been limited. (Zhang et al 2023; Botterweck 2000; Hasenböhler 2026).

More studies are needed on the cumulative effects of BHA and similar antioxidant preservatives, such as BHT and TBHQ (Hasenböhler 2026).

Other product use categories

BHA is also used as a preservative in cosmetic products. The ingredient scores a 7 in EWG’s Skin Deep® database and is not allowed in EWG Verified® products.

Cited resources

Global health and regulatory agencies

Office of the Commissioner. (2026, February 10). FDA launches assessment of BHA, a common food chemical preservative. U.S. Food And Drug Administration. FDA Launches Assessment of BHA, a Common Food Chemical Preservative.
The National List | Agricultural Marketing Service. (n.d.). The National List | Agricultural Marketing Service.
National Toxicology Program, Department of Health and Human Services. (2011). Report on Carcinogens, Fifteenth Edition. In National Toxicology Program, Department of Health and Human Services [Report]. Report on Carcinogens, Fifteenth Edition - Butylated Hydroxyanisole.
Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives. (1989). Evaluation of certain food additives and contaminants: thirty-third report of the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives. WHO Technical Report Series, (776), 1-64. https://iris.who.int/server/api/core/bitstreams/c4ccf354-a21d-428e-87fe-4b0fa9f810df/content.
EFSA Panel on Food Additives and Nutrient Sources added to Food (ANS). (2011). Scientific Opinion on the re-evaluation of butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA) (E 320) as a food additive. EFSA Journal, 9(10), 2392 https://doi.org/10.2903/j.efsa.2011.2392.

Legislation

21 CFR 182.3169 – Butylated hydroxyanisole. (n.d.). https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-21/chapter-I/subchapter-B/part-182/subpart-D/section-182.3169.
Real Food, Healthy Kids Act, A.B. 1264, Chapter 467, Cal. Stat. (2025). https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1264.
Banning certain products from food in West Virginia, House Bill 2354, (2025). https://legiscan.com/WV/text/HB2354/id/3177443.

Comprehensive review and frameworks

Monteiro, C.A., Cannon, G., Levy, R.B., Moubarac, J., Louzada, M.L., Rauber, F., Khandpur, N., Cediel, G., Neri, D., Martinez-Steele, E., Baraldi, L.G., & Jaime, P.C. (2019). Ultra-processed foods: what they are and how to identify them. Public Health Nutrition, 22(5), 936–941. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1368980018003762.
Xu, X., Liu, A., Hu, S., Ares, I., Martínez-Larrañaga, M., Wang, X., Martínez, M., Anadón, A., & Martínez, M. (2021). Synthetic phenolic antioxidants: Metabolism, hazards and mechanism of action. Food Chemistry, 353, 129488. Synthetic phenolic antioxidants: Metabolism, hazards and mechanism of action - ScienceDirect.
Zhang, X., Diao, M., & Zhang, Y. (2023b). A review of the occurrence, metabolites and health risks of butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA). Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, 103(13), 6150–6166. https://doi.org/10.1002/jsfa.12676
Pop, A., Kiss, B., & Loghin, F. (2013). Endocrine disrupting effects of butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA - E320). Clujul Medical, 86(1), 16–20. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26527908/.
Esazadeh, K., Dolatabadi, J. E. N., Andishmand, H., Mohammadzadeh‐Aghdash, H., Mahmoudpour, M., Kermanshahi, M. N., & Roosta, Y. (2024). Cytotoxic and genotoxic effects of tert‐butylhydroquinone, butylated hydroxyanisole and propyl gallate as synthetic food antioxidants. Food Science & Nutrition, 12(10), 7004–7016. https://doi.org/10.1002/fsn3.4373.
Ousji, O., & Sleno, L. (2020). Identification of in vitro metabolites of synthetic phenolic antioxidants BHT, BHA, and TBHQ by LC-HRMS/MS. International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 21(24), 9525. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms21249525.

Health-impact studies

Ham, J., Lim, W., You, S., & Song, G. (2019). Butylated hydroxyanisole induces testicular dysfunction in mouse testis cells by dysregulating calcium homeostasis and stimulating endoplasmic reticulum stress. The Science of the Total Environment, 702, 134775. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.134775.
Pop, A., Drugan, T., Gutleb, A. C., Lupu, D., Cherfan, J., Loghin, F., & Kiss, B. (2018). Estrogenic and anti‐estrogenic activity of butylparaben, butylated hydroxyanisole, butylated hydroxytoluene and propyl gallate and their binary mixtures on two estrogen responsive cell lines (T47D‐Kbluc, MCF‐7). Journal of Applied Toxicology, 38(7), 944–957. https://doi.org/10.1002/jat.3601.
Sasaki, Y. F., Kawaguchi, S., Kamaya, A., Ohshita, M., Kabasawa, K., Iwama, K., Taniguchi, K., & Tsuda, S. (2002). The comet assay with 8 mouse organs: results with 39 currently used food additives. Mutation Research/Genetic Toxicology and Environmental Mutagenesis, 519(1-2), 103-119.
Ito, N., Fukushima, S., Hagiwara, A., Shibata, M., & Ogiso, T. (1983). Carcinogenicity of butylated hydroxyanisole in F344 rats. Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 70(2), 343-352.
Ito, N., Fukushima, S., Tamano, S., Hirose, M., & Hagiwara, A. (1986). Dose response in butylated hydroxyanisole induction of forestomach carcinogenesis in F344 rats. Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 77(6), 1261–1265.
Hirose, M., Masuda, A., Tsuda, H., Uwagawa, S., & Ito, N. (1987). Enhancement of BHA-induced proliferative rat forestomach lesion development by simultaneous treatment with other antioxidants. Carcinogenesis, 8(11), 1731–1735. https://doi.org/10.1093/carcin/8.11.1731.
Botterweck, A. A. M., Verhagen, H., Goldbohm, R. A., Kleinjans, J., & van den Brandt, P. A. (2000). Intake of butylated hydroxyanisole and butylated hydroxytoluene and stomach cancer risk: results from analyses in the Netherlands Cohort Study. Food and Chemical Toxicology, 38(7), 599-605. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0278-6915(00)00042-9.
Hasenböhler, A., Javaux, G., Payen de la Garanderie, M., Szabo de Edelenyi, F., Yvroud-Hoyos, P., Agaësse, C., De Sa, A., Huybrechts, I., Pierre, F., Audebert, M., Coumoul, X., Julia, C., Kesse-Guyot, E., Allès, B., Deschamps, V., Hercberg, S., Chassaing, B., Srour, B., Deschasaux-Tanguy, M., & Touvier, M. (2026). Intake of food additive preservatives and incidence of cancer: results from the NutriNet-Santé prospective cohort. The BMJ, 392, bmj-2025-084917. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj-2025-084917.

Biomonitoring Studies

Zhang, Y., Du, B., Ge, J., Liu, L., Zhu, M., Li, J., & Zeng, L. (2020). Co-occurrence of and infant exposure to multiple common and unusual phenolic antioxidants in human breast milk. Environmental Science & Technology Letters, 7(3), 206–212. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.estlett.0c00104
Conacher, H. B., Iverson, F., Lau, P. Y., & Page, B. D. (1986). Levels of BHA and BHT in human and animal adipose tissue: interspecies extrapolation. Food and chemical toxicology : an international journal published for the British Industrial Biological Research Association, 24(10-11), 1159–1162. https://doi.org/10.1016/0278-6915(86)90302-9
Du, B., Zhang, Y., Lam, J. C. W., Pan, S., Huang, Y., Chen, B., Lan, S., Li, J., Luo, D., & Zeng, L. (2019). Prevalence, Biotransformation, and Maternal Transfer of Synthetic Phenolic Antioxidants in Pregnant Women from South China. Environmental science & technology, 53(23), 13959–13969. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.9b04709

New research: It’s time to treat ultra-processed foods like tobacco

Ketura Persellin — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 20:49:45 +0000

New research: It’s time to treat ultra-processed foods like tobacco Ketura Persellin June 3, 2026

A special health journal issue on ultra-processed food, or UPF, calls for bold policy action to address the growing public health crisis – and that efforts focused solely on personal responsibility are likely to fail.

The collection of 17 studies and editorials, just published in the American Journal of Public Health, brings together breaking research on the health harms of UPF.

The issue also sheds light on the tobacco industry’s lasting negative impact on today’s food landscape. It also shows why it might be time to start treating UPF with the same public health concern as tobacco, and shares policy and legal strategies that can help.

Health harms of UPF keep piling up

These studies add to a robust body of evidence linking UPF to chronic diseases like cancer, depression, Type 2 diabetes, and heart, kidney and gastrointestinal diseases.

One study provides new evidence that UPF could contribute to cognitive decline in older adults. It found that people who consumed the highest amount of UPF were at 58% higher risk of dementia, compared to those who consumed the lowest amount of UPF.

Researchers also call out the threats to public health from the UPF industry, which drives global plastic pollution, environmental degradation and greenhouse gas emissions.

Get your free guide: EWG's Guide to Food Additives

Tobacco research reshaped the U.S. food system

Multiple studies published in the special issue reviewed internal tobacco industry documents to reveal how it transformed the U.S. food system – for the worse.

In the 1980s, major tobacco companies like R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris acquired food and beverage giants like Kraft, Del Monte and Nabisco, bringing their research and technology with them to develop harmful UPF.

The new studies show that the tobacco industry used consumer research on cigarettes to help with developing new ultra-processed products for kids, including Lunchables. Food companies created “king size” and “light” versions of snack foods, mimicking “king size” and “slim” cigarettes.

The tobacco industry also revived its playbook for fighting public health protections.

When experts began to sound the alarm about the health risks of smoking, the tobacco industry responded with what would become its signature script: deny harm, manufacture uncertainty with biased research and use political influence to prevent government action.

Some of the biggest producers of UPF are now using these tactics in seeking to block state food chemical laws.

It’s not you – it’s the UPF

An unhealthy diet is often framed as a personal failure. But in fact, many structural factors impact our ability to eat well.

The journal issue authors argue that ultra-processed foods are prominent in our diets because they are widely available, relatively affordable and highly palatable.

UPF make up an estimated 73% of the U.S. food supply, and a new study from the special issue finds our food landscape is not changing for the better. During the past 20 years, the growth of restaurants and fast-food locations in so-called “food swamps” has far outpaced the growth of healthy grocery retailers.

Ultra-processed foods also tend to be more affordable than less processed alternatives. As a result, avoiding UPF may take more time, money and careful planning. These expectations are unrealistic, if not impossible, for households already experiencing food insecurity or concerned about the cost of groceries.

As several authors write, some UPF should be considered addictive. One study found that 90% of food with addictive potential were ultra-processed, and new polling shows that 70% of people believe UPF are addictive. These qualities likely stem from the “consumer-driven product development” the tobacco industry used to create foods with maximum pleasure and appeal.

Policies for less processed food

Based on the parallels between UPF and tobacco, the path forward is policy – not personal responsibility.

The study authors recommend a range of interventions, including:

A clear and scientifically supported federal definition of UPF, based on the NOVA classification system, that works for practical policy applications
Front-of-pack labeling requirements and marketing restrictions, with a focus on child-targeted marketing
Legal action by state attorneys general against food companies on behalf of the public, with settlement funds directed to health initiatives
Institutional procurement and other policies that limit UPF and provide more minimally processed foods in places like schools.

Meaningful progress may be possible. A national survey featured in the special journal issue found broad bipartisan public support for a range of governmental and legal interventions to address the health harms of UPF.

What you can do now

Solving our UPF problem requires large, systemic change. In the meantime, people still need help shopping for their families.

Check ingredient lists and nutrition facts, usually found on the back of food packages. Look for more whole foods and avoid longer lists of additives and chemicals you probably wouldn’t find in a home kitchen.

For extra help, take a look at EWG’s Food Scores, which provides ratings for more than 150,000 foods and drinks based on nutrition, ingredients and processing. Food Scores also flags unhealthy UPF and can help with identifying healthier alternatives.

Shoppers on the go can also use EWG’s Healthy Living app.

Finally, follow Fed UP! – a new coalition of scientists, researchers and public health advocates dedicated to exposing the harms of UPF and showing how our food system shapes our health.

Areas of Focus

Ultra-Processed Foods

Authors

Sarah Reinhardt, MPH, RDN

June 3, 2026

In major win for U.S. consumers, FDA approves first new sunscreen ingredient in 25 years

Iris Myers — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 13:48:51 +0000

In major win for U.S. consumers, FDA approves first new sunscreen ingredient in 25 years Iris Myers June 3, 2026

WASHINGTON – In a landmark decision for public health and consumer protection, the Food and Drug Administration today finalized its approval of the first new ultraviolet filter in more than 25 years deemed a safe and effective active ingredient in U.S. sunscreens.

The chemical, bemotrizinol, also known as BEMT, will give American consumers access to a level of ultraviolet A protection that has until now been unavailable on U.S. store shelves. The regulatory review process leading up to this approval took more than two decades.

Bemotrizinol offers a stable non-mineral option that doesn’t break down in the sun, unlike one of two previously approved UVA filters, avobenzone.

Sunscreen products formulated with non-mineral active ingredients are often the consumer’s preference. That’s because mineral-based sunscreens often leave a white cast on the skin, a quality that doesn’t work for many people, especially people of color.

The Environmental Working Group, which since 2019 has urged the agency to allow bemotrizinol to be added to sunscreens, hailed the decision a monumental victory for health and wellness.

Closing the UVA gap

“This is a great day for American consumers and everyone who has fought to improve sunscreen options and close the UVA protection gap in U.S. sunscreens,” said David Andrews, Ph.D., chief science officer at EWG.

“For decades, Americans have used outdated sunscreen tech while the rest of the world moved forward. The approval of bemotrizinol will help change that. The FDA’s go-ahead will finally bring more effective, safer sun protection to American store shelves.

“This is a win that has been a long time coming,” said Andrews.

What sunscreens deliver

Traditional U.S. sunscreens excel at blocking the radiation that causes visible sunburns, ultraviolet B rays. But they routinely fail to shield against deep-penetrating UVA rays, which drive premature aging, suppress the immune system and are the primary contributor to skin cancer, according to the American Cancer Society.

Skin cancer is the mostly commonly diagnosed cancer in the U.S., claiming more than one life every hour, with estimates of over 200,000 cases of both types of melanoma predicted in 2026, according to the Melanoma Research Foundation.

EWG’s peer-reviewed research found U.S. sunscreens deliver on average just 24% of the UVA protection implied by their sun protection factor, or SPF, labels. Most Americans reaching for high-SPF products get just a fraction of the protection they believe they’re buying.

Today’s approval is the most significant step in a generation toward fixing that problem.

“For too long, American consumers have been applying sunscreen and believing they were fully protected, not knowing that their product was delivering far less UVA protection than the label implied,” said Alexa Friedman, Ph.D., senior scientist at EWG.

“Bemotrizinol changes the calculus of sun care. It is highly photostable, meaning it won’t break down when hot summer sun hits your skin – unlike avobenzone, currently the only non-mineral filter in the U.S. that provides meaningful UVA coverage,” she said.

“And it provides strong, stable broad-spectrum protection against both UVA and UVB radiation. Better yet, unlike the older non-mineral filters, it can be combined with zinc oxide to provide strong broad spectrum protection with less white cast.

“American consumers deserve access to the best available sun protection. Today they’re finally getting closer to it,” added Friedman.

What is bemotrizinol and why is it better?

Bemotrizinol has been used safely in sunscreens across Europe and Asia since 1999 under brand names including Tinosorb® S by BASF and Parsol® Shield by DSM. The ingredient has amassed a 27-year safety track record abroad, though some of those jurisdictions have weaker data requirements than the U.S.

The original application for FDA approval was filed in 2005 under a regulatory process that has since been discontinued. One company, DSM, submitted its most recent request to the FDA in 2024, under an updated regulatory process established by the CARES Act. It has taken more than two decades of regulatory review to reach today’s approval.

Data submitted to the FDA confirms that at concentrations up to 6%, bemotrizinol is minimally absorbed through the skin, with average absorption levels below the concentration the FDA considers indicative of systemic exposure. Compare that to oxybenzone, which was detected in blood at 515 times the FDA’s threshold of concern after a single weekend of application. Bemotrizinol does not meaningfully enter the bloodstream.

The FDA’s review also included a two-year animal study that found no evidence of cancer-causing effects when bemotrizinol is applied to skin. A multigenerational reproductive study found no harmful effects on reproductive outcomes or offspring development.

Skin irritation tests found bemotrizinol was not irritating at permitted concentrations.

