Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on glyphosate: what the evidence says · JRE #2461

What the evidence says 01 / RECORD

The mass Roundup litigation against Monsanto/Bayer centered on the International Agency for Research on Cancer's (IARC) March 2015 classification of glyphosate as a Group 2A "probable human carcinogen," a determination based specifically on human evidence linking occupational glyphosate exposure to non-Hodgkin lymphoma, matching Kennedy's claim. Separately, a 2020 human study of 97 biopsy-confirmed NAFLD patients at UC San Diego found that urinary glyphosate and AMPA excretion were significantly higher in patients with steatohepatitis (NASH, p=0.008-0.022) and correlated with fibrosis severity (p=0.001-0.046), showing a genuine but modest statistical association. That study had no non-NAFLD control group and could not establish causation, and no major regulator treats glyphosate-NAFLD as an established causal link: the EPA's current position is that glyphosate is "not likely to be carcinogenic to humans," and its glyphosate materials do not list liver disease as a recognized human health endpoint of concern. Kennedy's statement is therefore roughly accurate on both points: the litigation was indeed built on non-Hodgkin lymphoma evidence, and a documented but preliminary, non-causal association with liver disease exists, though calling the liver finding a settled "scientific association" somewhat overstates evidence drawn from a single uncontrolled human cohort.