The Great GMO Coverup

Independent sci­en­tific stud­ies raised seri­ous alarm bells over the safety of GM foods over a decade ago.  But while this made front-page head­lines in European news­pa­pers, the North American main­stream media were con­spir­a­to­ri­ally silent.

Biotech com­pa­nies stand to make bil­lions from their seed patents.  Governments and supreme courts have sanc­tioned the patent­ing of life itself.  The planet’s food sup­ply is becom­ing increas­ingly dom­i­nated by fewer and fewer players.

If the biotech industry’s stated inten­tion of feed­ing the world is mis­guided or even mis­di­rect­ing, is there another polit­i­cal agenda behind GM food? Have we been mis-sold?  Were we even given a choice in the first place?

Jeffrey M. Smith, inter­na­tional best­selling author of Seeds of Deception and Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods, reveals the shock­ing truth behind GM foods and the huge effort by gov­ern­ments and Biotech cor­po­ra­tions to keep it out of the main­stream media and out­side of your awareness.

It looks the same—the bread, pies, sodas, even corn on the cob. So much of what we eat every day looks just like it did 20 years ago. But some­thing pro­foundly dif­fer­ent has hap­pened with­out our knowl­edge or con­sent. And accord­ing to lead­ing doc­tors, what we don’t know may already be hurt­ing us big time.

In May, the American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) pub­licly con­demned genet­i­cally mod­i­fied organ­isms (GMOs) in our food sup­ply, say­ing they posed “a seri­ous health risk.” They called on the US gov­ern­ment to imple­ment an imme­di­ate mora­to­rium on all genet­i­cally mod­i­fied (GM) foods, and urged physi­cians to pre­scribe non-GMO diets for all patients.

GM-What?

Genetic engi­neer­ing is quite dis­tinct from selec­tive breed­ing because it involves tak­ing genes from a com­pletely dif­fer­ent species and insert­ing them into the DNA of a plant or ani­mal. The long term effects of this for our health and our planet’s bio­di­ver­sity are unknown.

AAEM, an “Academy of Firsts,” was the first US med­ical orga­ni­za­tion to describe or acknowl­edge Gulf War Syndrome, chem­i­cal sen­si­tiv­ity, food allergy/addiction, and a host of other med­ical issues. But the poten­tial for harm from GMOs dwarfs any­thing they have iden­ti­fied thus far. It can impact every­one who eats.

More than 70% of the foods on super­mar­ket shelves con­tain deriv­a­tives of the eight GM foods on the market—soy, corn, oil from canola and cot­ton­seed, sugar from sugar beets, Hawaiian papaya, and a small amount of zuc­chini and crook neck squash. The biotech indus­try hopes to genet­i­cally engi­neer vir­tu­ally all remain­ing veg­eta­bles, fruits, grains, and beans (not to men­tion animals).

The two pri­mary rea­sons why plants are engi­neered are to allow them to either drink poi­son, or pro­duce poi­son. The poi­son drinkers are called her­bi­cide tol­er­ant. They’re inserted with bac­te­r­ial genes that allow them to sur­vive oth­er­wise deadly doses of toxic her­bi­cide. Biotech com­pa­nies sell the seed and her­bi­cide as a pack­age deal, and US farm­ers use hun­dreds of mil­lions of pounds more her­bi­cide because of these types of GM crops. The poi­son pro­duc­ers are called Bt crops. Inserted genes from the soil bac­terium Bacillus Thuringiensis pro­duce an insect-killing pes­ti­cide called Bt-toxin in every cell of the plant. Both classes of GM crops are linked to dan­ger­ous side effects.

Doctors and Patients: Just Say No to GMOs

“Now that soy is genet­i­cally engi­neered,” warns Ohio aller­gist Dr. John Boyles, “it is so dan­ger­ous that I tell peo­ple never to eat it.” How dan­ger­ous are GM foods? World renowned biol­o­gist Pushpa M. Bhargava, PhD, believes they are the major rea­son for the recent rise in seri­ous ill­nesses in the US.

The range of what GMOs might do to us is breath­tak­ing. “Several ani­mal stud­ies,” accord­ing to the AAEM, reveal a long list of dis­or­ders, includ­ing: “infer­til­ity, immune dys­reg­u­la­tion, accel­er­ated aging, dys­reg­u­la­tion of genes asso­ci­ated with cho­les­terol syn­the­sis, [faulty] insulin reg­u­la­tion, cell sig­nal­ing, and pro­tein for­ma­tion, and changes in the liver, kid­ney, spleen and gas­troin­testi­nal system.”