The European Union’s Scientific Committee on Consumer Safety reached the same conclusions as far back as 1999.

Crucially, bemotrizinol solves problems current U.S. sunscreen ingredients cannot.

Zinc oxide and avobenzone are the only two UV filters in U.S. sunscreens that provide meaningful UVA protection. But avobenzone is chemically unstable – it breaks down in sunlight, reducing its effectiveness precisely when it is needed most. Avobenzone’s breakdown products have been linked to allergic reactions.

Zinc oxide, for all its ability to provide the most stable, balanced broad-spectrum UVA and UVB protection, leaves a white cast after it’s been applied.

Until today, the FDA had proposed that only sunscreens containing zinc oxide and titanium dioxide – both mineral ingredients – would be generally recognized as safe and effective.

What comes next

Today’s approval of bemotrizinol triggers 18 months’ exclusive marketing rights in the U.S. of Parsol Shield, a proprietary bemotrizinol formulation.

After that period, other manufacturers may use it in their formulations, driving broader availability and more competitive pricing.

Consumers shopping for sunscreen with bemotrizinol should look for “bemotrizinol” or “BEMT” in the active ingredients list or the trade name Parsol Shield on product packaging. It may also be listed by its internationally standardized name, bis-ethylhexyloxyphenol methoxyphenyl triazine.

EWG will update its Guide to Sunscreens as products with bemotrizinol reach the market.

In the meantime, EWG’s top recommendation for daily use remains mineral sunscreens formulated with zinc oxide, which provide the most stable and balanced broad-spectrum UVA and UVB protection currently available on U.S. shelves.

Good news – but a broken system remains

Today’s approval is cause for genuine celebration. It is also a reminder of how far the U.S. regulatory system still has to go.

Even with bemotrizinol added to the mix, U.S. sunscreen formulators will have access to 16 approved UV filters. European formulators have access to approximately 30.

In 2019 and again in 2021, the FDA proposed meaningful reforms to sunscreen regulation that included stronger UVA standards, SPF value limits, better labeling and updated safety data requirements. None of those reforms has been finalized.

Other sunscreen manufacturers have so far been unwilling to produce the safety data the FDA needs to approve additional new filters.

“This approval is a triumph of consumer advocacy, but it also shines a harsh spotlight on a federal system stuck in neutral,” said Melanie Benesh, EWG’s vice president for government affairs.

“Meanwhile, sunscreen manufacturers are refusing to provide the FDA with safety data for other UV filters, prioritizing corporate secrecy over public health. American consumers are then left with fewer options than people in Europe and Asia have had for decades.

“Congress must step in. We need binding deadlines for chemical testing and real enforcement to pull non-compliant, unsafe products from the market entirely. American families have waited long enough.

“Companies must also do more. Manufacturers of additional sunscreen filters available internationally should request market access from the FDA and provide the FDA with the necessary data so consumers have more options,” Benesh added.

How to navigate store shelves

While bemotrizinol products make their way to store shelves, the best sunscreen is the one that actually gets used. Here’s how to choose strong sun protection today:

Prioritize zinc oxide. Mineral sunscreens with zinc oxide provide the most stable, balanced broad-spectrum UVA and UVB protection available and are EWG’s top recommendation for daily use.

For non-mineral sunscreens, look for products formulated with 3% avobenzone and check EWG’s Guide to Sunscreens for options that meet EWG’s safety and efficacy standards.

Avoid oxybenzone and octinoxate, which are linked to hormone disruption, and skip products with undisclosed “fragrance.”

Be wary of high SPF numbers. SPF 50 blocks 98% of UVB rays. SPF 100 blocks just 1% more. The negligible difference can create a false sense of security, since high-SPF products often provide no better UVA protection than lower-SPF alternatives.

Use EWG’s tools. Shoppers can search the 2026 Guide to Sunscreens, use the EWG Healthy Living app to scan products while they shop, and look for the EWG Verified® mark, which requires sunscreens to exceed both U.S. and European UVA protection standards.

###

The Environmental Working Group is a nonprofit, non-partisan organization that empowers people to live healthier lives in a healthier environment. Through research, advocacy and unique education tools, EWG drives consumer choice and civic action. Visit www.ewg.org for more information.

Areas of Focus

Personal Care Products

Sunscreen

Bemotrizinol offers stronger UVA protection, closing decades-old protection gap with sunscreens sold abroad

Press Contact

Iris Myers

iris@ewg.org

(202) 939-9126

June 9, 2026

With New York Legislature adjourning June 4, advocates urge swift passage of bill to ban Parkinson’s pesticide

Anthony Lacey — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 19:36:48 +0000

With New York Legislature adjourning June 4, advocates urge swift passage of bill to ban Parkinson’s pesticide Anthony Lacey June 2, 2026

ALBANY, N.Y. – Ahead of New York’s legislative session ending June 4, environmentalists and other advocates are urging state lawmakers to pass a bill banning paraquat, a widely used herbicide with links to Parkinson’s disease, childhood leukemia and other serious health harms.

At a virtual briefing Tuesday, representatives from the Parkinson’s Foundation, American Parkinson Disease Association, Environmental Working Group and allied advocates called for lawmakers to back the legislation, A.10074A/S.9094A. A medical expert and a person living with Parkinson’s disease also talked about the urgent need to pass the bill.

If enacted, it would make New York the second state to prohibit the toxic weedkiller, after Vermont last month enacted its landmark ban on the use of paraquat.

The bill, led by Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal (D,WF-Assembly District 67) and Sen. Pete Harckham (D,WF-40th Senate District), would deliver critical protections for farmworkers and rural communities who face the greatest exposure risk from paraquat. It would represent a significant step in shielding future generations from the crop chemical.

‘Very challenging disease’

More than 70 countries – including China, where most paraquat is produced – have already banned paraquat, yet it remains legal and widely used in the U.S. New Jersey and Pennsylvania are among other states now weighing similar restrictions.

During the virtual briefing, Rebecca Gilbert, M.D., Ph.D., chief mission officer of the American Parkinson Disease Association, described the full burden of the disease and the urgency of acting on preventable risk factors, like exposure to paraquat used on U.S. farm fields. She said:

As a doctor, I see people with Parkinson’s, and I can tell you that it is a very challenging disease to live with. . . . And the disease may be famous for causing tremor, which can be very challenging, but there’s much more than that.
“There’s stiffness, slowness, falls and then a lot of symptoms that are not related to movement at all, like depression or anxiety, sleep, problems, hallucinations, problems with cognition.
In laboratory studies, paraquat can very clearly damage the very brain cells that die in Parkinson’s disease. . . . And so putting paraquat onto cells in a laboratory can basically recreate the disease.

Forever changing lives

Gilbert continued:

It’s a disease that steals independence and it slowly steals it in a way where the person with the disease feels that they can’t control what it’s stealing from them and that is a situation that’s very difficult to be in. And it affects not just the person diagnosed but the entire family with the care partner responsibilities, financial stress and social isolation.
. . . I want to highlight that Parkinson’s is not just a disease of the elderly, as it is often thought of, because there is such a thing as young onset Parkinson’s that can be diagnosed in those under the age of 50, people in their 30s and 40s, sometimes even in their 20s.
And these individuals are given this news when they’re raising their children, building their careers, and the diagnosis then forever changes the trajectory of their lives.
So, when evidence mounts that there’s a known and preventable environmental exposure that contributes to the risk of Parkinson’s, we all have a responsibility to act, because we can do better.
Banning paraquat is something that we can do as a community to protect ourselves. So this is not about politics. This is about public health.

Protecting public health

At the press event, Mike Mooney, a former landscaper and resident of Pittsford, N.Y., who is living with Parkinson’s disease, spoke about his diagnosis. He explained why he believes a ban is a straightforward public health decision:

[A]fter diagnosis . . . one of the first things I did was get the genetic testing that’s available to see if you have any known genetic links to Parkinson’s. And for me, it’s not really a unique story from that standpoint because only 12.5 percent or so of people with Parkinson’s have any genetic link . . . so 80-plus percent, or more . . . have no known genetic link. . . . It’s crazy.
So when I see countries like China producing this [paraquat], but they banned it for their people . . . I just ask the question, what are we doing? It makes no sense.
My view, the number one role of the government should be to the people. And there’s no public trust right now. Nobody knows what is going on with these chemicals. They don’t know. . . .
It’s like Russian roulette . . . but we know that one sip of paraquat will kill you. And it just seems like a no-brainer for us to ban this chemical.

New York can be a leader

Jessica Hernandez, legislative director at EWG, warned that inaction this session would leave New Yorkers exposed for years to come.

“New York has an opportunity to lead on this issue and help prevent future cases of Parkinson’s disease,” she said. “We hope New York will be the second state in the nation to ban paraquat and urge the legislature to pass the Rosenthal-Harckham bill this session.”

###

Parkinson’s patients, medical experts and environmental health groups unite in calling for New York to become second state to prohibit toxic weedkiller paraquat

Press Contact

Alex Formuzis

alex@ewg.org

(202) 667-6982

June 2, 2026

5 viral – but problematic – TikTok tanning trends

JR Culpepper — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 18:12:01 +0000

5 viral – but problematic – TikTok tanning trends JR Culpepper June 2, 2026

With the days getting warmer, many are tanning or being outside more. Time in the sun is fun, as long as you protect yourself – and that usually means wearing sunscreen.

But some recent TikTok trends are discouraging people from using sunscreen.

The sun’s ultraviolet, or UV, rays can be damaging, so sunscreen is essential to reducing the health risks of prolonged sun exposure, like skin cancer.

Even if you already apply sunscreen regularly, check EWG’s 20th Annual Guide to Sunscreens to see whether your products provide adequate sun protection and are free from ingredients linked to health harms.

The guide includes thousands of sunscreen products and found nearly 80% of them do not meet EWG’s criteria for top-rated products, because they provide inadequate sun protection or contain harmful ingredients.

Here are five viral sunscreen trends, the myths behind them, and how to stay safe from their potentially harmful effects.

1. DIY sunscreen

Homemade sunscreen proponents say it’s a safe, affordable and simple option. But it may create more problems than it solves. DIY sunscreens often provide ineffective protection against UV radiation, since they almost always fail to achieve even a sun protection factor, or SPF, of 6.

2. “Base tans” and “Base burns”

Some people avoid wearing sunscreen in order to build up a “base burn,” or tan.

This is dangerous because any tan is evidence of skin damage – and sunburn is even more so. Tanning can increase your risk of skin cancer, even if you don’t burn.

3. Sun “contouring”

This practice involves strategically applying sunscreen to some parts of the face, to enhance a tan in specific areas. Sounds great, right? Instant summerlong highlights and contours, achieved without makeup.

But “sun contouring” is dangerous – it encourages people to damage their skin intentionally by applying lower SPF sunscreen to or leaving some parts of their face entirely unprotected.

The long-term effects of this method may ultimately make you look older. In addition to preventing sunburn, sunscreen prevents premature aging and reduces the risk of skin cancer.

Instead of contouring your sunscreen, choose a contoured makeup look – and don't forget to apply sunscreen afterward

4. Sun tattoos

This is just a bad idea that requires you to overexposure your body to UV rays.

If you develop skin cancer on one part of your body, it can spread to other areas of your skin and metastasize to other parts of the body. To reduce the risk of skin cancer, make sure to apply sunscreen everywhere your body will be exposed to the sun.

5. Treatment for acne

Tanning beds as a solution to skin problems? Not happening.

In fact, tanning beds are classified as a known carcinogen – they can increase the risk of skin cancer. Research links the beds to a higher risk of melanoma, especially when first use occurs before age 30.

The Food and Drug Administration has long warned that children and teens should never use tanning beds because of their health concerns. But the Trump administration quietly killed a pending FDA rule that would have banned anyone under 18 from using the beds.

Tips for sun safety

Here are a few tips to help you get the most out of your time in the sun.

Cover up and wear sunglasses. Shirts, hats, shorts and pants provide the best protection from UV rays. Good shades protect your eyes from UV radiation, which may cause cataracts.
Find shade or make it. Picnic under a tree, read beneath an umbrella or take a canopy to the beach. Keep infants in the shade because they are still developing the tanning pigments, known as melanin, that protect skin.
Wear sunscreen. EWG’s Annual Guide to Sunscreens evaluates the safety and efficacy of SPF-rated products, including sunscreens for recreational use and SPF-rated daily-use moisturizers and lip products. The best ratings are for products that provide broad spectrum protection formulated with ingredients that pose fewer health concerns when absorbed by the body.

Getting outside for some sun is good for you – in moderation. Just ignore the fleeting trends and stick to the tried and tested: Wear sunscreen to protect yourself, and wear it daily.

EWG’s mission in the 20 years we’ve produced the Guide to Sunscreens has been to ensure that whenever you use sunscreen, the SPF products you trust to protect your family are free from ingredients of concern, backed by science and effective at reducing the effects of UV radiation.

Areas of Focus

Personal Care Products

Sunscreen

Guest Authors

Grant Pacernick, Communications Intern

June 2, 2026

The dose makes the poison – but there’s more to the story

Anthony Lacey — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 14:16:38 +0000

The dose makes the poison – but there’s more to the story Anthony Lacey June 2, 2026

Does the dose define how chemicals can lead to harm? Yes.

But is the dose the only thing that “makes the poison”? No.

The idea that the dose makes the poison – originally explained as “all things are poison, and nothing is without poison; only the dose permits something not to be poisonous” – was introduced by a 16th-century physician named Paracelsus. It laid the foundation for what is, more than 400 years later, the field of toxicology.

Today the chemical industry and its supporters point to the phrase when claiming health risks only exist above certain chemical exposure levels and some doses are “too low” to be harmful.

It’s generally true that a chemical is more toxic at higher doses. But our understanding of how chemicals and mixtures interact with our bodies has improved considerably over the past 400 years, showing that there’s more to consider than just the amount of a substance.

A complicated mix of factors affect the ‘poison’

Who you are, when and how often you are exposed to something, and what else you’re exposed to all matter. And what is defined as a low dose might, with prolonged exposure, be sufficient to lead to health harms.

Relationships between dose and biological response – how it impacts a body – can be linear, where a higher dose results in a greater response. But scientists have also observed a variety of other, non-linear relationships between dose and response. Depending on the chemical, a higher dose doesn’t necessarily mean a higher response, or more “poison.”

In some cases, both lower and higher doses can trigger certain health harms, while moderate doses do not (see Panel F in Figure 1 below). For other chemicals (like in Panel D), the relationship might be logarithmic, meaning that toxicity might drastically increase at lower dose-ranges but taper off as doses get higher.

Figure 1. A variety of documented dose-response relationships

Source: Ramaiah et al., Figure 1 from Toxicological Pathology

What does ‘dose’ even mean?

The dose is the amount of a substance that is absorbed into the body. But not everything that we come into contact with will be absorbed into the body.

The exposure route can play a large role.

For example, titanium dioxide is an effective active ingredient in sunscreens, an ultraviolet filter that does not cross the skin barrier when applied. But its use in sprays or powders raises concern, since the particles can be inhaled deep into the lungs and harm health.

So the impact of exposure isn’t just about the amount, it’s also about how a person is exposed.

What else matters, apart from the dose?

When you are exposed

Low exposures in utero or during early childhood can have very different effects than the same exposure in adulthood. Even when they’re exposed to the same amounts of a chemical, children may absorb more than adults.

A World Health Organization study found young children can absorb up to five times more lead than adults from the same ingested dose.

And even if the dose is the same, it could have a greater impact on kids than adults because their brains are still developing. They may suffer irreversible damage to the brain and experience developmental impacts later in life.

What else you are exposed to

We know we aren’t exposed to chemicals one by one but instead to mixtures of chemicals over long periods of time. We constantly come into contact with combinations of chemicals from food, water and consumer products.

Research shows that small, seemingly insignificant doses of multiple chemicals can add up or interact together to multiply each other’s effects, creating a total health risk that is measurably more harmful than those from the chemicals acting alone.

Glyphosate, an herbicide, and cypermethrin, an insecticide, are sometimes used together to manage crops. A 2025 study compared the impacts in cells of individual exposures to glyphosate and cypermethrin with exposure to both pesticides at the same time. The authors found that joint exposure triggered early and late cell death, along with overall toxicity in animal models.

When combined, these two pesticides triggered more late cell death than would be expected from simply adding their individual effects together. A decade earlier, another study reported the same pattern – that these chemicals magnify each other’s effects when mixed.

Both pesticides are frequently used together on soy and corn fields, so this mixture analysis is a simulation of real-world exposures.

