Health Wanted: Autonomous Vehicles

The Episode

When the Beatles said “baby you can drive my car,” I don’t know that they realized they’d one day be talking to a robot. 

This week on Health Wanted, we’re talking about autonomous vehicles’ impact on health and safety and looking at the world of tomorrow! Today! We also talk to Yonah Freemark of the Urban Institute about what policy we should consider to make the technology a net positive.

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The Listener Questions

Is it okay to mix berries and bananas in my smoothie?

People have been claiming recently that bananas break down the nutritional value of berries, so you should not mix them together in your smoothies. There is no data to back up this claim.

This claim says that blueberries contain compounds called polyphenols, which are antioxidants and do good things for your body, and bananas have compounds called polyphenol oxidase, which can break down antioxidants. Both are true statements. But then people claim that the polyphenol oxidase in bananas will break down the polyphenols in blueberries, and that’s bad, so you shouldn’t mix them together.

The proof, they say, is a 2023 study...but the study did not actually find that you shouldn't mix bananas and berries. It was a study in only eight men, and it compared biomarkers in the blood of men who got either a banana smoothie (which is high in polyphenol oxidase), a berry smoothie (which is low in polyphenol oxidase), or a control. Each of those three options was also mixed with a cocoa extract that is high in a specific polyphenol called a “flavanol.” The study was done by UC Davis and funded by the Mars company, which makes the cocoa extract.

The men who had the extract as a capsule or the extract and berries saw their levels of a certain type of polyphenol go up, but for the men who had the extract and bananas, the level of the polyphenol stayed low. This implies that something about the banana-and-extract combo prevented the body from metabolizing the polyphenols in the extract

Nowhere in the study did they test banana’s impact on berries. Nowhere in the study were berries and bananas even mixed!

It feels shortsighted to try to make people think they’re doing smoothies incorrectly when we have a lot of people in this country who aren’t eating enough fruits and vegetables to begin with. So go ahead and mix your berries and bananas, and mute social media accounts that tell you you’re doing health wrong.

Glyphosphate

Glyphosate was the main ingredient in Roundup. It has been phased out of residential and commercial versions of the weedkiller but still exists in agricultural versions. Recently there has been confusion about whether is causes cancer after a Supreme Court ruling.

Starting with the court case: Bayer acquired Monsanto, which makes Roundup, and they were embroiled in a court case alleging that they had failed to disclose the cancer-causing potential of Roundup at the state level in the form of a warning on the product packaging. That would make them liable for cases of non-Hodgkins lymphoma believed to be connected to the use of the chemical.

Bayer said, “No, we are not in violation, the EPA has determined that glyphosate probably doesn’t cause cancer, and per the rules of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) if the EPA doesn’t require a label then the states can’t mandate any additional labels.”

And the plaintiffs came back and said, “But the EPA is supposed to review the data on pesticides every 15 years, and there’s new data that suggests a stronger link to cancer, so the lack of warning label at the federal level might be a mislabel, in which case states can require their own labels.” 

This is a big deal because glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide in the world. It’s estimated that 300 million pounds of glyphosate are used in U.S. farms alone each year. So, if the court ruled that the states had the right to request warning labels about cancer risk and Bayer did not do them, then that would open the door to hold Bayer liable for the thousands of cases currently in courts that claim Bayer is responsible for people’s cancer diagnoses. They would still have to prove that glyphosate caused the cancers, but there’s no point in going through with those cases if the Supreme Court rules that Bayer did not have to put state-level warning out.

Which is what happened. The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in Bayer's favor.

So that is what happened in court. But is glyphosate actually harmful to human health? That’s proving harder to answer. If you look at epidemiologic, animal, and mechanistic studies, they provide a compelling pattern of evidence that glyphosates are a cause of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. But actual studies in humans are much harder to wade through.

In 2015, the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified glyphosate as a group 2A carcinogen, meaning that it is probably carcinogenic to humans. This category is used when there is limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans, but sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in animal studies. But this report faced some severe scrutiny, because the IARC study aimed to understand if glyphosate can cause cancer under any circumstance, not just at doses that are likely to occur in the environment. 

Other agencies, like the U.S. EPA and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, have found that it's likely not carcinogenic. The EPA’s ruling was also met with a lot of scrutiny, because the paper that deemed Roundup safe (which this EPA decision relied on) was retracted in January of this year because it was found the authors had financial ties to the makers of Roundup that they didn’t disclose.

Other large-scale studies or meta analyses have differed in their conclusions, likely because different researchers weigh the strength of papers differently. There just isn’t a great way to study if the level of exposrue you get through produce consumption is enough, vs using round up on your garden for 20 years, vs working on an industrial farm that uses roundup. The dose makes the poison and we don’t know what dose (if any) makes roundup a problem.

The concern here is that as the use of glyphosate has increased dramatically, the amount that people can potentially be exposed increases as well.

So, I the jury is particularly out when it comes to what a dangerous level of polyphosphate exposure is, if there is one at all. But it’s become a surprisingly contentious topic in MAHA. HHS secretary RFK Jr. actually represented a plaintiff in one of these early Roundup cases and won. Plus, he has repeatedly said that he thinks glyphosate causes cancer. 

But in this case the U.S. government actually sided with Bayer. And more recently, RFK Jr. has defended an executive order from earlier this year aimed at boosting glyphosate production. So it seems like MAHA’s stance on glyphosate is about as clear as the connection between glyphosate and cancer.

Catch all the listener questions and Laurel’s answers on the full episode of Health Wanted by:

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