Quaker Oats, Chlormequat, and the Environmental Working Group's Newest Public Scam
(Research Brief)
The hard-working alarmists… sorry, environmentalists over at the Environmental Working Group (EWG) just dropped their latest target for pesticide presence, and this time, they’re getting a boost from our friends over at the NY Post.
If you’re not familiar with the EWG, you’d more likely recognize them for their yearly release of the “Dirty Dozen” produce list, a marketing guide that reports the ultra-trace amounts of pesticide residues found on everyday produce. The top reported produce vary by year, and all of the residue levels reported are well within federally required safety levels, but don’t expect the EWG to include that in their annual report.
All cards on the table, I’m not a fan of the EWG and I think their work can be categorized as outright misleading at best, and conniving propaganda at worst. Nor do I think the NY Post provides the most well-researched health pieces, so given the combination of the two, this should be a doozy.
To the science, we go.
The NY Post’s article is based on the EWG’s recently published study in the Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology, targeting a pesticide called chlormequat and its alleged connection to infertility. Chlormequat can be used to limit stalk length of crops like oat and wheat. While this improves harvest yields, the EWG claims that trace residues can then make their way into our food products, and eventually us. Based on their own analyses, they assert the following:
Chlormequat is linked to infertility, altered fetal growth, and delayed puberty
80% of Americans tested positive for chlormequat residues
The current concentrations must mean that Americans are regularly exposed to chlormequat
92% of the oat-based foods they tested presented with detectable levels of chlormequat
Each of these claims is either outright nonsense or extremely decontextualized, demonstrably so using their own report and data.
Let’s start with this central claim of harm posited in the EWG’s study, how “Toxicological studies suggest that exposure to chlormequat can reduce fertility and harm the developing fetus…”. What is the evidence offered herein? Well, in the 1980’s, Danish pig farmers apparently noticed that after their pigs consumed some wheat treated with chlormequat, they observed declining birth rates in the pig population. Doesn’t sound like much to go on if you ask me, but that’s functionally the best piece of evidence offered forth. Their study’s own introduction admits just as much:
But let’s look at this from another angle. Cereal growers have been using chlormequat for the past 40 years, so if this pesticide is so abundantly present in our food supply and impairs fertility, wouldn’t we see a decline in fertility rates in the United States?
Seems like a reasonable question, and according to a separate study on infertility rates published in June of 2022, with data pooled from over 50,000 individuals spanning 1995 to 2019, there were no meaningful changes in infertility rates:
The fluctuations in infertility over this period, with a low of 5.8% in 2006–2010 and a high of 8.1% in 2017–2019, were not found to be statistically significant. This trend was present across nearly all subgroups.
Said another way, there has been nothing abnormal about the annual fluctuations of infertility rates over the last 29 years. Probably more to the point, studies conducted from even earlier observed a significant drop in infertility rates throughout the 80’s and 90’s. Infertility arises for a variety of reasons and has many different risk factors, but I don’t suspect that exposure to chlormequat is one of them.
As for that claim about how 80% of Americans tested positive for chlormequat residues in their urine? The EWG purchased 96 urine samples, participant identities of the samples unknown. At least 21 of those samples were from pregnant woman, and the sample providers all lived in Missouri, Florida, or South Carolina. Extraordinarily small residues were identified within 77 of the samples.
How old were these people? Don’t know. What do we know about their racial background? Don’t know. Dietary patterns? Health history? How about income levels? Don’t know. Were any of these people asked to consume thirteen bowls of Quaker Oats cereal before providing their urine sample? We don’t know, the urine was tight-lipped about all this.
Given how we don’t know practically anything about the participants who provided the urine, we certainly can’t extrapolate this as a generalizable sample of the US population, and you certainly can’t claim this means 80% of all Americans tested positive, as the NY Post title so foolishly asserts. And while we’re tossing this claim in the garbage, we can do the same with the notion that Americans are getting consistent, hazardous exposure to chlormequat.
Last, what about their results reporting 92% of oat-based foods having detectable levels of chlormequat? In this instance, the operative word is ‘detectable’. In a sample of conventional oat products purchased in 2023, the EWG detected a median residue of 114 parts per billion among 11 of the 12 products they purchased.
To contextualize what 114 parts per billion means, consider this. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the sticklers of protecting Mother Nature, set the legal requirements of maximum tolerable residue levels for each registered pesticide, including chlormequat. These levels are extremely small, set well below any reported side effects for toxicity, and you can see the chart here that highlights oats at 10 parts per million for chlormequat residues:
The EWG’s report of 114 parts per billion detected in oats is exactly 1.1% of the maximum tolerance for chlormequat residues. It would take almost 100 times the level observed before you would exceed the EPA’s already insanely strict regulations. Among other samples, some of the detected residue levels barely eeked outside of the EWG’s own established limits of detection, which are the lowest concentration of a metabolite that can be reliably detected and quantified.
Well, color me perplexed. In the end, it appears as though the EWG is just out to sully the name of another food brand, and one associated with America’s religious roots no less. The gall!
So ladies, please take a moment and internalize this fact. When it comes to oatmeal, the only thing you’re at risk for is a bland breakfast, should your forget to add anything worthwhile to it such as fruit or peanut butter. There is no reliable evidence that eating Cheerios, Quaker Oats, or any oat or wheat product are going to make it harder for you to have a baby. Ironic as it is that the EWG promoted this claim, we can use their own report to put it where it belongs. In the trash.