In 2021, the European Commission and European Food Safety Authority, or EFSA, announced a joint strategy to integrate cumulative risk assessments in pesticide reviews. This new approach incorporates methods to assess the effect of chemical mixtures on human health. EFSA is reviewing the status of multiple approved pesticides in light of toxicity findings from mixtures assessments.

U.S. regulatory safety assessments routinely fail to account for chemical interaction, when the presence of one chemical can unexpectedly amplify the toxicity of another by altering how much is absorbed or metabolized.

The bottom line: It has been known for a while that exposure to chemicals in combination can multiply their effect. In other words, for some chemical mixtures, the sum is greater than its parts.

How often you are exposed

The average person uses between 10 and 14 personal care products a day, spanning several categories. You aren’t exposed just once, you’re exposed every day for years.

This repeated, long-term use leads to what’s called cumulative exposure. While many chemicals are rapidly excreted, they can still have an impact with repetitive low dose exposure.

The issue isn’t just a single dose today. It’s repeated exposure – even at low levels – across months or years that can add up.

Who you are

Individual susceptibility, genetics, and your microbiome matter.

Your genes can act like a personalized instruction manual for how well your body processes toxins. Some people have versions of enzymes that clear chemicals quickly, while others can have versions that allow the same small dose to build up to dangerous levels.

Your immune system and gut microbiome can also change how you respond. A “safe” dose of a given substance could be “poison” to an immunocompromised individual or someone taking a specific medication.

Statins, widely used cholesterol medications, are broken down in the body by an enzyme called CYP3A. Grapefruit juice contains compounds called furanocoumarins that stop CYP3A from doing its job.

So when ingested with grapefruit, more of the drug can be absorbed than intended. Both substances alone are safe, but the combination can be unexpectedly toxic. This is why some medications warn about consuming grapefruit while taking the medicine.

Some medication labels warn against consuming grapefruit when taking the drugs

The case of hormone disruptors

Endocrine-disrupting chemicals, or EDCs, are a class of chemicals that mimic the body’s natural hormones. Our hormone system is designed to respond to tiny “doses” of substances that act as signals to control how we grow and how our bodies use energy.

One well-known EDC is bisphenol A, or BPA. Results from a 2012 study linked low doses of BPA, legally considered “safe,” to endocrine disruption.

The study emerged from a partnership among the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, and 14 independent researchers, called CLARITY-BPA.

As a landmark 2007 report in Environmental Health News notes, even exposure to a tiny dose of an EDC can interfere with these signals. Repeated exposure over time can cause health impacts later in life.

The relationship between the amount of an EDC and its effect on health doesn’t always proceed in a straight line or in one direction. When the relationship doesn’t move in one direction only – when the shape of the dose-response relationship does not consistently increase or decrease – the low-dose effects of exposure to EDCs “cannot be predicted by the effects observed at high doses,” one study found.

This study’s results demonstrate how, if only high doses are tested, serious health impacts that only show up at lower doses can be missed.

The researchers tested a cancer-causing chemical called TCDD on rats. At a “high dose” of 0.25 micrograms per kilogram, or µg/kg, TCDD didn’t seem to cause any reproductive problems. But when the dose was tested at a much lower level, 0.064 µg/kg, researchers saw a significant drop in the rats’ daily sperm production.

This doesn’t mean that higher doses are safer. The authors point out that high levels of TCDD are still harmful to many organs and can even be deadly. Instead, the study shows why we can’t just say “the dose makes the poison.” Low levels of exposure can interfere with the body in ways that are not seen at high doses.

Low doses do not mean safe doses

Analysis of the science documents made public through trial discovery led to EWG advocating for increased regulation of the “forever chemical” perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA. At the time, PFOA was extensively used as a processing aid in the manufacturing of Teflon.

But industry representatives pushed back, citing the notion that dose makes the poison to argue that health concerns about PFOA were “unfounded.” PFOA detections were “negligible … and within government standards,” they said, characterizing the measured average PFOA concentrations of 4 parts per billion in drinking water as a mere “shot glass … spread among 250 railroad tankers.”

Since 2005, research has repeatedly documented the dangers of exposure to this supposedly “negligible” – and, at the time legal – level of PFOA.

That same concentration would today be 1,000 times the Environmental Protection Agency’s legal limit for PFOA in drinking water, currently set at 4 parts per trillion.

Chemical companies and pesticide manufacturers have long argued that low doses are safe. For example, Dow, a global materials science manufacturer, lists “the dose makes the poison” on its position statement page, arguing that “as a dose increases . . . the likelihood of a toxic response increases as well.”

Despite the wealth of peer-reviewed literature indicating otherwise, Dow maintains that findings of the toxicity of low doses are unsubstantiated.

Outcomes matter in defining safe doses

A “safe” dose is safe only for the specific health outcomes being measured.

Traditional tests often look for obvious signs of harm, like organ damage or a specific birth defect. But they may completely miss changes in other parts of the body, like the immune or nervous systems.

This means a chemical can be labeled safe at a certain level because it doesn’t cause organ damage in animals, even if the same dose is high enough to disrupt hormones or immunity.

What we define as the level at which a chemical becomes a poison depends entirely on which part of the body we’re looking at.

For example, PFAS were long considered safe at levels that didn’t appear to harm the liver. But once scientists researched impacts on immunotoxicity, they found these supposedly safe doses contributed to suppressed immune responses in children, prompting increased research and regulator scrutiny, including restrictions and bans on use and lower limits for allowable water contamination.

When setting a drinking water standard, the EPA evaluated data about all available health outcomes. It found that, in the case of PFOA, low exposure levels could lead to increased cholesterol, decreased birth weight, weakened immune response and liver harm.

The herbicide dimethyl tetrachloroterephthalate, commonly known as DCPA and sold under the brand name Dacthal, was initially approved in 1958 and deemed safe for use. In 2024, the EPA banned it following new findings that linked the pesticide to “irreversible harm to unborn babies’ developing brains,” among several other hormonal issues.

It’s more complicated than just dose

The science now suggests a more refined interpretation of Paracelsus’s statement: the dose matters, but the timing, the individual, and what else one is exposed to are also critical aspects in predicting harm.

While it’s generally true that a chemical is more toxic at higher doses, there are cases where that is not the whole picture. “The dose makes the poison” is overly simplistic and has been used for years to defend the continued use of harmful chemicals. The dose contributes to the poison, but there are many other factors at play.

And that’s why legal does not always mean safe.

Areas of Focus

Family Health

Toxic Chemicals

Authors

Alexa Friedman, Ph.D.

Varun Subramaniam, M.S.

June 3, 2026

Transcript of EWG podcast 'Ken Cook Is Having Another Episode' – Episode 60

Adam Levin — Fri, 29 May 2026 19:00:43 +0000

Transcript of EWG podcast 'Ken Cook Is Having Another Episode' – Episode 60 Adam Levin May 29, 2026

There is an ongoing lawsuit between the American Academy of Pediatrics and Robert F Kennedy, Jr., head of the Department of Health and Human Services. The lead attorney of the lawsuit challenging the HHS vaccine policy changes is EWG co-Founder and President Ken Cook’s guest today.

Richard H. Hughes VI is a professor at George Washington University Law School as well as a partner at Epstein Becker Green. In addition to the American Academy of Pediatrics, Hughes’ law firm also represents the American College of Physicians and the American Public Health Association.

Hughes breaks down the legal framework behind the lawsuit against Kennedy, including the effort to dismantle and remake HHS’ immunization advisory committee, the broader implications for federal vaccine policy, and the growing erosion of public trust in pediatricians, vaccines, and public health institutions.

Disclaimer: This transcript was compiled using software and may include typographical errors.

Ken Cook: Hello there. Ken Cook here, and I'm having another episode. You know, ever since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services, and specifically during his confirmation process, I've been keeping a close eye on the dismantling of our vaccine policy infrastructure. I suspect a lot of you have been keeping an eye on it too.

It's one of the top priorities of the public health community now. And I've come to think of the approach that he's taken, uh, I've, I've coined a term for it, I call it vaccilation. This is why, uh, he's able to make the case on the one hand to his anti-vax followers that he's doing all he can to pursue their agenda, and that agenda is to prove various things about vaccines being harmful, even maybe more harmful than the diseases they prevent, that vaccines cause autism and so forth.

And he always does it in a kind of vacillating, vaccilating way where science is never settled, so we can always ask questions. A gold standard science is needed, and he's bringing that because you can't rely on existing authorities. And m-most importantly of all, he's not wanting to be positioned as either anti-vaccine or supporting vaccine.

He's in that vaccilating middle ground. And that has worked for him surprisingly well. It didn't work for Casey Means. Ultimately, she got caught up by not really saying what she thought when she was rejected by the Senate in the confirmation process for becoming surgeon general. But for Kennedy, it has mostly worked.

But there's one arena where it does not work, not the arena of hearings where Kennedy gives and takes with senators, not press statements, not podcasts, not Instagram posts. In all of those places, vaccilation has been a very smart strategy for him to remain elusive about where he is even as he pursues anti-vaccine measures.

But the one place where it doesn't work is in court, in legal proceedings before a judge. And today I'm joined by a lawyer who's doing something about vaccilation. Richard H. Hughes IV, who is a partner at Epstein Becker Green, a health law professor at the George Washington University Law School. And the lead counsel in American Academy of Pediatrics versus Robert F. Kennedy Jr. This was a landmark lawsuit challenging the vaccine policy changes Kennedy has implemented at HHS.

And in that setting, there is no wiggle room afforded for vacillating. You have to follow the law. Now, Richard's clients have included some of the most respected medical organizations in the country: the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Physicians, the American Public Health Association, the Infectious Disease Society of America, among others.

And in March, a federal judge looked at all this vacillating, and specifically the steps Kennedy had taken under the cover of vacillating, and handed these organizations a very significant early victory, ruling that HHS had acted arbitrarily, ignored established law, and failed to follow basic administrative process.

But the fight is far from over. Richard is one of the nation's leading experts in vaccine law, and he has spent his career building the very public health infrastructure that's now under attack. I'm grateful that he's here because he, like EWG, follows science, and his objective is very clear: to protect the health of America's children and their future.

Professor Hughes, thank you so much for being here. The stakes could not be higher. And knock on wood, at least from my perspective, and I'm sure yours. So far it looks like it's gone pretty well, but we've got quite a ways to go, no question about that. I just wanted to ask, how did you, as you were starting your career, what brought you, Richard, into the health arena, and specifically this subset of health pertaining to vaccines? If you don't mind. I'm just curious to know.

Richard Hughes: I don't mind. Yeah, no, Ken, I appreciate that question. It actually goes, uh... and, and thank you for having me. It goes so far back, long before I was a lawyer. I was a very young political appointee in my home state of Arkansas. So I was 22 years old, and I was appointed to the Arkansas State Board of Health, and I didn't know anything about public health.

I was incredibly unqualified. It was an undeserved privilege to get that appointment. And right after I was appointed, I survived a brain tumor.

Ken Cook: Oh my goodness.

Richard Hughes: Yeah. I was misdiagnosed with glioblastoma. It was basically a death sentence, and got a second opinion and found out that I was gonna live, and got involved in cancer issues.

And I said, "You know, I'm in this position, and I can do something, you know, to, to improve the health of Arkansans." I felt compelled to do that. And I learned about the HPV vaccine. So a colleague came to me one day and said, "There's this vaccine to prevent cervical cancer." And I didn't know anything about it.

But as I, as I dug into it, as I learned more about it, I said, "You know, we really need to talk about, uh, this vaccine, and we really need to make this vaccine accessible." At the time, this was before the Affordable Care Act, we had a lot of access issues in our state, and I knew that if we were gonna reach the most rural parts of the state, that we should consider requiring the vaccine.

That was a really unpopular opinion to have. It got me kicked out of party politics. It ended my political ambitions completely, and so I got my master's in public health, I moved to DC and said I'm gonna work in vaccine policy for the rest of my career. I went back to law school, and, um, you know, added a lot more tools to my toolbox.

Ken Cook: Wow, I, I had no idea there were so many layers to that, to your history, and, uh, just as a editorial note to start off with, you know, Environmental Working Group has, you know, we, we generally speaking, have, have always supported vaccine policy, the conventional policy that is now at least temporarily back in place, and the, the CDC's positions on all, all of those things.

We did raise questions about thimerosal back in the day, but those were resolved. But generally speaking on vaccine policy, my overall feeling is the environmental health community looked the other way on the vaccine debate, which was probably not helpful. I think we now find ourselves in a s- a situation where, uh, there is such a threat to that frontline defense, and so much energy around undoing the reputation of the CDC and of science and of practicing physicians.

I, I read some of the things people say about pediatricians, and I just... I wonder what, what pediatricians are they talking about? Uh, everyone I've ever met, and I've met, hundreds of them, because we work on children's environmental health all the time, and m- from my own experience having a son, I don't get it.

But anyway, I just wanted to, I wanted to put that out there... because a big part of this is the, the kind of atmospherics that drove you away from the job in Arkansas, right? I mean, you must feel that... in your current role as well, right?

Richard Hughes: I absolutely do. I absolutely do. And it was really hard to watch the distortion around vaccine science, and a lot of that was wrapped up in religion back in Arkansas, right?

And... you know, talking about abstinence and sex and, and that was unfortunate, but I feel like, you know, we're up against a lot of the same issues, a willingness to spread misinformation and disinformation so easily, a public that maybe at first glance sometimes, you know, you might see something, uh, that looks like a potential correlative relationship, and you might have real questions.

And I do think that we should be answering those questions and helping- Yeah ... people understand the science, right? But... it's really hard to, you know, sometimes get people off of these beliefs, these misguided beliefs, when you have somebody like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with the bully pulpit now, right, spreading all this misinformation.

Ken Cook: Yeah, no, and, and of course there's conspiracy-minded, uh, approaches to these issues. It's very convenient and very hard to overcome. It's, uh... a great, uh, retreat from, from critical thinking.

Richard Hughes: Yes, it is.

Ken Cook: Right? And that- that's, that's done a lot of harm. I found myself, when I read the judge's, uh, decision, uh, in March, I was fortified by that. Uh, not... not just because of the way the decision came down, but the learned way in which he argued it.

And I just want, I just wanna say, uh, just from the beginning of his order, uh, he, he writes that, "For our public health, Congress and the executive have built over decades an apparatus that marries the rigors of science with the execution and force of the United States government. One extraordinary product of that apparatus has been the eradication and reduction of certain communicable diseases through the development and use of vaccines."

And right there, he's drawing a distinction in his position, his conclusions, from Kennedy's, which... increasingly is to argue that these vaccines didn't play any role. And so, uh, the, the whole presence of the government in this sphere is questionable because, you know, better nutrition and sanitation and other measures… really, that's what caused polio and mumps and other diseases to be controlled. Patently not the case, but I appreciated that he was standing upright then.

Richard Hughes: Yeah. Yeah, I did too. I love that decision. It reads beautifully. I love that on the first page, he intertwines science and law, and talks about... the importance of process to both.

This is the first case I've worked on as a litigator. I'm not a litigator. I didn't go to law school to sue anybody.

Ken Cook: Oh, is that right?

Richard Hughes: It is. It is.

Ken Cook: Oh my goodness.

Richard Hughes: And sitting in the courtroom, you know, sitting in the courtroom as a vaccine law expert at the counsel table and, and really just hoping that we are doing the best possible job to help the judge get the facts right, to get the law right, to make the best, most informed decision, because we want the decision to stand.

He wants... to write an, an effective decision. He wants to get it right. He's not an ideologue. And, you know, the government over here is saying in the, in the courtroom that, you know, there's no binding, you know, guiding principles in the law that says the secretary has to do this or that, the secretary can just basically do whatever he wants, and that, you know, reasonable minds can differ on how to best prevent infectious disease, and that we're all here to protect public health.

It was really disturbing to hear some of those arguments and the way they framed it. And, and then it was so encouraging to hear the judge come back to them and, and, and to recite back to them law, and to see how he followed the apparatus that, that he described. And it has... I mean, I have to say, there was a time when all we had were vaccines, and we didn't put policy or the force of law behind it.

Sometimes then we would do that in an outbreak context. So late, you know, late 1800s, smallpox outbreaks, we're saying, "You have to go get vaccinated because we're trying to prevent it." But one of the greatest innovations in the law and in vaccine law and policy in the, in the 20th century was we realized, if we can just get everybody vaccinated early, we can actually stop the transmission of these diseases.

We can lower the overall incidence of disease, the overall morbidity and mortality, and we started to do that in a really systematic way with vaccine policy. And as the judge recited, we have these federal laws. The federal government is not making people get vaccines, that's the role of the states.

