This transcript was created with help from Ai. Please report errors to us and always refer to the video as your primary source.

Justin Brady: From the jetro Barbecue Studio, I’m Justin Brady, real talk, real Iowans, no drama, and we’re gonna bring you some real talk today, The international agency for CA Research on Cancer. The IABC considers it Carcinogenic, Florida Surgeon General last week. Last week, just labeled it as a contaminant. And it’s used on 70 this, these are rough estimates, but 70 to 90% of. Iowa’s fields right now. What is it, it’s glyphosate. and Some people, not everybody. Some people think maybe it’s carcinogenic, maybe it’s causing Iowa’s high cancer rates. And of course there are many other things that are being looked at. and To break that down today. is Dr. Richard Deming of Mercy one and the Deming Cancer Center. Thank you for so much for coming on the show.

Dr. Richard Deming: You bet. Thanks for having me.

Justin Brady: It’s a very complicated issue and I think one of the things you believe in, it’s an issue we need to discuss. We don’t Point, fingers, we gotta discuss it. All options are on the

Dr. Richard Deming: Absolutely And I’m a, I’m a clinical oncologist, uh, by training. I’m a radiation oncologist. Um, I graduated medical school in 1980 and most of my career has been, uh, focused on radiation oncology, uh, which is killing cancer cells with radiation. For the last four years, I have not been doing killing of cancer cells. I’ve created an integrative oncology program and that is, you know, not every patient can be cured, but every patient can be healed. So I spend a lot of time with new patients, helping them assemble the team, but also a survivorship clinic. And survivorship clinic is, you know, taking care of patients, some of whom have been treated in curative cancer, but some who are living. Within incurable cancer. But I’m very interested in, you know, what are the causes of cancer? How can we prevent as many cancers as possible? How can we do screening and detect it at early stage, as many cancers as possible, but also how can we make sure that everyone has access to healthcare? Yeah.

Justin Brady: So, and I’m gonna, I want to talk about above and beyond, I want to talk about your work. I want to talk, about, I mean, there’s so many things. but before we get all into that real quick note, Jethro’s Barbecue we’re, we appreciate them being a sponsor. and bringing conversations like This To you, if you wanna show us some love go to Iowa podcast.com. Scroll to, the top, there’s a little banner. Click that buy a gift card from Jet rows of a hundred dollars and they’ll throw in a $30 gift card. Without them, we couldn’t bring you these, shows, so we certainly appreciate it, I’m assuming. Then, uh, Dr. Deming, you saw the Florida announcement. Is this one of the first. times An actual government health? entity in the United States has actually gone after glyphosate. ’cause they’re, they’re not calling it carcinogenic, but they, on their website, they actually call it a pesticide contaminant. And for those that didn’t see it, they were actually testing bread and finding out where this showed up. Have you, what’s your reaction

Dr. Richard Deming: So

Justin Brady: news? Yeah, I was,

Dr. Richard Deming: I was, I was starting to, to. to sort of, um, let you know that I’m not an expert on glyphosate. I’m not an expert, I’m not a basic scientist. I got interested in advocacy and public policy really significantly during the debate on the Affordable Care Act because access to care is so important. So I am very, very interested in public policy and I keep up on reading, not only, you know, the current journalistic articles. But have done a bit of a deeper dive into things related to the cause of cancer. So, uh, we could talk about all the other causes of cancer and we do have to keep that in mind because glyphosate definitely is carcinogenic. There’s numbers of articles that show that we can talk about what type of cancers, but we have to not lose sight of the fact that 42% of cancers in the United States are. Preventable by things we already know, like not smoking, eating healthy, engaging in physical activity, not drinking alcohol, getting vaccinated for the HPV virus, avoiding sun exposure. Um, lots of things that we know causes cancer and among them are environmental factors. The environmental factors are more difficult to study and to quantify and then to directly correlate. So it took decades to prove that the act of cigarette smoking caused lung

Justin Brady: right?