“There is more than a casual asso­ci­a­tion between GM foods and adverse health effects,” says the AAEM posi­tion paper. Based on estab­lished sci­en­tific cri­te­ria, “there is causation.”

Difficult to Trace the Damage

Outside the care­fully con­trolled lab­o­ra­tory set­ting, it is more dif­fi­cult to con­fi­dently assign GMOs as the cause for a par­tic­u­lar set of dis­eases, espe­cially since there are no human clin­i­cal tri­als and no agency that even attempts to mon­i­tor GMO-related health prob­lems among the pop­u­la­tion. “If there are prob­lems,” says biol­o­gist David Schubert, PhD, of the Salk Institute, “we will prob­a­bly never know because the cause will not be trace­able and many dis­eases take a very long time to develop.”

GM crops were widely intro­duced in 1996. Within nine years, the inci­dence of peo­ple in the US with three or more chronic dis­eases nearly doubled—from 7% to 13%. Visits to the emer­gency room due to aller­gies dou­bled from 1997 to 2002. And over­all food related ill­nesses dou­bled from 1994 to 2001, accord­ing to the Centers for Disease Control. Obesity, dia­betes, gas­troin­testi­nal dis­or­ders, and autism are also among the con­di­tions that are sky­rock­et­ing in the US.

The Lyme Induced Autism Foundation, a patient advo­cacy group, is not wait­ing for stud­ies to prove that GMOs cause or worsen Lyme, autism, and the many other dis­eases on the rise since gene-spliced foods were intro­duced. Like AAEM, the LIA Foundation says there is more than enough evi­dence of harm in ani­mal feed­ing stud­ies for them to “urge doc­tors to pre­scribe non-GMO diets” and for “indi­vid­u­als, espe­cially those with autism, Lyme dis­ease, and asso­ci­ated con­di­tions, to avoid” GM foods.

Another patient group, those suf­fer­ing from eosinophilia myal­gia syn­drome (EMS), is more con­fi­dent about the GMO ori­gins of their par­tic­u­lar dis­ease. It was caused by a genet­i­cally engi­neered brand of a food sup­ple­ment called L-tryptophan in the late 1980s. It killed about 100 Americans and caused 5,000-10,000 peo­ple to fall sick or become per­ma­nently dis­abled. The char­ac­ter­is­tics of EMS made it much eas­ier for author­i­ties to iden­tify the epi­demic and its cause. It only affected those who con­sumed the pills; symp­toms came on almost imme­di­ately; and its effects were horrific—including unbear­able pain and paral­y­sis. There was even a unique, easy-to-measure change in the white blood cell count. But even though EMS was prac­ti­cally scream­ing to be dis­cov­ered, it still took the med­ical com­mu­nity more than four years—and it was almost missed.

“The exper­i­ments sim­ply haven’t been done and we now have become the guinea pigs.” David Suzuki, renowned Canadian geneticist.

What if the GMOs through­out our food sup­ply are cre­at­ing com­mon dis­eases which come on slowly? It would be nearly impos­si­ble to con­firm them as the cause. “Physicians are prob­a­bly see­ing the effects in their patients,” says AAEM pres­i­dent Dr. Jennifer Armstrong, “but need to know how to ask the right ques­tions.” The patients at great­est risk are the very young. “Children are the most likely to be adversely effected by tox­ins and other dietary prob­lems” related to GM foods, says Dr. Schubert. They become “the exper­i­men­tal ani­mals,” our col­lec­tive canaries in the coal mine.

Warnings by Government Scientists Ignored and Denied

Scientists at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had warned about all these prob­lems back in the early 1990s. According to secret doc­u­ments made pub­lic from a law­suit, the sci­en­tific con­sen­sus at the agency was that GM foods were inher­ently dan­ger­ous, and might cre­ate hard-to-detect aller­gies, poi­sons, new “super” dis­eases, and nutri­tional prob­lems. They urged their supe­ri­ors to require rig­or­ous long-term tests. But the White House had ordered the agency to pro­mote biotech­nol­ogy and the FDA responded by recruit­ing Michael Taylor, Monsanto’s for­mer attor­ney, to head up the for­ma­tion of GMO pol­icy. That pol­icy, which is in effect today, denies knowl­edge of the sci­en­tists’ con­cerns and declares that no safety stud­ies on GMOs are required. It is up to Monsanto and the other biotech companies—who have a long his­tory of lying about the tox­i­c­ity of their ear­lier products—to deter­mine if their own foods are safe.