But there is a robust apparatus in federal law that says, you know, Congress has thought about this, and they've enacted a variety of laws where we essentially presuppose that vaccination is the best way to control vaccine preventable diseases in this country. And that's what, simply what we're trying to do.

Ken Cook: Yeah. I was astonished at some of, uh, when the judge asked certain questions about, well, how, how far could Secretary Kennedy go?

You know, how much power... does he have? Could he actually say, um, "Getting some of these diseases is okay, or is good, or we would, we would like to pursue policies that would encourage them to get these?" Which, which of course, Aaron Siri and others, Dale Bigtree have openly said they think that should be the case.

Yeah. I was astonished. What, what was it like in the courtroom when you were hearing that?

Richard Hughes: Well, what's really hard is when you're a... you know, I, I, I speak a lot on these issues publicly, right? I'm, I'm a policy-oriented lawyer, and I have opinions. And to sit in the courtroom at the counsel table and to really, you have to maintain decorum in the courtroom.

It's not a raucous place, right? You know? And, uh, you know, and so to have to sit and listen and keep a straight face to those kinds of arguments was really, really, really hard for me. And the number of things I w- I w- you know, that you wish you could say, right? And so for the judge to point that out, uh, and to use that example, and I think it's one of the great things that, that judges sometimes do, is to present absurd hypotheticals, and it was a really really, really effective one.

And so I think what gets overlooked is they frame up natural infection as just fine. You know? That, that natural infection is just fine. And what in reality is if you go to old graveyards and you look at the number of infant graves that are there, and you can, these graveyards are all over our country, right?

In the early 20s, late 19th century, early 20th century, right? And then I always go back, I, I tell my team all the time about this letter to the editor that I read around 1994 or 1995 in The New York Times, where a mother wrote to The New York Times, and she said, "You know, I just learned about this new vaccine to prevent chickenpox, and I don't understand why I wasn't made aware of this five years ago when the vaccine first became available."

Because she said, "To my family, chickenpox is not a minor illness." Chickenpox had devastated her household. Her kids ended up with all sorts of infections that I didn't even realize that, you know, measles, chickenpox, these things can result in other infections, other morbidities.

Ken Cook: Very serious, yeah.

Richard Hughes: Right. Very serious. Very serious, and, and sometimes very deadly. And so, you know, vaccination is a way not just to prevent cases and to have fewer or hopefully zero cases. You know, we have a sophisticated tool. People don't have to die from these diseases. They don't have to deal with the long-term effects of these diseases.

Ken Cook: And, you know, the, the consequence of not intervening through vaccines on the, the cost of the healthcare system, and I've even said to, to my colleagues in the environmental community, we all noticed what happened during COVID, where all the resources rushed from the CDC and elsewhere, rushed straight to the concerns and the, the need to a- adapt to the COVID conditions.

You lose a lot of ability to do other health-related interventions, including environmental health, and talking about pollution or, uh, contamination of food or what have you.

Richard Hughes: Yes. Yeah.

Ken Cook: That, that contracts in the face of emergencies, where it has a huge impact. I noticed, and I, I just, I wanna mention the other plaintiffs, because it's an impressive list. It's the American Academy of Pediatrics, the lead plaintiff, but it's also the American College of Physicians, the APHA, the American Public Health Association. We also have a longstanding association with them. Infectious Diseases Society of America, Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, the Massachusetts Public Health Alliance, and I'm sure there are others that I'm not naming.

It's impressive to me, and I've, I've said this to several, uh, people, you know, when you look at the way these, uh, interests are arrayed on the two sides of this issue, it's kind of shocking to think that there is virtually no reputable independent science association or organization that, that stands with Kennedy.

Now, I think everyone agrees, yes, there can be vaccine injuries, and yes, we should address those, and we should, we should be concerned about those, and, uh, unfortunately sometimes they're, fortunately very rarely, but sometimes they are serious.

Richard Hughes: Yes. Yeah.

Ken Cook: No question about that. But on the basic question of whether we need vaccines, whether the, where any kind of mandate, again, at the state level, which is where these are proffered, it really is shocking that we're at the state of the debate that we're at. And even to the point where I noticed that quite a bit of time was spent by the government to try and make the case that the plaintiffs you represent shouldn't have had standing.

Richard Hughes: Right, right, right, right, right, right.

Ken Cook: Can you talk a little bit about that? I just- I mean, why not try it? Why not try it?

Richard Hughes: I sure can. And I... look, I'm very honest. I, I, I'm very honest and open about how we got to this point. We knew when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. came into office that he was going to do a lot of these things. I knew he was gonna do a lot of these things because I've helped build up the system that he's trying to tear down.

And so I, I looked around me and I said to my team, I said, "You know, he's going to do these things, and we have to be prepared. We have to watch everything he does. We have to watch when he takes these actions, and we're gonna need to be prepared to put up a legal fight."

Okay, so we have a policy disagreement. Absolutely, we do. The government wants to suggest that that's all we have, and that policy disputes don't belong in court, and they belong in the legislature and, and, and all that. But there are real harms here. And I would not, I would not have pursued this and put my name and, and, and resources and effort behind this if I thought it was a mere policy disagreement.

I knew that this was going to harm, uh, not only public health and families, but that it was actually going to harm the organizations that we're representing. And they do have standing. And so if you look at the pediatricians of this country represented by AAP, not only has AAP itself as an organization had to divert all of its time and resources to deal with, with this, but the providers on the front lines, and they'll, they'll say, "Oh, you know, it's just… you know, they make a lot of money."

You know, it is so not true. Being a pediatrician is not some sort of gangbusters, you know, business to be in. It's very, uh, costly to maintain an inventory of vaccines in those practices, and the reimbursement, you know, it's not usually profitable. And so this is causing them, you know, the, the frustrating experience of having to address misinformation and disinformation that their patients are hearing, coming in confused, and to practice effective medicine.

That's been frustrated. And the same thing, uh, American Public Health Association, and, and Dr. Benjamin doesn't mind me telling folks that when I called him and I said, "You know, would you be a part of this?" He said, "We're in." It was a no-brainer. Because he and I knew, we instinctively knew, that this was going to impact health departments across the country.

There are clinical practitioners that are members of the American Public Health Association. They represent this vast constituency across the country of public health workers, clinical workers, all kinds of folks, and, um, we knew that the harm was going to just, just permeate the public health system. And so we demonstrated those harms.

We're proud to represent these plaintiffs and we take very seriously the work of showing the court that they have been harmed, and we did that. We went in in December. The government tried to get our case dismissed on standing. And we went in, and we, you know, demonstrated to the court — they're experiencing real harms.

And if anybody's interested, go read the declarations that have been filed by the dozens of, of physicians and others, uh, in the case.

Ken Cook: Yeah, I encourage people, you know, to read the whole record so far. Yeah, yeah. Every aspect of it is to me informative, up to and including the, the judge's order at, in mid-March.

You know, Kennedy's often claims that pediatricians are in the pocket of big pharma, as you suggested, and it's very profitable to, uh, give kids shots, and they make a lot of money doing it. Sometimes I've, I've seen it suggested that this is the main way they make money is by vaccines. I haven't seen any evidence of that.

But what interests me is that i- in order for his, uh, approach to work, he has to then say, "We want you to have a conversation with your doctor before you decide for yourself about getting vaccinated." So where do all the good doctors go, and where, where do all the bad doctors go that you can just... and it turns out that if it's your pediatrician, that's a good doctor.

But when they gather together under The Academy of Pediatrics or they, when they assemble, that's when they're evil. Makes no sense.

Richard Hughes: No, it doesn't. It doesn't. It doesn't. And there are fringe, you know, very, very, very, very fringe physicians out there that are a part of his movement, right? That, and I'm, I'm sure that's who they would rather you go to and talk to. But they want to frame this, because these are political issues, right?

And they, they know he has a, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a base and a constituency that he is pandering to. And when they talk about medical freedom and choice and forced medical treatment, this is all so deceptive.

And so if you go back, the old case Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 1905, the Supreme Court, where the Supreme Court said states can require vaccination. There's a lot of really great discussion in that case. It's a dense read, and I have my class read it every year. But it talks about sorting junk science from evidence, you know, in early 20th century terms.

And by the end of the decision, it talks about the importance that we not make people who shouldn't be vaccinated get vaccinated. It acknowledges that. That is in the opinion. So inherent, when I think about vaccine policy, and I think about requiring vaccines so that people can be healthy and we save lives, what I know as a part of that equation is that it's always going to be a conversation between the pediatrician and the parent about the child's health, and they should sit down, and they should say, you know, "Which vaccines do you need to get? Well, we have this schedule, and it's standardized, and it's based on evidence, and we should follow it."

But if this child's contraindicated, if they're at risk of some sort of harm that is ascertainable, you know, then we shouldn't vaccinate. But those cases are rare. Those cases are rare, and we should acknowledge when there are rare vaccine injuries, we need to compensate those.

We need to do it quickly and adequately. So that we can continue to pursue the public health goal. I ask my class every year, would you rather have 100 cases of polio or would you rather have, you know, two injuries? And, you know, we have to make some trade-offs. And there's a, there's a social compact here that they misconstrue, that they absolutely misconstrue.

Ken Cook: Yeah. No, I think that's right, and it's hard to think of a, of a medicine or a drug that doesn't have those kinds of potential complications for some subset of the population, these side effects. Um, and, um, I mean, even cancer drugs sometimes cause cancer, so it is a conversation with physicians, and to me, what, what I worry about is th- this debate is missing how to actually make parents better consumers of information and make them more able to have those conversations. You don't have a lot of time often in those offices. But how to, how to make the most of those conversations because that's certainly gonna be in the interest of the physician treating you as well.

Richard Hughes: That's right.

Ken Cook: So one of the things that I had all kinds of thoughts about which direction Kennedy might take vaccine policy.

I did not foresee him going immediately in the face of what he promised Congress and firing every member of the committee and replacing them summarily with his own people. B- but it goes to a, a question that I've, I've had, which is I thought in this second Trump administration they were being more careful than in the first Trump administration, certainly in environmental, uh, decision-making, where they, they made it easy to lose in court, and they mostly did lose to my colleagues in the environmental community who practice public interest law, so law that sues the government.

But then I, as I read this judge's decision and saw what, what was piling up, I was shocked at the fumbles, the mistakes that HHS made with the Administrative Procedure Act, that you made great use of, um, of that law to point out to the judge, and he ruled, I think in every instance, on your side. That's there for a purpose, too, in addition to vaccine law, which is, you know, it's to make sure that the government proceeds in an orderly manner.

It's not, uh, arbitrary. It's not capricious. And the thing that puzzled me the most, Richard, was, you know, if you're an environmental lawyer, the Administrative Procedure Act is central to how you think about challenging the government, maybe more than almost any other area.

Richard Hughes: Yes. Yes.

Ken Cook: Of public interest law, right? Because it's, it's, it's the clockworks of EPA and Interior Department and Fish and Wildlife Service.

Richard Hughes: Yes.

Ken Cook: And when they get a procedure wrong, when they're arbitrary, when they're capricious, when they side, uh, make a decision, you know, in favor of, of industry that is ill-considered, that's where the environmental community, and Kennedy in the past, has grabbed on.

I was surprised that there were so many mistakes that they're, uh, in the rush to get these decisions made, which to me tells me also that they're, they're not likely to be lasting. But I'll go back to that. But just talk a little bit about the the Administrative Procedure Act and how you saw that play in this case.

Richard Hughes: Uh, you don't even need to take a, a law school administrative law class to see that. I mean, it is so just patently obvious. I said early on, I said, "Anything this man does is going to be arbitrary and capricious because- ... the science isn't there." The science doesn't support it.

They're not going to be able to point to anything legitimate and to say, "That's the basis for this decision." Now, what I didn't expect was the lack of process. You know, the explanation part of it, and these are all, I'm talking about sort of the recipe of, of what we expect government officials to follow, right?

Ken Cook: Yeah, yeah.

Richard Hughes: We expect them to take a hard look at evidence. We expect them to follow a process to explain why they did it. I knew that they wouldn't find the evidence. I did think that they would at least try to give the appearance that they were following a process and taking a hard look. The way they throw around the term, the, well, the terms gold standard science and transparency and everything, I, I think it's very misleading, and I didn't expect a lot of explanation or transparency.

But I really did think that they would try to follow some process.

Ken Cook: So did I.

Richard Hughes: You know, right? And so for a long time environmental lawyer, who, as you said, you know, should have a deep understanding of the importance of the APA and procedure, to just go out one day and film a video, and in 58 seconds make statements like, "The previous administration's recommendations were based on nothing," right?

And to say that, "I, standing here, you know, a lawyer surrounded by two other political appointees, I'm just gonna tell you that I, I'm delighted, in fact, I'm gonna use the word delighted, to tell you that you no longer need to get the COVID vaccine."

I mean, it just reeked, it reeked of lack of process, of unseriousness. And, um, same thing with the January 5th schedule changes. And as President Trump is saying, "Well, let's look at the Danish schedule," I think there was actual reporting that, that HHS knew that what they were discussing would likely violate or potentially violate the APA. So they're, they know this, and I think that this is just evidence of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the forces around him will stop at nothing, you know, to get their agenda through.

Ken Cook: Yeah, I mean, w- what I've been saying to my friends on the other side of this issue is, "If you really did believe that you wanted to tear down vaccine policy in this country, and do it on the basis of transparency and gold standard science, you've been failed by Kennedy."

The pace at which he's operated. The fact that, I mean, here he has, he has control over the, all these funds. He could launch- the study that he says we've long not done to link vaccine harm to, you know, autism or whatever it might be. I mean, th- you've got all the money now. You could, you could control it.

Where are the studies? Where is the evidence that you're- Yeah ... putting forward or, or what basis? And then you have a, a press conference in the, in the White House a- about Tylenol, and the promise that by September of 2025 we'll know what causes autism. So obviously these aren't serious people. They don't show their work.

Anti-vax interests, anti-vax proponents, ought to begin to understand by now that these changes are not going to endure. They're not gonna stand up scientifically, and as we f- see in the case that you've been arguing, it's not standing up in the law either.

Richard Hughes: No.

Ken Cook: And the political support seems to be eroding.

At least Republicans wanna talk about healthy eating, not vaccine policy anymore. It's a real shortcoming of Kennedy's approach, but I think it's what he's left with because the evidence really isn't there.

Richard Hughes: Yeah. You know, it's not, and ultimately we're gonna prevail. We have to litigate this thing, and I, it's, it's unfortunate, but we, it, I, I knew that if he did these things and if we were going to stop him and show to be true what you just said, is that they're not showing their work, this is all false, and we need to stop it, and we need to go back to... and it's not to say that our system before couldn't use improvements. Absolutely it needs improvements.

But, you know, if we were ever going to stop this and restore sanity, we were going to have to sue, and we still have the work to do to do, we're not done yet, right? But ultimately, yes, it won't endure. It won't endure because we're stopping it.

Ken Cook: Yeah. Now let me just ask you. Kennedy in, in recent weeks, and I, I, I don't know exactly where this stands now, so help me out here — he has proposed a restructuring of the, uh, advisory committee on immunization practice, the ACIP committee at the CDC, to restructure it to include the kinds of personnel that he thinks will represent vaccine-injured people.

I was surprised the judge actually went as far as he went in go- kind of going through the list of people appointed to this committee and basically- Yeah ... saying, "You know, we, this committee can't continue." It doesn't meet the, the, the test of the law for expertise. So how do you see this latest move by Kennedy to reorient the committee and give it a, a different charter?

Richard Hughes: Yeah. Yeah. So they are trying to circumvent the judge's ruling.

Ken Cook: Patently.

Richard Hughes: Patently. I hope the White House is watching. I hope that White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles is listening to this podcast, and I assume that she wanted him to cool it on vaccines, because that's not a popular issue. Going into the midterms, I don't think they want him to continue this.

Now, what they've done is they've gotten really creative. They said, "Oh, the charter's going to expire on April 1st." And so they got together, and Aaron Siri said, "We're gonna put in a petition, and we're gonna just change the charter." So Andel Bigtree, uh, has been on his podcast, and there was a Politico story that ran last week where he said, "Oh, you know, Kennedy basically just has to change the T's he's crossing and the I's that he's dotting."

Wow. You talk about transparency. I mean, they're being so transparent about their nefarious- Finally, yes. Finally.

Ken Cook: Right? Isn't it funny? So- finally some useful transparency,

Richard Hughes: Yeah ... ri- right. Very useful, because it's like, okay, you broke the rules, and you got your hand slapped, and so now you're just going to change the rules?