Dr. Richard Deming: We’re now talking about environmental exposures that are thousands of chemicals causing dozens of cancers, and even in the world of. Ag chemicals. Glyphosate isn’t the only chemical And and it’s not just ag chemicals. I mean, it’s PFASs, it’s red dye, it’s plastics, it’s our carpet, it’s our wall covering. We can probably show that there’s lots of different contaminants. Most of us don’t want to go back to the 15 hundreds where we didn’t have as many, you know, manmade carcinogens. We still were burning stuff though. So, uh, the things that cause cancer may also have positive benefits on a modern lifestyle and may have. Positive effects on, on agriculture, for example. So it’s a matter of figuring out what are the negative, the contributions, the risks, what are the benefits, and then mitigating. Even cigarette smoking. We have not made

Justin Brady: right?

Dr. Richard Deming: It is not illegal. It is not immoral. My mom and dad, like 50% of adults in the 1950s smoked. My mom and dad each died of cigarette smoking at age 52. Mom of lung cancer, uh,

Justin Brady: uh,

Dr. Richard Deming: dad of sudden cardiac death. They were not doing anything illegal or immoral. They were good people. But once we learn the association with cigarette smoking and lung cancer, then we started to mitigate. Right. And how do you mitigate? You mitigate with public policy. That’s carrots and sticks. It’s it’s credits and penalties. And over the years with cigarette smoking, we have learned how to reduce cigarette smoking by public policy. Number one is. Attacks on a packet of cigarettes. Nothing reduces, uh, cigarette smoking as much as increasing the price of cigarettes. So we’ve gone from a high of about 50% of the 1950s by 50%. I mean, 50% of adults smoking down to less than 20%.

Justin Brady: I, actually heard a really, and I can’t, I don’t, I, I wish I could source. this, but you Bring up a good point. which is just, Uh, efforts being, you bring up a good point, which is sometimes people wanna point out that, you know, oh, farmers, farmers are out Dude, it’s not farmers. Farmers don’t have labs. They can’t they trust regulators. They trust lawmakers and they trust the providers of this stuff. that They’re doing the right research. So, um, I was texting someone ahead of time and they’re like, man, like And why do people always hate on the farmers? And I’m like, yeah, that’s a good point. It’s not their fault. No, it’s They’re

Dr. Richard Deming: No, we’re not throwing anybody under the boss’s feed the

Justin Brady: the world for crying. Out loud. Give ’em a break. I’m,

Dr. Richard Deming: I’m not even here to throw under the bus manufacturers mm-hmm. Of chemicals. I would say that if, if there is something ethical that needs to be looked at, it’s like, just as in the analogy with cigarette smoking, when did they know it? And, and Correct. At what point were there. Um, Mirus there is a point of

Justin Brady: of accountability. Yeah. I, I wanna go back to something you said though, because, uh, in my view. um, not my personal view, I avoid anything with glyphosate in it as much as I can. That’s just my personal view. But You said something interesting, which is like, well, we know it’s carcinogenic, so like, I mean, that’s kind of a big statement in and of itself, isn’t it?

Dr. Richard Deming: Well, if you have access to peer reviewed public, uh, medical literature, that that’s not hard. I mean, anybody can nowadays, I mean, used to, back when I was in school, you have to go to library and, and do card catalogs that were, but now you can go to. Uh, peer-reviewed medical literature, PubMed, and there is an abundance of peer-reviewed medical literature that shows the association of many, many different che chemicals with increased risk of cancer. Now, one might ask, well, what is needed to say cause and effect as opposed to

Justin Brady: So like an amount, is that what you’re saying?

Dr. Richard Deming: Well, an amount or the degree of which this chemical and this amount causes cancer as opposed to, um, exposure to this chemical. Is associated with an increased risk in the

Justin Brady: Sure.

