Studies Conclude GMO Feed Causes Organ Disruption in Animals

The GM soy­bean and corn vari­eties used in the feed­ing tri­als “con­sti­tute 83% of the com­mer­cial­ized GMOs” that are cur­rently con­sumed by bil­lions of peo­ple. While the find­ings may have seri­ous ram­i­fi­ca­tions for the human pop­u­la­tion, the authors demon­strate how a mul­ti­tude of GMO-related health prob­lems could eas­ily pass unde­tected through the super­fi­cial and largely incom­pe­tent safety assess­ments that are used around the world.

The researchers, lead by French Professor Gilles-Eric Séralini, found that nearly 1 out of every 10 mea­sured para­me­ters in the stud­ies, includ­ing blood and urine bio­chem­istry, organ weights, and micro­scopic analy­ses, were sig­nif­i­cantly dis­rupted in the ani­mals fed GMOs. The kid­neys of males fared the worst, with 43.5% of all the changes. The liver of females fol­lowed, with 30.8%. The report, pub­lished in Environmental Sciences Europe on March 1, 2011, con­firms that “sev­eral con­ver­gent data appear to indi­cate liver and kid­ney prob­lems as end points of GMO diet effects.” The authors point out that liv­ers and kid­neys “are the major reac­tive organs” in cases of chronic food toxicity.

Feed’em longer!

One of the most glar­ing faults in the cur­rent reg­u­la­tory regime is the short dura­tion of ani­mals feed­ing stud­ies. The indus­try lim­its tri­als to 90 days at most, with some less than a month. Only two stud­ies reviewed in this new pub­li­ca­tion were over 90 days — both were non-industry research.

Short stud­ies could eas­ily miss many seri­ous effects of GMOs. It is well estab­lished that some pes­ti­cides and drugs, for exam­ple, can cre­ate effects that are passed on through gen­er­a­tions, only show­ing up decades later. IN the case of the drug DES (diethyl­stilbe­strol), “induced female gen­i­tal can­cers among other prob­lems in the sec­ond gen­er­a­tion.” The authors urge reg­u­la­tors to require long-term multi-generational stud­ies, to “pro­vide evi­dence of car­cino­genic, devel­op­men­tal, hor­monal, neural, and repro­duc­tive poten­tial dys­func­tions, as it does for pes­ti­cides or drugs.”

Pesticide Plants

Nearly all GM crops are described as “pes­ti­cide plants.” They either tol­er­ate doses of weed killer, such as Roundup, or pro­duce an insec­ti­cide called Bt-toxin. In both cases, the added toxin — weed­killer or bug killer — is found inside the corn or soy­beans we consume.

When reg­u­la­tors eval­u­ate the toxic effects of pes­ti­cides, they typ­i­cally require stud­ies using three types of ani­mals, with at least one feed­ing trial last­ing 2 years or more. One third or more of the side effects pro­duced by these tox­ins will show up only in the longer study — not the shorter ones. But for no good rea­son, reg­u­la­tors ignore the lessons learned from pes­ti­cides and waive the GM crops-containing-pesticides onto the mar­ket with a sin­gle species tested for just 90 days. The authors affirm that “it is impos­si­ble, within only 13 weeks, to con­clude about the kind of pathol­ogy that could be induced by pes­ti­cide GMOs and whether it is a major pathol­ogy or a minor one. It is there­fore nec­es­sary to pro­long the tests.”

GMO approvals also ignore the new under­stand­ing that tox­ins don’t always fol­low a lin­ear dose-response. Sometimes a smaller amount of tox­ins have greater impact than larger doses. Approvals also over­look the fact that mix­tures can be far more dan­ger­ous than sin­gle chem­i­cals act­ing alone. Roundup residues, for exam­ple, have been “shown to be toxic for human pla­cen­tal, embry­onic, and umbil­i­cal cord cells,” whereas Roundup’s active ingre­di­ent glyphosate does not on its own pro­voke the same degree of dam­age. One rea­son for this is that the chem­i­cals in Roundup “sta­bi­lize glyphosate and allow its pen­e­tra­tion into cells.”

Furthermore, tox­ins may gen­er­ate new sub­stances (metabo­lites) “either in the GM plant or in the ani­mals fed with it.” Current assess­ments com­pletely ignore the poten­tial dan­ger from these new com­po­nents in our diets, such as the “new metabo­lites” in GMOs engi­neered to with­stand Roundup. The authors warn, “We con­sider this as a major over­sight in the present regulations.”

“It’s not the same stuff that farm­ers spray”

Regulators claim that the Bt-toxin pro­duced inside GM corn is safe. They say that the Bt gene comes from soil bac­te­ria Bacillus thuringien­sis (Bt), which has been safely applied as a spray-on insec­ti­cide by farm­ers in the past. But the authors insist that “the argu­ment about ‘safe use his­tory’ of the wild Bt pro­tein . . . can­not, on a sound sci­en­tific basis, be used for direct autho­riza­tions of . . . GM corns,” with­out con­duct­ing proper long-term ani­mal feed­ing studies.

In order to jus­tify their claim that the wild Bt-toxin is safe, the authors state that it must first be sep­a­rately tested on ani­mals and humans and then autho­rized indi­vid­u­ally for food or feed, which it has not. And even if the wild vari­ety had been con­firmed as safe, the GM ver­sions are so dif­fer­ent, they must require their own inde­pen­dent stud­ies. The paper states:

“The Bt tox­ins in GMOs are new and mod­i­fied, trun­cated, or chimeri­cal in order to change their activities/solubility in com­par­i­son to wild Bt. For instance, there is at least a 40% dif­fer­ence between the toxin in Bt176 [corn] and its wild counterpart.”

Even though the iso­lated Bt-toxin from GM corn has not been tested on ani­mals, rodent stud­ies on corn con­tain­ing the toxin do show prob­lems. Male rats fed Monsanto’s MON863 corn, for exam­ple, had smaller kid­neys with more focal inflam­ma­tion and other “dis­rupted bio­chem­i­cal mark­ers typ­i­cal of kid­ney fil­tra­tion or func­tion problems.”

Stop with the dumb excuses

If sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant prob­lems show up in their stud­ies, biotech com­pany researchers often attempt to explain away the adverse find­ings. But the authors of this review paper describe their excuses as unsci­en­tific, obso­lete, or unjustified.

When male and female ani­mals have dif­fer­ent results, for exam­ple, biotech advo­cates claim that this couldn’t pos­si­bly be related to the feed. Since both gen­ders eat the same amount, they argue, both would have to show the same reac­tion in all of their organs, etc. And if the group of ani­mals fed with less of the GMO feed exhibit more severe reac­tions than the group fed the larger amount, advo­cates claim that this dis­crep­ancy also means that the GMOs could not be the cause, since there must always be a lin­ear dose relationship.

The authors of this paper, how­ever, point out that effects found in a GMO ani­mal feed­ing study “can­not be dis­re­garded on the ratio­nale that it is not lin­ear to the dose (or dose-related) or not com­pa­ra­ble in gen­ders. This would not be sci­en­tif­i­cally accept­able.” In fact, most “patho­log­i­cal and endocrine effects in envi­ron­men­tal health are not directly pro­por­tional to the dose, and they have a dif­fer­en­tial thresh­old of sen­si­tiv­ity in both sexes. This is, for instance, the case with car­cino­gen­e­sis and endocrine disruption.”