Well, I'm sorry, you have to follow some rules to change the rules. And it goes back actually to where we started in this conversation, too, is that the law presupposes we want to use vaccines, right, to control vaccine preventable disease. There is that thoughtful apparatus that's been set up.

They are flying, they continue to fly in the face of that. And so, you know, we'll see what he does. We need to see how he would execute on these charter changes. But it's, it's just egregious, and I hope it gets the attention that it deserves.

Ken Cook: Yeah, I do, too. Well, we'll certainly try and help as much as we can to shine- Thank you a light on that, because, you know, there's, there's never been a more opaque administration when it comes to decision-making.

And more arbitrary, almost clownishly so, and oftentimes to deadly effect. Lots of bad decisions on environmental policy that are causing harm. And we see from the shifting attitudes, the new poll that came out from Politico, that it seems like more and more Americans are, Republicans in particular, are vaccine skeptical and might decide not to have their kids vaccinated because of this ambient debate or discussion.

Debate's hard to say. Uh, it d- doesn't really suit it. What are the next steps that will unfold? Um, they haven't formally appealed yet, have they?

Richard Hughes: They haven't, and they don't have a window to appeal. There have been statements made out of HHS that they have, you know, 60 days following the ruling. This was an interlocutory decision.

They have 10 days. They would have had to have a question of law certified to be able to take it up to the First Circuit on appeal. They have missed their window. And so if they want to try to appeal this late, we would oppose that. And so where we are right now is in a relatively boring place, where we essentially are working with the government to get the administrative record and, you know, going back to the APA, because this is an APA case, we are entitled to see the record, and there are different records for each of the decisions, right?

And so we're, it's the ver- again, the very boring part of litigation, of trying to get the documents. Now, are they going to give us all of the documents we want? Are we gonna see the emails and the text messages? You know, we're looking.

Ken Cook: I would love to. I would love to.

Richard Hughes: I would, I would as well. I would as well. I would as well. So, you know, once we have that record, and once it's completed, we'll be pursuing a final judgment and to get a final decision on the merits. And, um- presumably that could be appealed in the future. I would assume they want that to happen after the midterms, because of the way we've talked about this.

But we're doing the work of getting to that final decision.

Ken Cook: Well, I wanna thank you for that work, and thank you for your time, Richard. Thank you. I've read deeply into the court record here. I, again, I encourage everyone to do the same, and I know your students will be reading through it.

Richard Hughes: Yes, they have. They have already been... yes.

Ken Cook: I, I'm sure, I'm sure. This is a pretty exciting time to be reading through something as a curriculum that's so present in the world, and that their professor is so heavily involved in. And I, I'm not happy that you had to leave your political career in, in Arkansas, but I'm, but I'm grateful in a way that where you ended up is, uh, making this case.

Richard Hudges: Me too

Ken Cook: These organizations, again, they're not perfect. The law is not perfect. The science is not perfect. But in the scheme of things, we cannot afford this area of law and policy and science to be degraded in the way it is, and that's my, one of my greatest regrets. People wor- worry about authoritarianism, I get that.

But I think before, well before we get to that, it's the corrosion in understanding what authority really means. The authority of, of knowledge and expertise as well as the, the authority of law. To me, that's the greater, that's the greater threat right now. Because that sits in a parent's head.

Richard Hughes: Yeah.

Ken Cook: Who do I trust?

Richard Hughes: I agree.

Ken Cook: If it's a pediatrician of the sort that Kennedy caricatures as in the pocket of big pharma, why would you trust them? On the other hand, you have a kid that, um, really will be vulnerable. Look at what's happened with, uh, all these infectious diseases just in the past year and a half. It's very worrisome.

Richard Hughes: No, it absolutely is, and we have so much work to do to actually reestablish trust. He talks about reestablishing trust. I'm not saying that we were ever perfect at communicating about vaccines. I think there are so many things that we could do better when it comes to talking with parents, right? You know?

Ken Cook: I agree. The fact that they feel ghosted is really upsetting to me. It is. People say that to me on, you know, on direct messaging and on, in LinkedIn and other ways I communicate, that I even questioned Kennedy, and we came out against his, his confirmation. And, uh, George Benjamin, when I called him, he said, "I'm in," when we were live streaming the con- confirmation hearings.

It's, it's like a no-brainer. And there's no one in the nonprofit environmental community who's standing up with Kennedy, which is also noteworthy. I say that to a lot of my friends who are, you know, MAHA fans and adherents that take note of that. It's kind of noteworthy that you don't have anyone in the major environmental groups that he worked with-

Richard Hughes: No ...

Ken Cook: Uh, who's willing to stand up for him. Quite the contrary, so.

Richard Hughes: That's right. That's right.

Ken Cook: Anyway. Well, thank you so much. I really-

Richard Hughes: Thank you, Ken

Ken Cook: ... appreciate it. As this evolves, I hope I can get you back on if there's-

Richard Hughes: Please, anytime

Ken Cook: ...important developments that

Richard Hughes: Please

Ken Cook: Really great. Thanks so much, counselor. Thank you so much.

Richard Hughes: Thank you, Ken.

Ken Cook: Thank you to Professor Richard Hughes for joining me today, and thank you out there for listening. If you'd like to learn more, be sure to check out our show notes for additional links so you can take a deeper dive into today's discussion.

Make sure to follow our show on Instagram, @KenCooksPodcast, and if you're interested in learning more about EWG, head on over to ewg.org or check out the EWG Instagram account, @EnvironmentalWorkingGroup. Now, if this episode resonated with you or you think someone you know would benefit from it, send it along.

The best way to make positive change is to start as a community with your community. Today's episode was produced by the extraordinary Beth Rowe and Mary Kelly, who wrote that last sentence. Our show's theme music is by Moby. Thank you, Moby, and thanks again to all of you for listening.

Areas of Focus

Family Health

Children’s Health

May 29, 2026

Transcript of EWG podcast 'Ken Cook Is Having Another Episode' – Episode 59

Adam Levin — Fri, 29 May 2026 18:26:50 +0000

Transcript of EWG podcast 'Ken Cook Is Having Another Episode' – Episode 59 Adam Levin May 29, 2026

Two major battles over pesticide policy are unfolding at the federal level, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.

The dispute: Can states protect their citizens from pesticide harms beyond what federal law requires, or will that authority be stripped away? These are the urgent questions that a pending Supreme Court case and a fight over the farm bill could play major roles in answering.

The chemical at the center of all of this? Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup and the keystone product of the Bayer-Monsanto corporation. Critics of the controversial weedkiller link it to a number of health harms through exposure.

To help unravel the legal docket, EWG co-Founder and President Ken Cook is joined by Chuck Benbrook, Ph.D. He has worked on pesticide issues in roles during the Carter administration, for Congress and with the National Academy of Sciences, and has served as an expert witness in many of the cases he and Cook discuss.

Benbrook is urging the Supreme Court to preserve the right of states to hold pesticide companies accountable when federal regulators fall short.

Disclaimer: This transcript was compiled using software and may include typographical errors.

RoundUp Ad Voice: Weeding again, hey Bob?

Bob: Huh?

RoundUp Ad Voice: Why not do it once? Do it right?

Bob: Why is your head in the ground?

RoundUp Ad Voice: I'm gonna watch Roundup kill these roots.

Bob: Hey, this is Spike's area.

RoundUp Ad Voice: Bob… Roundup can be used where kids and pets will play and breaks down into natural materials. Since Roundup kills the root, what's not coming back, Bob?

Bob: The weed.

RoundUp Ad Voice: You betcha. Bob, come on down and take a peek.

Bob: Can I squirt one?

RoundUp Ad Voice: Sure, Bob.

Ken Cook: Hello there. I'm Ken Cook and I'm having another episode. And this is an episode that's happening during glyphosate week, which is the end of April, beginning of May. It's glyphosate week for two reasons. There are two major battles that unfolded this week around this weed killer made by Bayer. One major battle took place in the Supreme Court.

And that's what we'll focus on with my guest today Dr. Charles Benbrook, who is a long time student, an expert in the field of pesticide policy, and has also been, uh, very deeply involved in some of the court cases that the Supreme Court is considering a measure to overturn. And we'll get into that. It's, um, it's, it's really directly relevant to a lot of what we've been talking about with respect to how decisions are made on pesticide policy and toxics policy generally, and how the Trump administration has time and again, taken the side of pesticide and chemical companies.

And this is, no, this is no exception. But the other thing that happened just this morning, and I'm talking about April 30th, took place in the House of Representatives. There was a move by the House Agriculture Committee in their Farm Bill. They put a provision in that would've blocked liability for Bayer and other pesticide companies in state court, and would also have taken away some of the ability of states just basically to protect their citizens beyond what EPA does.

You may have heard of this flood of litigation against Bayer, formerly known as Monsanto, with respect to this weed killer glyphosate — trade name is Roundup — the flood of litigation because thousands and thousands of people have gone to court and claimed that glyphosate contributed to non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a kind of blood cancer that many people have come down with.

It's a, not an epidemic, but it's a, a serious disease that's growing in this country, and glyphosate has been fingered as one of the likely causes. So the House of Representatives weighed in on behalf, at least the House Agriculture Committee weighed in on behalf of Bayer and Monsanto and put this in their Farm Bill — brought it to the house floor.

We'll probably have another session on this topic too — brought it to the house floor — and it was challenged. First by Democrats, Chellie Pingree and Jim McGovern. Then challenged by Chellie Pingree and Thomas Massey, a Republican of Kentucky. And then, most notably challenged by Republican Congresswoman Luna from Florida.

And she stood up to the Trump administration, to the House Agriculture Committee, to Big Ag, to MAGA, to basically the powers that be in chemical agriculture and said, no, I am not going to vote and allow a measure in the Farm Bill to block liability for people who want to go to court, who believe that Roundup this chemical has caused their cancer or other harms.

So she stood up, an amendment. She got lots of grief from Republican leadership, lots of grief from the Republican dominated agriculture committee that voted overwhelmingly to put this amendment into the Farm Bill — against overwhelming opposition from Democrats on the agriculture committee. She went to the floor, and she got 73 Republicans to vote along with hundreds of Democrats to strip this language out of the bill.

And the final vote was overwhelming, a landslide, that stripped this Bayer, Trump administration, big Ag provision out of the Farm Bill, so that liability would not be blocked against people who were seeking justice in the courts. So it's an extremely important week in pesticide policy, an extremely important week with respect to the politics around MAHA, which we've been talking about quite a bit.

The fundamental question was, can states protect their residents from pesticide harms beyond what federal law might require, or the federal agency in charge EPA dictates, or will that authority be stripped away? And at least we know now from the vote in the House of Representatives this morning, that will not happen as part of the Farm Bill.

So the chemical, again at the center of all of this is called glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide roundup and other herbicides. And the stakes really couldn't be higher because human lives are at risk. They have been at risk, and human lives have been lost. So before we get into the episode, I wanna give some context on two things.

What does preemption mean and what is happening at the Supreme Court? Preemption is a legal doctrine that says, when federal law and state law conflict, federal law wins. In the pesticide context, the question is, if the EPA approves a pesticide and sets the language on its warning label, can a state court still hold a company liable for failing to warn consumers about health risks like cancer — risks that aren't mentioned on that federal label?

And EPA is very good about not mentioning on their label when pesticides might be linked to cancer. Instead, preferring, which is exactly what the pesticide makers prefer, that they make adjustments to how the pesticide might be handled or changes to instructions to farm workers or farmers put on gloves, change the time when you apply it, don't do it when it's too windy.

Soft changes like that rather than just coming right out and saying, “Hey, this stuff is carcinogenic.” Now, Bayer, which acquired Monsanto in a very controversial acquisition some years ago, they argue the answer is no. Since the EPA approved roundup and didn't require a cancer warning, Bayer says, the states have no business second guessing that through lawsuits or allowing litigation that second guesses that.

This is the preemption argument, federal regulatory approval essentially shields them from state liability. The case before the Supreme Court involves a plaintiff named John Darnell, one of thousands of people who claim Roundup's active ingredient glyphosate caused their non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. The Supreme Court asked the Trump administration to weigh in.

It sided with Bayer. It said, sure, we'll weigh in — their message, EPA approved the label — case closed no matter who got sick. A large group of state attorneys general, including some Republicans from red states, disagreed saying states have always had the right to hold companies accountable through their courts, regardless of what a federal label might say.

At the same time, as I mentioned, Congress was debating attaching a preemption provision to the Farm Bill and that was defeated, today. Glad to announce that. To walk us through all of this. I'm joined by Dr. Chuck Benbrook, a longtime colleague and one of the foremost experts on pesticide policy in the country, and specifically one of the foremost experts on glyphosate.

Chuck has worked on these issues from the halls of Congress to the Carter administration to the National Academy of Sciences, and he served as, as an expert witness in many of the cases, like the ones we're discussing today.

Dr. Benbrook recently submitted a formal scientific and legal argument known as an amicus brief to the Supreme Court, urging the justices to preserve the right of states to hold pesticide companies accountable when federal regulators fall short, and boy, do they fall short time and again. There's arguably no better person on the planet to walk us through how we got here, what's really at stake, and why the next few weeks could determine the future of pesticide accountability in this country for a very long time.

Not just glyphosate, not just this one pesticide, but the basic ability for people to hold these pesticide companies accountable. Chuck, welcome to the show and thanks for joining me.

Chuck Benbrook: Well, looking forward to it, uh, Ken. But first, uh, thanks for, uh, inviting me onto the podcast. It's a great honor, and I, I think I would be remiss not to share with your listeners, um, the, the day I first met you, I was, uh, working in the new executive office building for the Council on Environmental Quality in the Carter administration.

And you were a stringer for the Journal of Soil Water Conservation.

Ken Cook: That's correct.

Chuck Benbrook: Uh, a, a young reporter trying to scrape out a living at, uh, 25 bucks a piece, uh, for, uh, an article. And, uh, you called me up and said, I understand you're involved in this Resources Conservation Act implementation, that that was an issue for you and the journal.

And I said, yes, said, well, can I come talk to you? I said, sure. So you set at an appointment and you came into the building and back then they called you upstairs and you came down. And so I came down to meet my, uh, my soon to become very good friend Ken Cook, and greeted this guy in Birkenstocks without socks, white shorts, and a white t-shirt. I'll never forget it.

Ken Cook: Right. That was, that was a, a official journalistic garb for me back then. And, uh, it, it, uh, it served me well. I got a lot of scoops in that as I was writing that column for a decade or so, I can't remember. Max Schnat, the great editor of that journal, yeah, you can let me have my way. But yeah, I remember, I remember that very well.

Chuck Benbrook: It's been a, a, a wonderful friendship and a, and a wonderful journey in a lot of ways, and, you know, it's kind of a journey that feels like maybe things are turning around a little bit,

Ken Cook: Fingers crossed.

Chuck Benbrook: But where did all of this, uh, tension about glyphosate come from?

Well, a couple things that, that, that stand out. A, as you know, and most of your listeners know, glyphosate is a broad spectrum herbicide, and pretty much anything that is green and growing, if you spray it on it, it kills it. So, before the advent of genetically engineered crops that, that were genetically modified to tolerate glyphosate being sprayed on them, farmers could only use glyphosate before their crop came up, or they, they sprayed it on their crop. They'd kill the weeds and the crop, or it could be used at after the harvest to kind of clean things up and get a field ready for the next year. So the, the agricultural market for Roundup herbicides, which came on the market in ‘74, was quite limited by the very way that the product worked.

Until 1996, the year that the first genetically engineered, so-called Roundup ready crop came on the market, which was Roundup ready soybeans and roundup ready cotton. These new technologies which require genetically engineering the seed to express a gene that allowed the soybean plant and the cotton plant to go ahead, spray Roundup on me, “I, I'm, I'll be just fine.”

Ken Cook: “We love it. We love it.” Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: “We love it.” Yeah. Yeah,

Ken Cook: Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: That technology, it worked very well. And it came along at a time when farmers were super frustrated and pissed off about all the problems that they were having with weed control. The products on the market at the time, they were having to spray three or four different ones to control different weeds.

There were lots of bad interactions between the herbicides. They were spending more and more money. A lot of the herbicides were persistent in that they carried over, and if the farmers didn't watch it, they'd spray the herbicide and control the weeds in the soybean year of the rotation, but they'd end up screwing up the corn that was planted the next year.

So there were, there was a lot of problems with weed management. It wasn't working well. It was complicated. And the costs were going up. So when this Roundup ready system came along, which couldn't be easier, you just couldn't screw it up, it was such an easy system to do well because you pay the extra money for the seeds that had the trait, and then you plant your Roundup ready soybeans, and then when the weeds come up, you just spray Roundup and it kills all the weeds.

