GMO Health Risks

Starting in 1996, Americans have been eat­ing genet­i­cally mod­i­fied (GM) ingre­di­ents in most processed foods. Why isn’t the FDA pro­tect­ing us?

In 1992, the Food and Drug Administration claimed they had no infor­ma­tion show­ing that GM foods were sub­stan­tially dif­fer­ent from con­ven­tion­ally grown foods. Therefore they are safe to eat, and absolutely no safety stud­ies were required. But inter­nal memos made pub­lic by a law­suit reveal that their posi­tion was staged by polit­i­cal appointees who were under orders from the White House to pro­mote GMOs. In addi­tion, the FDA offi­cial in charge of cre­at­ing this pol­icy was Michael Taylor, the for­mer attor­ney for Monsanto, the largest biotech com­pany, and later their vice president.

In real­ity, FDA sci­en­tists had repeat­edly warned that GM foods can cre­ate unpre­dictable, hard-to-detect side effects, includ­ing aller­gies, tox­ins, new dis­eases, and nutri­tional prob­lems. They urged long-term safety stud­ies, but were ignored.

Today, the same biotech com­pa­nies who have been found guilty of hid­ing toxic effects of their chem­i­cal prod­ucts are in charge of deter­min­ing whether their GM foods are safe. Industry-funded GMO safety stud­ies are too super­fi­cial to find most of the poten­tial dan­gers, and their vol­un­tary con­sul­ta­tions with the FDA are widely crit­i­cized as a mean­ing­less façade.

GM plants, such as soy­bean, corn, cot­ton­seed, and canola, have had for­eign genes forced into their DNA. The inserted genes come from species, such as bac­te­ria and viruses, which have never been in the human food supply.

Genetic engi­neer­ing trans­fers genes across nat­ural species bar­ri­ers. It uses impre­cise lab­o­ra­tory tech­niques that bear no resem­blance to nat­ural breed­ing, and is based on out­dated con­cepts of how genes and cells work. Gene inser­tion is done either by shoot­ing genes from a “gene gun” into a plate of cells or by using bac­te­ria to invade the cell with for­eign DNA. The altered cell is then cloned into a plant.

Widespread, unpre­dictable changes

The genetic engi­neer­ing process cre­ates mas­sive col­lat­eral dam­age, caus­ing muta­tions in hun­dreds or thou­sands of loca­tions through­out the plant’s DNA.  Natural genes can be deleted or per­ma­nently turned on or off, and hun­dreds may change their behav­ior. Even the inserted gene can be dam­aged or rearranged, and may cre­ate pro­teins that can trig­ger aller­gies or pro­mote disease.

GM foods on the market

There are eight GM food crops. The five major varieties—soy, corn, canola, cot­ton, and sugar beets—have bac­te­r­ial genes inserted, which allow the plants to sur­vive an oth­er­wise deadly dose of weed killer. Farmers use con­sid­er­ably more her­bi­cides on these GM crops and so the food has higher her­bi­cide residues. About 68% of GM crops are her­bi­cide tolerant.

The sec­ond GM trait is a built-in pes­ti­cide, found in GM corn and cot­ton. A gene from the soil bac­terium called Bt (for Bacillus thuringien­sis) is inserted into the plant’s DNA, where it secretes the insect-killing Bt-toxin in every cell. About 19% of GM crops pro­duce their own pes­ti­cide. Another 13% pro­duce a pes­ti­cide and are her­bi­cide tolerant.

There is also Hawaiian papaya and a small amount of zuc­chini and yel­low crook­neck squash, which are engi­neered to resist a plant virus.

Growing evi­dence of harm from GMOs

GM soy and aller­gic reactions

• Soy aller­gies sky­rock­eted by 50% in the UK, soon after GM soy was introduced
• A skin prick allergy test shows that some peo­ple react to GM soy, but not to wild nat­ural soy.
• Cooked GM soy con­tains as much as 7-times the amount of a known soy allergen.
• GM soy also con­tains a new unex­pected aller­gen, not found in wild nat­ural soy.

Bt corn and cot­ton linked to allergies

The biotech indus­try claims that Bt-toxin is harm­less to humans and mam­mals because the nat­ural bac­te­ria ver­sion has been used as a spray by farm­ers for years. In real­ity, hun­dreds of peo­ple exposed to Bt spray had allergic-type symp­toms, and mice fed Bt had pow­er­ful immune responses and dam­aged intestines. Moreover, the Bt in GM crops is designed to be more toxic than the nat­ural spray and is thou­sands of times more concentrated.

Farm work­ers through­out India are get­ting the same aller­gic reac­tions from han­dling Bt cot­ton as those who reacted to Bt spray. Mice and rats fed Bt corn also showed immune responses.

GMOs fail allergy tests

No tests can guar­an­tee that a GMO will not cause aller­gies. Although the World Health Organization rec­om­mends a screen­ing pro­to­col, the GM soy, corn, and papaya in our food sup­ply fail those tests—because their GM pro­teins have prop­er­ties of known allergens.

GMOs may make you aller­gic to non-GM foods

• GM soy dras­ti­cally reduces diges­tive enzymes in mice. If it also impairs your diges­tion, you may become sen­si­tive and aller­gic to a vari­ety of foods.
• Mice fed Bt-toxin started hav­ing immune reac­tions to for­merly harm­less foods.
• Mice fed exper­i­men­tal GM peas also started react­ing to a range of other foods (The peas had already passed all the allergy tests nor­mally done before a GMO gets on the mar­ket. Only this advanced test, which is never used on the GMOs we eat, revealed that the peas could actu­ally be deadly.)

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at Institute for Responsible Technology.