Dr. Richard Deming: So it ends up, even with cigarette smoking, you can’t prove that my mom’s cigarette smoking caused her lung cancer because some people who don’t smoke do get lung cancer. Sure. There’s also secondary smoke and there’s tertiary smoke. But you study enough people that are primary smokers and you see the risk of cancers and then you reduce the risk of cigarette smoking and you see a reduction in, in cancer. That is very good evidence. It’s not directly cause and effect, but it is association. So there are many, many good studies in the literature that associate. Uh, um, chemicals that are used in agriculture with increased risk of cancer. Um, you know, I brought a whole bunch of studies, but you don’t, you don’t have to dig too deeply. It’s what is a degree of association that meets a scientific level of cause and effect where you might actually take

Justin Brady: Why, is it so, why aren’t we taking action then? Why? Like, why is it still being applied? everywhere And why it seems like it’s still this thing that people are like, well, maybe it’s a debate we should have. We don’t really know why. Is there even a debate if it seems kind of clear? it’s

Dr. Richard Deming: risks and benefits. It’s clear the cigarette smoking causes cancer. We have not made that illegal. It is absolutely clear that alcohol consumption in any amount increases the risk of cancer. There are benefits associated with it. So we have not, I mean, we did go through a. Period of time in our history where we banned alcohol, not because of

Justin Brady: didn’t work so well, everybody.

Dr. Richard Deming: Work so well. So, um, it’s, it’s mitigation. Okay. So to what extent do we mitigate and ion requires public policy. So for example. Public document on nitrates. Nitrates are, uh, natural in, in, uh, manure. Mm-hmm. We spread manure. That’s nitrates, but it’s also can be spread in commercial fertilizers. Right. We know that there’s a association with nitrates and with cancer. This is from, you know, the Iowa College of Public Health. This is a state of Iowa document. From the Environmental Health Sciences Research Center, and we know that, uh, the International Agency for Research of Cancer classifies nitrates in food and water as probably carcinogenic to humans, and particularly colorectal cancer, but also associated with thyroid cancer, ovarian cancer, and kidney cancer. We don’t make spreading manure illegal. Right. We don’t put, uh, make. Putting am ammonia on, on, um, fertilizers. But we have created a strategy. So there is a, um, nutrient reduction strategy, and I don’t know how old it is. You can do the journalism to.

Justin Brady: People can do the

Dr. Richard Deming: You know, and part of that is, you know, when the nitrates come get applied to the field, they don’t stay on the field. They quickly get washed down through, into the streams, into the rivers, you know, in Des Moines Water Works this year. You couldn’t water your lawns, not because we didn’t have enough water, but they couldn’t clean the water of nitrates quickly enough to get them into the pipes to have enough water for drinking and for, uh, watering lawns, uh, because of the high level, but it continues to wash down. And then the Gulf of Mexico, the, the, the big dead zone. So what we did is create a nutrient reduction sta strategy. It was. It is all voluntary. Mm-hmm. Um, so I invite you to. Do the research. I mean, the goal was to reduce, uh, nitrates in the water heading down to the Gulf of Mexico by a certain percent in a certain year. All that’s happened is it’s gone up and up and up with a voluntary nutrient reduction strategy, and that doesn’t surprise people because the strategy to reduce it. May cost a farmer some money, whether, and I’m not an expert on all of the strategy, you know, my dad worked for a grain elevator, grew up in a small town, but I never actually farmed. But you can put buffer crops around the edge to try to keep the nitrates from going in. There’s cover crops in the way. All of those things have some expense to the farmer. And if there’s no. Tax credits to encourage those activities, or there’s no penalties to detect how much nitrate is coming off that field, then it’s not surprising that many of the known methods of reducing nitrates getting into the rivers and going to the Gulf of Mexico aren’t fully put into effect.

Justin Brady: farmers in, um, agricultural community aren’t just going to take commercial risks. without Clarity, They’re going to wait for some clarity in some direction. before doing

Dr. Richard Deming: even cigarette smokers in the 1950, were not willing based on just the knowledge that it causes cancer, it, it was the, um, tax on cigarettes that significantly started to reduce, but along with education.