Ken Cook: Yeah. And well into the growing season, if you needed to it, the, the, the corn could be this high, the soybeans and, and you could take care of the weeds. It, it helped farmers a lot. I, one, farmers used to tell me all the time that they couldn't have made their operations bigger, which they wanted to do to generate more revenue, they couldn't have done that if Roundup ready technology had not come along and made that vital planting operation so much faster and simpler.

Chuck Benbrook: So starting in 1996, as this, uh, GMO crop revolution unfolded like, you know, a tsunami over American agriculture. It changed EWG, it changed what I was working on.

Ken Cook: Totally.

Chuck Benbrook: I got sucked from working on pesticides to working on genetically engineered crops. The foundations moved all their money, as you remember.

Ken Cook: Yep, yep.

Chuck Benbrook: And the sales of, of Roundup just took off like a, a rocket from 1996 until about 2005 or six, Roundup moved closer and closer to the most heavily applied pesticide in the country.

But around 2005, 2006, it passed atrazine and became number one.

Ken Cook: Another prominent weed killer. Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: Another corn herbicide, but had some major growth still in it. And it peaked about 2015 and at that point there was about three pounds of glyphosate applied in US agriculture for every, every pound of atrazine.

So not only had it become number one, but it passed it threefold.

Ken Cook: Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: It was by far the most heavily applied pesticide ever in history in the world. Around 2015, there was enough glyphosate applied in the United States to spray three quarters of a pound of the active ingredient on every cropland acre in the country.

And globally it was about two thirds of a pound. So you just wrap your mind around it.

Ken Cook: Yeah. I don't think I've ever, maybe I've shared this story with you. I, I talked to an editor from a, an agricultural trade publication around the 2005, 6, 8 period there, and, um, asked how things were going. And this person said, well, it's, it's pretty tough because we're losing advertisers.

And I said, well, why are you losing advertisers? And she said, well, we used to have all these pesticide companies, weed killer companies buying ads in our magazine. And that kept us afloat. But once Roundup came along and it was so universally used relative to anything else, the ad flow stopped from the other companies 'cause they just kind of gave up. So even, it even affected journalistic coverage of agriculture and the ability to do that. Incredible.

Chuck Benbrook: Of course. So I started my work in the pesticide world in 1981 when I took the job as the staff director of the DORFA subcommittee. And at that point, there were 23 pesticide companies that had Washington reps that came and lobbied young staffers like me.

23 of them. And now there's four left.

Ken Cook: Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: So the, the concentration in the industry is a huge issue. So the use of glyphosate just took off like a rocket starting in 1996. But not only did the agricultural use go up, but there was continued growth in the lawn and garden, forestry, government arena, industrial arena, because Monsanto recognized that there were lots of other markets where they could sell Roundup, and in particular the home and lawn and garden markets, so people that would buy it at Walmart or Lowe's or Home Depot and spray weeds in their, you know, their driveway or in around the yard or…

Ken Cook: Yeah, playgrounds.

Chuck Benbrook: Or plant a garden. So you gotta kill the grass before you till the soil, so you spray Roundup. So Monsanto aggressively went after those markets with great success and had they had specially formulated versions of lawn and garden Roundup.

As the diversity of uses of Roundup expanded incrementally, but over 20 years, there were so many different ways that people were handling the product, spraying the product, and so many different ways that people were being exposed to the product.

Ken Cook: I have to remind you here, I was invited by one of the pesticide trade associations to address their annual conference, uh, because in their, by the early to mid 1990s, EWG was very much on their radar as a, a problem in pesticide policy.

And I reminded the audience of a Monsanto commercial at the time where someone dressed as if ready to go to the airport, and that was the plot line of the commercial, a TV commercial, leaned out the window of the taxi cab, and sprayed Roundup on his driveway and sidewalk to kill the weeds, and then just brought the Roundup bottle back into the cab and off they went.

And that's just how safe and easy it was. I don't know if we could ever find that ad, but they pushed it very hard and they brought modern marketing to bear.

Chuck Benbrook: Yeah. All throughout this period of when Roundup use was going up, glyphosate use was going up so much, the percentage of the total glyphosate sales represented by Ag versus the non-Ag market stayed roughly the same around 10%.

The Ag went up fast and the non-Ag stayed 10%, but it grew because the other was growing.

Ken Cook: Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: In the last 20 years, Monsanto has made almost as much profit from the 10% of glyphosate they've sold into the lawn and garden market as the 90% that they've sold to agriculture. So what does that tell you? Well, they're obviously marking up the glyphosate much more.

It's a lot of packaging, a lot of promotion. And you know, somebody goes into Home Depot to buy a, a, you know, a gallon of ready to use glyphosate. They're not that concerned if it costs 19 bucks or 22 bucks, they know it's gonna last for quite a while and they want to control their weeds. So Monsanto was, has always been able to profit, uh, much more significantly from the lawn and garden market, but yet they never did any focused research on the exposure patterns and risks that were unique to that market.

Ken Cook: That gets us to Dwayne Lee Johnson, I think, doesn't it?

Chuck Benbrook: It absolutely does. So there's two major things that happened that brought glyphosate into the middle of this massive increase in the use and diversification of the ways that it was being used, and the ways that we were all exposed to it, including this crazy idea to start spraying it on a wheat crop two weeks before harvest.

RoundUp Ad: Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: The so-called pre-harvest use — that you and EWG are finally, I think, going to have some success in ending. Thank God. That's half of it. Then the other half is that in March of 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, which is part of the World Health Organization issued a very unexpected classification of glyphosate and glyphosate based herbicides, which would include Roundup as a probable human carcinogen.

Ken Cook: Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: This came out of the blue. People, including me, were shocked 'cause we had followed the toxicity data and the EPAs human health risk assessments on glyphosate and, and, you know, glyphosate looked a, about as safe as any herbicide that had ever been registered and now all of a sudden IARC is saying it's a probable human carcinogen.

That's what triggered the interest among tort lawyers out there, and IARC said that the evidence was strongest linking Roundup to non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. So people that had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and had been using Roundup for 20 years, they said, “Hey, geez, I wonder if the Roundup contributed to my non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.”

And so they talked to a lawyer, do I have a case? And indeed they did. And Dwayne Lee Johnson, the groundskeeper for the Bonita school district just a little north of where you live, Ken.

Ken Cook: Yeah, that's right.

Chuck Benbrook: I believe it was either six or seven school campuses that he was responsible for controlling weeds and other pest control activities.

So he probably spent more time spraying Roundup than almost any other specific task in his job. And in his years of doing that, he had two very serious exposure episodes where he really got dosed. That's why his non-Hodgkin's lymphoma came on in only four years after the exposures. Usually non-Hodgkin's lymphoma has a longer latency period, but those were the two events.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer, carefully going through the data and explaining why in their judgment and based on their classification system, the evidence now supports the fact that glyphosate state-based herbicides probably cause cancer. Yeah. Well that, that's what triggered the initiation of the litigation.

Ken Cook: That was a case that was brought in state court right here in the state of California. The ruling came down in in his favor. And for most of these cases where it was in favor of the plaintiff, the initial amounts, the penalties or the settlements that were announced have been reduced by, over the course of appeals and reviews and so forth.

But it was very substantial. And on top of that, um, it, it was pretty clear that there would be many more such cases, and that has turned out to be in fact what happened.

Chuck Benbrook: Yeah, so the, the Roundup non-Hodgkin's lymphoma litigation ha, you know, has dwarfed any past pesticide litigation in the history of the US by multiple orders of magnitude.

And in fact, Ken, I think the only mass tort litigation that's involved more overall settlements would be asbestos. I mean, it's,

Ken Cook: Yeah, probably, yeah,

Chuck Benbrook: There's been about a 110,000 cases that either, the vast majority of course, have settled there. There's only been like 32 trials, in 11 years. It takes a lot to get through all of the hurdles to actually have a trial.

And Bayer Monsanto has not wanted to go to trial, because that's when they're vulnerable to, what's called a punitive damage award. So Lee Johnson, who, he had pretty strong evidence that his massive exposures to to Roundup caused his non-Hodgkins lymphoma.

And he had actually called the one 800 number on the bottle to talk to Monsanto physicians went after he'd been diagnosed and he asked them, is it safe for me to go back and continue to spray Roundup even though I've been diagnosed with non Hodgkin's lymphoma? And guess what they said?

Ken Cook: Yeah, no problem Lee.

Chuck Benbrook: Yeah, your use of Roundup had nothing to do with your cancer, when they knew that it probably did.

The jury was so convinced that Monsanto's behavior was unacceptable,

Ken Cook: And that resulted in punitive damages on top of, uh, other damages

Chuck Benbrook: $250 million for one man.

Ken Cook: So you were part of that legal team as an expert witness, that, that helped Johnson's legal team succeed in that case. And another person who was part of that legal team is our current Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and he shared in the proceeds of the settlement, the share that went to the lawyers. Don't know how they divided it up, it's not been made public, but this was a case that he was integrally involved in.

And at, if you look back at the time, he made some very strong statements as he's mostly continued to make ever since about the importance of dealing with the threat that Roundup poses to human health, not just Mr. Johnson's, God bless him, but lots of other people. And he recruited people as well to bring similar cases as I understand it, uh, in other venues.

Chuck Benbrook: Let's also remember what else was going on at this time.

Bayer really wanted to buy Monsanto, either wanted to merge or acquire Monsanto, and that was actually coming to fruition in early 2018. The Lee Johnson trial started, I believe in March and concluded in May. Yeah. And the acquisition, the $63 billion check that Bayer wrote to buy Monsanto occurred right before that trial started, and at the time when Bayer wrote that $63 billion check to buy Monsanto and all of its liability, there were already 4,500 cases had been filed.

Ken Cook: Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: So Bayer knew that it was going to be a significant body of litigation. I think it's, it's fair to predict that the Monsanto folks told the Bayer people, oh, this is just BS litigation. The science isn't there. We're gonna, we'll win the first few cases and it'll all go away.

I mean, there's no way that Bayer would've gone through with the acquisition.

Ken Cook: You wouldn't think

Chuck Benbrook: Unless they did believe that,

Ken Cook: You know, you, you wouldn't think, and back in around, right. At that time, I had some, some folks I was talking to with Bayer, based in Europe. And if you leave out the Monsanto conversations, Bayer was beginning to take much more seriously developing low risk, organic compliant, even pesticides of all kinds of different kinds.

They had an investment in a facility here in California to do it that I was proud to, to view. And the thought that a major player like Bayer would be weighing in, in a way that would be beneficial because of less toxic, maybe less immediately effective, as is often the case, but less toxic weed killers and other pesticides.

And I remember saying to them, when I heard that they might be buying Monsanto, I said, look, I don't know all the financial considerations or the market considerations, but what I will tell you is what I mostly know about Monsanto beyond what I know about, uh, what's happened with, with Roundup, is what they did with PCBs.

'Cause I have a member of my board from Aniston, Alabama, and we worked with him in the years before when Monsanto knew and lied about, hid from their community in Aniston what PCBs were doing to the community of Aniston, particularly a, a poor community that wasn't entirely African American, but, but largely African American.

And my current board member, David Baker, was the guy who pushed back against Monsanto, led the charge in the community, brought Johnny Cochran to town, had thousands of people lined up and got a huge settlement, the largest settlement at that time, based on fundamentally civil rights law, that they had violated the civil rights of that community.

And they, I think they came in with about a $700 million settlement for the community against Monsanto on PCBs. And I just said, look, if it's in the DNA of a company to not let you know. And this was always in the backdrop for the two of us, I think too with, with uh, GMO crops, right? This was not the kind of company that was gonna step up.

Now most of them don't. But we felt, I felt, in particular, knowing the PCB history, knowing how much money was at stake in, in Roundup, I just didn't trust the company, and I said that to these folks I knew at, at Bayer. But it was higher ups making the decisions. I think it was a bad call, but we'll see how the courts decide.

Chuck Benbrook: It's probably worth sharing, Bayer did not buy Monsanto for Roundup. They bought Monsanto for the intellectual property methods to genetically engineer seeds, and plus of course, they got all of Monsanto seeds. Monsanto, by the time Bayer bought them, had control of much of the base genetics for corn and soybeans in the United States.

Ken Cook: Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: That was the real reason that drove Bayer to want to acquire Monsanto, because Monsanto was making a lot of money off of the licensing of the genetic engineering traits to all other seed companies. And when a company has intellectual property like that, that they license to other companies, it's a perpetual cash machine.

Ken Cook: Yeah. It's like owning the operating system for American agriculture in a significant way. Right? And look what that's done for Microsoft and Apple and others who stepped in, right?

Chuck Benbrook: Yeah. Yeah. So that's what Bayer was, was after and, um, so the, the Johnson case happened and about six months later, the Hardeman case.

Ken Cook: Yes.

Chuck Benbrook: And the Hardeman case was very important because it was the first trial in the federal multi-district litigation. The MDL litigation run by a, a, a very hard-nosed judge named Vince Chhabria.

Ken Cook: Here in San Francisco, the Ninth Circuit, right

Chuck Benbrook: here in San Francisco, and Chhabria to the benefit of Bear and, and Monsanto, bifurcated the trial into two parts. The plaintiff's Hardeman had to get through the first part to get to the second part of the trial.

The first part was just the general causation. Was there adequate science evidence linking exposure to Roundup and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma to meet the standard of, it's more likely than not that Hardeman's exposure to Roundup contributed to his disease — contributed in a significant way?

Ken Cook: But where was Hardeman from?

Chuck Benbrook: He was from California. I don't remember where in California. He had used Roundup for 20 or 30 years

Ken Cook: On his property.

Chuck Benbrook: He wasn't a groundskeeper. He wasn't a farmer. He had been in good health. And the trial on the first part, on the general causation was.

Ken Cook: Yeah

Chuck Benbrook: That was Monsanto's and Bayer’s best shot at containing the litigation and the lawyers knew it, both sides, especially because the judge had seemed to be very open to many of the Bayer Monsanto attorney and expert arguments. Judge Chhabria was skeptical about the science.

Ken Cook: I was fully expecting the trial to end at that first juncture.

Chuck Benbrook: In that first phase of the Hardeman trial, the jury brought back a yes, we believe that Roundup contributed to his non Hodgkins lymphoma.

So phase two was liability and Monsanto's bad behavior, and how big should the compensatory damage award should be, how big should the punitive damage award be? And then just a few months after Hardeman, the Pilliod case. And the Pilliod case was what really blew it wide open. Alva and Alberta Pilliod, and after he retired from the Navy in good health, they would buy five acres of kind of rundown urban, suburban property in Northern California, clean it up.

They were birders, so they would take, each one would take their Roundup sprayer in the evening and walk through the properties and use the Roundup to make trails so they could go and watch the wildlife and the birds.

And, and it's hot, and it's hot in Northern California in the, in the spring and summer. And so they would wear flip flops or sneakers without socks. Shorts and t-shirts, because they'd been told it was safe. And because a lot of the spray solution would land on their lower legs and on their hands, they never got sick.

They didn't get a rash. Monsanto had told 'em it's safe and they knew they had it on them and they never got sick and they never had a rash. So they, they figured their lived experience was aligned with what Monsanto was saying. But Doc, there's a problem — when a chemical damages your DNA, you don't feel it.

Ken Cook: Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: You, you don't get a rash.

Ken Cook: They were from Livermore, so they were out in the heat of the day. And if you've been to Livermore, you know how hot it gets over there, but yeah. And it, it got into their skin. And so what happened next?

Chuck Benbrook: Alva and Alberta Pilliod, a married couple, they got exactly the same type, the major type of non-Hodgkins lymphoma within like six months of each other.

So they got the same disease.

Ken Cook: Oh.

Chuck Benbrook: And the lawyer that presented the case, Brent Wisner, someone that you've met.

Ken Cook: Yeah. Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: He did a masterful job at the tail end of the case in presenting to the jury a way for them — if they so choose to impose punitive damages, how might they figure out the number? A million, 10 million?

And he brought to their attention multiple times during the trial, an email sent by medical doctor to the rest of the management team, the senior people in, involved in preserving their markets for Roundup. And this email chain was speculating about the impact of the IARC classification as a probable human carcinogen.

Ken Cook: Big problem for Monsanto. Big problem.

Chuck Benbrook: For big, big problem. And whether the IARC report would change the EPAs mind. So that they said no, the EPA position was, it was not likely to cause cancer. They, they were concerned about the IARC decision pushing EPA to at least go to possible carcinogen or maybe to a probable carcinogen, which is what the classification decision that IARC made.

So this, this medical officer wrote an email to the brass speculating about whether the, the IARC classification would change EPA, and he entitled it, the billion dollar question.

Ken Cook: There you go.

Chuck Benbrook: And Brent, in the end of his closing statement, the end of the closing statement, this is right before basically the case goes to the jury, he brought that that email back to the attention of the jury in a way that some of the jurors said, hmm, billion, billion, that, that's okay.

Well guess what the jury awarded? A billion dollars to both Alva and Alberta. So it's a $2 billion punitive damage award. One of the largest, punitive damage awards in history for two people.

Ken Cook: For anything. Yeah, for anything. It's this internal document, right? This secret stuff. Right. What they knew and when they knew it.

Profound impact, right? You could line up all the animal studies and all the rest of the evidence critically important to take that into account, but there's something about corporate malfeasance doing things dishonestly, that really rubbed a juror wrong.

Chuck Benbrook: So there were two other smoking gun, very impactful emails in all of these early trials.

The second one was an email by Donna Farmer sent to colleagues in Australia who were dealing with a major news program, investigative program, doing a story about this Roundup cause cancer. And they were getting advice from the brass in St. Louis about what they should say to the, the reporter. They had drafted a statement saying, oh, Roundup doesn't cause cancer, blah, blah, blah.

And she sends them an email saying, we can't say Roundup doesn't cause cancer, 'cause we haven't done the studies required to make that statement. Right in an email. Well, so the jury sees that email about five times.

Ken Cook: Yes, I remember that very well.

Chuck Benbrook: During the trial. And then my personal favorite, number three,

Ken Cook: I think I know which one this is, but go for it.

Chuck Benbrook: Yeah, yeah. You, you know what's coming. It was written by a senior scientist working for Monsanto Europe that had been involved with the very successful reregistration process in Europe, where the European regulators had basically told Monsanto Europe that they're gonna ban Roundup with polyethoxylated tallow amine POEA surfactants, because it was genotoxic, it was clearly damaging DNA.

Ken Cook: The surfactants are the things they add to the formulation to aid right in its efficacy on the leaf of the plant, right?

Chuck Benbrook: Correct. But it also speeds up the movement of the glyphosate through skin. And it also speeds up the glyphosate moving through a hematopoietic stem cell wall because the glyphosate's gotta get inside the cell to come into contact with the DNA to trigger the mutation that starts that cell on the path to non Hodgkin's lymphoma or leukemia or multiple myeloma, which are things that your buddy Benbrook learned through 11 years working on this litigation.

So this guy that helped Monsanto do this seamless transition where they voluntarily took all of the Roundup off the market that they were selling in Europe that was formulated with the POEA surfactants and replaced it with Roundup, formulated with another surfactant, coronary ammonia surfactants.

And it worked fine. They didn't lose any market. There was no big public concern. And so Dr. Richard Garnett, the guy that did this, was involved in a debate with the, again, the brass in St. Louis, the senior people who were trying to figure out what to do next. 'cause they were dealing with reregistration in the U.S.

Ken Cook: Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: They were dealing with concerns in Mexico that wanted to end use of Roundup. Garnett and others put on the table, well, why don't we make the same change worldwide that we made to make Roundup safer in Europe?

Ken Cook: Why wouldn't you? Why wouldn't you?

Chuck Benbrook: Why wouldn't you? And, and so in the course of this long email change with, you know, the senior people, the key people that were the decision makers that

Ken Cook: Was never meant to be public.

Chuck Benbrook: That was never meant to be public.

This guy puts in a line, why should we keep making a hazardous pesticide when we know how to make a safer one. In the email!

Ken Cook: I remember

Chuck Benbrook: And, and so again, the jury saw that like five times over the weeks of the trial. I mean, what could be a clear admission that they understood that there were risks to the old Roundup? The Roundup that's still being sold to American farmers, by the way.

Ken Cook: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Again, that, you know, when will anyone learn if they haven't learned it already, that the coverup is worse than the crime.

Chuck Benbrook: Yeah. And that's when the advertising started all over the country. I mean, how many ads did all of us, you know, on the radio, on the TV billboards, if you used a lot of Roundup?

Ken Cook: Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: Mm-hmm. Call this number. Then of course the number of cases filed, you know, ballooned from several thousand to a hundred thousand, and now I think the total is, it's pushing 180,000 total.

Ken Cook: Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: There's still new cases coming in. It's one of the things that, you know, we ought to talk about a little bit is that there's absolutely no change in how Bayer Monsanto has dealt with Roundup other than for the lawn and garden market.

They took the relatively low tox, active ingredient, glyphosate out of it, and put in three or four different herbicides, including most of them, that are much more toxic than glyphosate, which is just, it's such a irresponsible action by this company, and they say, oh, we did it because we have to curtail the liability risk.

Well. You know, there's gonna be a lot of people that are harmed by this new Roundup because it's still called Roundup. People don't know that there's four other pesticides in it and they think, well, I used to get it all over me and it never made me sick. Well, you get this stuff all over you, you are gonna get, you are gonna get sick. Other than that, they've done nothing.

Ken Cook: Yeah. Yeah. And they could have, as they said themselves. So let's talk through the case that proceeded that your Amicus Brief filed on behalf of Heartland Health and Research Alliance, HHRA. The Trump administration came in in the Ninth Circuit and said, yes, we want the Supreme Court to hear it, and yes, FIFRA preempts, the federal law preempts the states, being able to have any kind of parallel warning that should be made known to anyone who uses the product.

So that case just kind of dies out because the, the Biden administration comes along and says, no, we, we think FIFRA preemption here is not appropriate.

So Hardeman gets their settlement and then Mr. Darnell comes along. And at this point we have the Department of Justice under Biden is still saying, no, we, we don't, we don't think the Supreme Court should intervene. We don't think you should look at this case because it's settled. Preemption doesn't prevent these kinds of plaintiff's cases from coming forward.

But the new Supreme Court, as of the summer of 2025. Ask the incoming, the new Trump administration, been in office, not even a year, asks them, what should we do? Should we, should we take another look? Because maybe things have changed with the new administration. And sure enough, then that's when the Trump administration for the second time in the case, it's going to the Supreme Court, the Trump administration says the same thing in effect that it said before, yeah, these cases should be thrown out because FIFRA protects the companies.

Chuck Benbrook: I learned from a very reliable source that this issue of preemption and the tension within the MAHA world came up several months ago in a, a cabinet meeting that Trump was at, and he said, what's this about?

And somebody that knew a little bit about it said, oh, it's this preemption thing. And Trump said, we shouldn't agree with that. We don't want to give a free pass to chemical companies. He said that, and at the time wasn't expected, but the view was, well, it looks like the White House wasn't gonna, wasn't gonna weigh in on, on behalf of Bayer and Syngenta in this policy fight, but clearly other voices changed his mind.

Ken Cook: Yeah. And my colleague also, Brian Bienkowski for The New Lede works with Carey Gillam. He just won the North American Agricultural Journalists top award for news because of his study using the Freedom of Information Act to unearth just how many times Bayer Monsanto lobbyists met with the administration to argue for them to come back and come back, come home and stand for the companies and not for the, the victims of this exposure.

Chuck Benbrook: Oh my God. The, the degree to which Bayer and former Bayer people and people whose professional careers and livelihood has been dependent on Bayer and the other pesticide companies. I've never seen anything like it from the Secretary of Agriculture, Susie Wiles, the chief of staff, this major fundraiser, Brandon, somebody, the Florida guy.

Ken Cook: Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: They all have deep ties into Bayer. This is how large corporations engage with government.

Ken Cook: That's how they get their way.

Chuck Benbrook: They establish long-term relationships with people of influence that they don't know exactly, I mean, who would've guessed that Brooke Rollins would be Secretary of Agriculture in 2026?

Ken Cook: No one in agriculture I guess, did.

Chuck Benbrook: No, nobody in agriculture. And you know, I think, you know, Brooke, Brooke, Brooke is doing a fine job on some issues. But, uh, she certainly is paying attention to her, her friends and colleagues in the Bayer world and the degree of influence that Bayer has now on this administration, I, I've never seen anything like it.

Ken Cook: It's shocking and, uh, you know, of course Lee Zeldin responded pretty favorably when the, uh, Attorney General, early in the administration came to him and said, here's our petition to you at EPA to, to intervene on behalf of Bayer and Monsanto and stand up for, for preemption of state law.

I think all of us were blown away by the executive order that invoked national security as yet another layer of defense. Look, let's think about the layers here. First of all, there's the proceedings in federal court where the solicitor general, the top trial lawyer for the Justice Department weighed in on behalf of Bayer and Monsanto.

Then you have this executive order that, hey, it's a matter of national defense that we keep, keep this stuff being produced. And then finally, we haven't yet heard what the administration will say, but I don't think it'll be a surprise — there's an effort in Congress to rewrite the law in favor of Bayer and Monsanto and lots of other pesticide companies to choke off any kind of state-based claims of harm and avenues for accountability.

So that's, that's really pretty impressive. Uh, we probably won't get to the prospect that a bad decision at the court or the passage of this bad amendment in the Farm Bill, the implications it will have for other pesticide litigation and other venues for holding pesticide companies accountable. But it's significant, right?

Chuck Benbrook: Yeah. You asked about the Durnell case. Yeah,

Ken Cook: Yeah. Uh,

Chuck Benbrook: John Durnell was a very typical urban user of Roundup. Bought it at, you know, local Lowe's or Home Depot, sprayed it around his yard again for several years. And was exposed to enough of it that the amount of damage to the DNA in these hematopoietic stem cells in his bone marrow, it, it created enough mutated, uh, cells that are incredibly elaborate and redundant immune systems just couldn't keep up.

Ken Cook: Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: And sometimes a cancer will get ahead of the immune system when the immune system's fighting a urinary tract infection or an ear infection, or upper respiratory infection. Or sometimes people are put on immunosuppressive drugs 'cause they're having an a, an organ transplant. If there's some cancer cells in that person's body, they're gonna go wild.

So there, there's, there, cancer is such a complicated disease and there's essentially never or hardly ever one thing that causes a case of cancer. It's a series of things that unfold over at least a few years. Timing has a lot to do with it. John Darnell's case, uh, which I was involved with, I did an expert report and was deposed as, as part of the case — I didn't testify at trial. Uh, it, it reached a judgment. I think he was awarded 1.25 million, which was definitely on the low side.

Ken Cook: Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: Monsanto didn't pick the Durnell case because of the, the large award. There were other reasons that they felt it would be a good vehicle to get these, these issues back in, in front of the Supreme Court.

So when, Bayer Monsanto literally engineered the conflict between the appeals courts. They paid people to do the appeals and, and rewarded either plaintiffs or attorneys for an outcome in those appeals that set up the request for the Supreme Court to take the case.

Ken Cook: Set up by a split between two districts.

Chuck Benbrook: Three.

Ken Cook: The third. Three, okay. All right. I know it's the one in Philadelphia, obviously the one in California, and then where was the third one?

Chuck Benbrook: Uh, it's in the southeast.

Ken Cook: Okay. The Supreme Court's looking at it and saying, “Hey, we're getting conflicting readings right from the courts right below us. So that's an invitation for us to step in.”

Chuck Benbrook: Right. But one of the reasons this is so controversial within the legal community is that Bayer Monsanto paid for lawyers to create the conflict in a way that's been exposed.

Ken Cook: How did they go about it? How did they do it?

Chuck Benbrook: What it boiled down to is that they promised both the attorneys and the person that was the plaintiff in the litigation that they would receive financial compensation, even if they settled their case.

Ken Cook: Wow.

Chuck Benbrook: So once the Supreme Court decided to take the case, I said to myself, I've been dealing with preemption since 1981, when I served as the staff director of the DOA subcommittee. And the number one issue that the industry wanted changes on in 1981, in George Brown subcommittee was preemption. And why?

Because the state of California, Florida, Massachusetts, and New York were starting to impose further restrictions, mostly on insecticide use because they didn't want farm workers to be poisoned in the field.

Ken Cook: Yeah. These were parallel to what was required on the label, right? Not

Chuck Benbrook: Correct.

Ken Cook: Not additional to or substitutes to. They were just parallel, like you have to do this too under state law.

Chuck Benbrook: Yeah, let's use wine grapes. A lot of insecticides are used in in wine grapes. And the company gets a federal label that it, it says how much can be applied, how many times, what kind of sprayer? What sort of PPE the applicator has to wear.

Ken Cook: Personal protective equipment, yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: But doesn't say much about a farm worker, maybe in the next field over, or a, a farm worker that's going into pr...

Ken Cook: It gets on them. It spray, it drifts onto them, or whatever. A family. It could be anybody.

Chuck Benbrook: And the federal label doesn't have any warnings about if you are working in and around a treated field, make sure that you don't get, get exposed. 'Cause this, this stuff will kill you.

Ken Cook: Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: Federal labels were being approved that did not address in any way, shape or form many of the ways that farm workers were getting inadvertently, accidentally, exposed in places like California where you'd have a heavily sprayed grape field next to a strawberry field, next to a cauliflower field.

And you know, they're close enough together that some of the pesticides drift and people were getting badly injured, some people were being killed. So the states were requiring on state labels additional restrictions on when and where a field could be applied. And for example, the state of California wanted to put a sign on the corner of the field — this has been sprayed, stay out of the field for at least 24 hours.

And they wanted the signs to be in Spanish. What a radical idea.

Ken Cook: Of course.

Chuck Benbrook: Right. And this is what the pesticide industry at the national level, they didn't want states to be free to address these very localized and often really dangerous, high risk exposure scenarios. So they came to our subcommittee and and said, we want to cut back the role of states in pesticide labeling.

And states can't require anything more on their label than what the federal EPA did. And if a farm worker is injured and heaven forbid killed, they can't go into a state court and sue the company because they got sprayed from this application on the grapes and were exposed to enough to kill them. They couldn't bring litigation because the application was, complied with, what was on the federal label.

So what California was doing, they were adding additional requirements, including mandatory warnings. And so now the industry says, the argument behind the current effort, is that a farmer or a farm worker, or someone that is exposed to a pesticide in a state and is harmed. Either harmed economically, the pesticide killed their crop, killed their apple trees, damaged the paint on their Maserati, which was happening from some aerial applications in California, remember?

Ken Cook: Yeah, I do remember that.

Chuck Benbrook: You know, people were being harmed from legal, labeled uses of pesticides and, and because of state law, they would go into court and say the, you know, there was a failure to warn. But the pesticide companies want now the federal court system and the Supreme Court to say to the state court, you can't recognize a failure to warn claim unless the warning was on the federal label.

Ken Cook: Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: And of course, pesticide companies, they're responsible for writing the labels and they resist.

Ken Cook: They don't wanna do it.

Chuck Benbrook: They don't want to.

Ken Cook: It'll hurt sales. It'll hurt sales.

Chuck Benbrook: It'll hurt sales.

Ken Cook: Yeah. You have a phrase in your brief industry backed by the Trump administration, I'm gonna say it again, backed by the administration that includes Bobby Kennedy. What they're basically saying is, we wanna make sure that this preemption exists, not just for the things we warn about on the label, but for anything we didn't think of.

Chuck Benbrook: Or didn't understand.

Ken Cook: Didn't understand. No science. But the, the states are producing the science, Heartland Health and Research Alliance produced vital information. New science that wasn't originally considered in the registration of the pesticide you write about in the brief, but there we are.

Chuck Benbrook: Let me just briefly describe part of the HHRA amicus brief that, I think's gonna catch the attention of the Supreme Court.

Ken Cook: Fingers crossed.

Chuck Benbrook: At the core of it, the pesticide industry, Bayer Monsanto wanna take states out of the pesticide regulatory business

Ken Cook: Out of the game. Totally.

Chuck Benbrook: Out of the game. What's going on right now involving another major Monsanto herbicide called Dicamba. Dicamba is one of the herbicides that Monsanto has developed a way to genetically alter soybeans and cotton plants so that not only can you spray glyphosate over the top of the crop, but you can also spray Dicamba.

And Dicamba is very helpful in dealing with some of the difficult to control broadleaf weeds that are really plaguing corn and soybean farmers around the country now.

Ken Cook: And that because Roundup no longer works, right,

Chuck Benbrook: Because it was used too heavily and irresponsibly. Yeah, because Monsanto fought putting any kind of resistance management provisions on the label because they were afraid that it might curtail their sales.

'Cause Monsanto is all about maximizing the sale and profits from its products and anything that gets in the way of that, what they call they, they want to preserve the ‘freedom to operate.’ The freedom to get labels and then to prevent any limitations being put on the existing labels.

Ken Cook: Freedom to operate. I can see the bald eagles and the American flag — unless the pesticide has killed the bald eagles. Of course, I can see the bald eagles in the American flag in the background. Freedom. Freedom to operate.

Chuck Benbrook: Dicamba has been a hugely controversial development, these Dicamba tolerant crops, because Dicamba is very volatile.

So farmers would spray Dicamba and kill the broadleaf weeds in the soybean field. But then the Dicamba, it volatilizes and goes up in the air, and then it moves with the, the, the wind and wherever it next rains or, or a little dew, it's gonna come back down to earth. Well, guess what? There's a lot of plants and trees and shrubs that when that Dicamba comes back down to earth, it's gonna harm it, if not kill it.

So all over the Midwest, there's been, this movement of Dicamba and, and another phenoxy herbicide, two four D, which is also very volatile. So the, the, the herbicides, they don't stay on the field where they sprayed, funny thing, especially in hot and hum weather, they volatilize go up in the air and move.

And so this has just created havoc in these Midwestern and southeastern states where there's a lot of genetically engineered soybeans and cotton grown and a lot of Dicamba being applied. So what have the states done? The states all now do supplemental labels. And what's in the supplemental labels? They have things like, you can't apply Dicamba after June 15th north of, of Highway five or in X County.

So all of the states now are doing supplemental labels for the Dicamba product. That's registered for over the top use in association with a genetically engineered soybeans and cotton. And these labels have some combination of geographic restrictions where they can be sprayed and what the cutoff date is — because this volatilization problem, it gets worse as it gets hotter.

So the farther into the summer, the worse the problem is. From the first year it was used when they could use it, Christ, they could apply it in August and they were having huge problems. Now most of the states don't allow it much after the third week in June.

And basically the farther south you go, the earlier that date is.

Ken Cook: Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: So now there are three companies, Bayer Monsanto, Syngenta, and BASF, that have EPA approved Dicamba labels for applications on genetically engineered soybeans and cotton. These products are now approved in 34 states. So do the math.

Ken Cook: Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: 34 times three.

So now states are reviewing and approving a hundred supplemental labels. A hundred supplemental labels. These are labels that the states have to do, have to apply, they have to enforce, and there's all kinds of crazy ass implications that nobody thought of. You know, somebody's farming in Missouri along the Iowa border, and they go and they buy some Dicamba in Iowa and it's got the label for Iowa and they bring it to Missouri, who's at fault.

Ken Cook: Yeah. Yeah. It's

Chuck Benbrook: unimaginable.

Ken Cook: One of the dynamics here, and you brought it to my attention as these cases were unfolding in this instance, this is a farmer versus farmer thing, right? This is where the plaintiffs were the farmers who were complaining that the drift of this dicamba into their fields that weren't dicamba resistant was costing them a lot of money, a lot of damage, and, and, uh, very upsetting.

Much as they care about their neighbors, they want their neighbors to be able to do what they want to do, like they want to do with their own land. But this stuff doesn't stay on your land. It doesn't stay on your crops. It moves.

Chuck Benbrook: Just think of the hypocrisy here where Bayer Monsanto, for its Roundup product is saying, we gotta cut the role of states out, because we don't like the fact that sometimes we get hauled into court, maybe have to compensate somebody that's been harmed by our product.

But it, but for our Dicamba product, oh, we like it that the states are doing like a almost a hundred supplemental labels this year to allow farmers to spray Dicamba on genetically engineered soybean and cotton,

Ken Cook: And then it falls on the farmers, if they haven't obeyed the label, it falls on them. Not on Monsanto. Is that right?

Chuck Benbrook: Well, that, yes, that, that is exactly correct. Now, if Monsanto has written a inaccurate or ineffective or ambiguous label, they also can become part of litigation. But the, the thing that, that just boils my blood about this, Ken, is the current Supreme Court precedents and direction to state courts about when somebody, that, that is defending a Monsanto or a Syngenta in state court.

Somebody has Parkinson's disease, somebody has non Hodgkin's lymphoma and has brought suit, and that person is seeking compensation from the company, the instructions to the judge on how to deal with a motion — to throw out the failure to warn cause of action. The basis of the litigation.

Ken Cook: Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: Throw it out. You can't do it. That foundation, that interpretation of the FIFRA law was put in place in 2005 as a result of a bunch of cantankerous Texas peanut farmers.

Ken Cook: Yes.

Chuck Benbrook: These peanut farmers had bought a brand new Dow AgroSciences herbicide diclosulam. The trade name was Strongarm.

Strongarm, right?

Ken Cook: They always have the great trade names. Machete and whatever. Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: But there was one issue with Strongarm. Maybe more than one, but one issue that Dow knew about was that in soils, high pH soils, it didn't break down as fast as it normally did, and it was pretty persistent. So if, if a peanut farmer used it in the peanuts, it would work great, it would control the weeds. But then the farmer plants a cotton crop after the peanuts, the next year.

And holy shit, the, the Strongarm herbicide is still active and damages the subsequent crop. Well, that's what happened to this group of, of, I think there was seven or eight plaintiffs led by, the lead plaintiff was a, a guy named a farmer named Bates, and all they asked for was their losses to be covered. Which is the, you know, the amount of money that they paid to plant the subsequent crop and this, this kind of thing with, you know, carry over herbicide damage. Yeah. It, it was happening regularly all over the country.

And most of the time if it was a custom applicator, they would have insurance and the insurance would more than cover it. And sometimes the companies would kick in some of the money if it was a, a larger, broader adverse impact. But for some reason Dow decided that by God we're gonna fight this and try to get rid of this failure to warn cause of action.

And so Dow takes on this group of seven Texas peanut farmers takes on big Dow AgroSciences

Ken Cook: All the way to the Supreme Court.

Chuck Benbrook: Yeah. And wins.

Ken Cook: Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: And wins. And so now American farmers read the, the propaganda put out by the Modern Ag Alliance and other front groups that are being financed mostly by Bayer Monsanto and Syngenta — that are the two multinational pesticide companies facing billions of dollars of costs from litigation over, in the case of Syngenta, Paraquat Parkinson's disease, and in the case of Bayer Monsanto, Roundup and Non Hodge's lymphoma.

They are desperate, desperate to find a way to limit their liability exposure. And let, let me at this point, make one other point that is really important. Why is the pesticide industry so determined to try to get this change in law put in place?

And there's really a very obvious answer. Science is catching up with the ability to link exposure to a given pesticide to damage to DNA or some marker of the evolution of a chronic disease, which then clearly increases the risk of some bad thing happening. Science is catching up on all of the instances where the pesticide industry covered up knowledge and evidence of harm and convinced regulators to say, yeah, it's okay.

We'll label that. That pesticide can be in broccoli. This pesticide can be in carrots. This pesticide can be sprayed all over rangeland in the West. And EPA made those decisions, because the companies had successfully kept the regulators from understanding what the companies already understood about how the pesticide can damage human health.

And the companies know that there are going to be more of these successful efforts by the pesticide industry to keep products on the market, for decades, in some cases, after the company knew it was causing significantly heightened risk of, in the case of Paraquat and Parkinson's disease, the predecessor companies to Syngenta, remember back in the day when we called them Novartis?

Ken Cook: Okay, I do remember. Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, we're going back, but in 1980s, Novartis sponsored cutting edge quality research on what Paraquat was doing in the human brain. And guess what they found? It was triggering damage to dopamine neurons. Completely consistent, and fundamentally part of the progression of damaged neurons to Parkinson's disease — in the eighties!

Ken Cook: Yeah. And another shout out to Carrie Gillum because she published something called the Paraquat Papers. They're on the The New Lede website right now. They were published by The Guardian as well, that again, once you lift this corporate veil and see what they knew and when they knew it, what they were talking about in memos and emails and other communications, they fricking knew.

And they have an obligation under law to let the government know and they didn't. And we know why they didn't. For all the reasons you just described, it's the beginning of the end for them.

Chuck Benbrook: And Ken, let, let me make really clear, 'cause I'm sure some farmers that do worry about access to Roundup are listening to this.

Monsanto knew that Roundup herbicides were damaging the DNA in stem cells in all of our bone marrow. They knew that by the early two thousands. They didn't have any tools to quantify exactly how big the increase in risk of non Hodgkin's lymphoma, multiple myeloma, leukemia, the blood cancers.Very important cancers.

They didn't have all the pieces of the puzzle put together like we do now, today.

Ken Cook: Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: But they knew enough to say, let's put a warning on it.

Ken Cook: Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: You know, if you're using this product a lot and use it over several years, take extra precautions to avoid exposures. They should have put a requirement for for on the label when you are handling and applying this product, wear gloves. I mean, how simple is that?

Ken Cook: How about a long sleeve shirt? How about long — no flip flops, right?

Chuck Benbrook: No flip flops. The Roundup non Hodgkin’s lymphoma litigation is unfortunately stuffed with incredible stories. There was a woman in Florida, she loved her backyard garden, especially her rose bushes.

She had an area in her backyard with her rose bushes.

Ken Cook: My mom and Aunt Ruth did too. I think you saw it one time too.

Chuck Benbrook: God bless them.

Ken Cook: Yeah. Yeah, that's right.

Chuck Benbrook: Been a long time since they left a stock.

Ken Cook: That's right. That's right.

Chuck Benbrook: So this woman, she used bark mulch under her roses, very proud of her roses. And then she had her lawn and she hated it when her lawn started to creep out into her bark mulch, which, yeah, don't we all tend to do.

Ken Cook: Don't we all? Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: So she devised a creative solution. She would have her little Roundup canister that she bought at Home Depot and the little electric sprayer on with shorts on and bare feet.

Ken Cook: Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: And she would put her foot on top of the edge of the grass, on top of the edge of the grass and then spray the bark mulch with her foot catching the, the spray.

And she did that for several years. And guess what? She got non Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Ken Cook: Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: I mean, people do kind of crazy things, but

Ken Cook: Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: When a, when a company tells people that their product is non-toxic, it's, it's all natural ingredients, biodegradable.

Ken Cook: You can spray out the window of a cab as you're on your way to the airport.

Chuck Benbrook: Right? Yeah. Right. And remember the ads for DDT with the kids in suburban areas?

Ken Cook: Yes, off course.

Chuck Benbrook: Of course. Walking behind the spray truck 'cause it looks like it's snowing. In an urban area.

Ken Cook: I did it in my suburban St. Louis neighborhood. Of course I did.

Chuck Benbrook: Yeah.

Ken Cook: Of course I did.

Chuck Benbrook: We all did. So what, what does DDT and Roundup glyphosate have in common? They have an extraordinarily high LD 50.

Ken Cook: The LD 50 is the amount that will kill half the animals in an experiment.

Chuck Benbrook: Exactly. LD stands for lethal dose. Dash 50 is 50% of the animals. So this is the

Ken Cook: Died during the study

Chuck Benbrook: Yeah. Right, right.

Ken Cook: It's not like this is, we wait around for them to get cancer. They're fricking dead.

Chuck Benbrook: Right

Ken Cook: In the cage.

Chuck Benbrook: Right, right. And so, you know, the, the, the LD 50 for glyphosate is like 4,000 parts per million. I mean, it's really high. Just the same as with DDT. I mean, you can stick your arm into a barrel of Roundup and pull your arm out and you're not gonna get sick. You're not gonna have symptoms, you're not gonna get a rash.

If you stick your little one finger just a little bit into that much Paraquat, you're gonna die.

Ken Cook: Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: Or any of the high risk, uh, organophosphate or carbonate insecticide.

Ken Cook: Yeah. Yeah. It varies. Well, you've been very generous with your time, so I just want to ask you one more question and, and you know, again, we're, this is gonna stay with us for a while, depending, especially depending on where, where the Supreme Court goes down, depending on what happens with the Farm Bill next week and what, we don't have time to talk about that particular scenario, but you and I have been through dozens of Farm Bills it feels like.

But what do you think is at stake now? So politically, there are all kinds of questions now in the world of MAHA because they feel betrayed, and rightly so. They shouldn't have been surprised, but because they don't know all the history that we know, uh, they just assume when Trump said he was gonna do something about pesticides, and it sounds like you've, you've heard he was surprised at the preemption position the government took, uh, in the end too.

So there's that political element where we gotta get people to wake up to what's really going on. But then there's, there's the real possibility that if this decision goes the wrong way, and we've had some doozies on the environment from this court, right — that we could, we could really be in trouble.

We could really lose one of our few remaining avenues, other than buying organic food. But certainly for a lot of people being exposed outside the dietary exposure route, we, we could really be in trouble when it comes to protecting human health and the environment and all kinds of critters from pesticides.

But, but what, what's your sort of closing thought on all of this, Chuck? You, I mean, you, you and I go back decades, but you've been, you know, a, a, a leader on pesticide policy and regulation and obviously deeply involved as an expert in this litigation now also for decades. What comes to your mind that, that makes you most concerned if this goes sideways?

Chuck Benbrook: Really important, uh, question Ken and I, I, I think the answer is that right now, the, the only meaningful accountability and concern about coming forward and getting high risk pesticides registered for uses that are gonna result in a lot of, uh, human exposure is the, the risk of litigation. If that risk is taken away, then, right now, the, the pesticide industry has a very cozy relationship with the Office of Pesticide Programs.

Ken Cook: Longstanding very long, unfortunately, uncomfortably longstanding. I think, I don't wanna put words in your mouth, but, you know.

Chuck Benbrook: OPP started to go downhill by the late eighties, uh, and from basically the late eighties on, the ability of pesticide registrants to get their way with the Office of Pesticide Programs has steadily increased to, to the point now where they're, they're not really that concerned about getting their, their products on the market, and they're certainly not concerned about EPA taking a high risk product off the market.

I mean, look what happened just two weeks ago. Syngenta bailed on Paraquat before the EPA took it off the market.

Ken Cook: Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: And what, why did Syngenta bail on it? Because they know they're gonna keep getting sued. It, it's, it's been banned in China, which owns Syngenta. You know, it's, it's just, uh, the, the lax approach of the US EPA and the Office of Pesticide programs about well documented, clearly hazardous uses of pesticides.

It, it's, it's, a travesty. And I think that farmers are starting to figure it out — because they look in their neighborhood cancer, this family, two cases of cancer, this family, three cases in this family.

Ken Cook: Yeah. Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: They can see that people are getting sick.

Ken Cook: Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: And unfortunately we have big problems with how we grow food in this country, and then what we do with the food between when it leaves the farm and people eat it.

The concerns over ultra processed food are real. The health of the American public is a national disgrace right now.

Ken Cook: Yeah, for sure.

Chuck Benbrook: I think the public is about had it with it. And I think that the day is going to come, you know, in, in the next five or 10 years where there's going to be substantial changes in some of the laws and policies that govern agriculture and, and, and food safety and food quality.

We could have the most nutritious, delicious, diverse food supply in this country if we wanted to, but no. What do we have? We produce a lot of ethanol. We export a lot of food and we feed a lot of corn and soybeans to, to livestock and create unhealthy fats that keep us unhealthy. Our food and fiber system is seriously broken, and the, the, the time is, is, has come to fix it.

Ken Cook: Well, between your lips and God's ears, brother Chuck, I'm gonna end there and, and thank you for, uh, explaining all of this to me and to my, uh, audience and, and also for your decades of devotion, uh, intellectually and, um, devotion that comes from, from the heart. I know that firsthand, we'll come back when we find out how some of these deci, big decisions have come down.

The most momentous decisions really since the 1990, mid 1990s, Food Quality Protection Act and the National Academy, most momentous moment.

Chuck Benbrook: I, I knew you were gonna say that at some point.

Ken Cook: Yeah. We haven't agree. Had a moment like this and, um…

Chuck Benbrook: Yeah.

Ken Cook: We'll stick with it. Uh, Chuck Benbrook, thank you for joining and giving me another great episode.

Chuck Benbrook: Thank you.

Ken Cook: Thank you to Dr. Chuck Benbrook for joining me today, and thank you out there for listening. If you'd like to learn more, be sure to check out our show notes for additional links to take a deeper dive into today's discussion. Make sure to follow our show on Instagram @KenCooksPodcast. And if you're interested in learning more about ewg, head on over to ewg.org or check out the ewg Instagram account @EnvironmentalWorkingGroup.

Now, if this episode resonated with you, and I hope it did, and you think someone you know would benefit from it, send it along. The best way to make positive change is to start as a community with your community. Today's episode was produced by the extremely remarkable Beth Rowe at Mary Kelly. Our show's theme music is by Moby.

Thank you Moby, and thank you again out there for listening.

Areas of Focus

Chemical Policy

Glyphosate

Pesticides

May 29, 2026