After over­see­ing GMO pol­icy at the FDA, Mr. Taylor worked on GMO issues at the USDA, and then later became Monsanto’s vice pres­i­dent. In the sum­mer of 2009, he went through the revolv­ing door again. Taylor was appointed by the Obama admin­is­tra­tion as the de facto US food safety czar at the FDA.

Dangerously Few Studies, Untraceable Diseases

“Where is the sci­en­tific evi­dence show­ing that GM plants/food are tox­i­co­log­i­cally safe, as assumed by the biotech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies?” This was the con­clud­ing ques­tion posed in a 2007 review of pub­lished sci­en­tific lit­er­a­ture on the health risks of GM plants, show­ing that the num­ber of stud­ies and avail­able data are “very scarce.”

“The exper­i­ments sim­ply haven’t been done and we now have become the guinea pigs,” says renowned Canadian geneti­cist David Suzuki. He adds, “Anyone that says, ‘Oh, we know that this is per­fectly safe,’ I say is either unbe­liev­ably stu­pid or delib­er­ately lying.”

When con­sumers real­ize the dan­gers of GM foods and that the FDA has abdi­cated its respon­si­bil­ity to pro­tect us, they usu­ally want to opt out of this mas­sive feed­ing exper­i­ment. In fact, most Americans already say they would avoid GMO brands if given a choice.

It wouldn’t take a major­ity of us to kick GMOs out of our food sup­ply. Kraft and other food com­pa­nies wouldn’t wait until half their mar­ket share is gone before telling their sup­pli­ers to switch to the non-GM corn, soy, etc. By using GM ingre­di­ents, they don’t offer cus­tomers a sin­gle advan­tage. The food doesn’t taste bet­ter, last longer, or have more nutri­ents. Thus, if even a tiny per­cent­age of US consumers—say 5% or 15 mil­lion people—started avoid­ing GMO brands, the mil­lions in lost sales rev­enue would likely force brands to remove all GM ingre­di­ents, like they already have in Europe.

But the FDA doesn’t want to give us the choice. They ignore the wishes of nine out of ten Americans for manda­tory GMO label­ing in order to pro­mote the eco­nomic inter­ests of just five biotech companies.

The Shocking Evidence of Harm from GMOs

Genetically mod­i­fied (GM) foods have not been sci­en­tif­i­cally tested on human beings. (The only pub­lished human feed­ing study had omi­nous results – see later.) Instead, ani­mals are used as our sur­ro­gates, but the few pub­lished ani­mal safety stud­ies are gen­er­ally short-term and super­fi­cial. In fact, industry-funded research is widely crit­i­cized as designed to avoid find­ing prob­lems.  They’ve got bad science—down to a sci­ence. Even still, the accu­mu­lated evi­dence of harm is com­pelling peo­ple to read ingre­di­ent labels and avoid brands with genet­i­cally mod­i­fied organ­isms (GMOs).

Infant Mortality and Reproductive Disorders

When GM soy flour was added to the diets of female rats, most of their babies died within three weeks—compared to only a 10% death rate among moth­ers fed nat­ural soy. The babies from the GM-fed group were also smaller and later had prob­lems get­ting pregnant.

When male rats were fed GM soy, their tes­ti­cles actu­ally changed color—from the nor­mal pink to dark blue. Mice tes­ti­cles also showed changes, includ­ing dam­aged young sperm cells. And the DNA in mice embryos func­tioned dif­fer­ently when their par­ents ate GM soy. Mice fed GM corn had fewer babies, and their chil­dren were smaller than normal.

About two dozen US farm­ers say that thou­sands of their pigs became ster­ile after con­sum­ing cer­tain GM corn vari­eties. Some had false preg­nan­cies; oth­ers gave birth to bags of water. Cows and bulls also became infer­tile when fed the same corn. Investigators in the state of Haryana, India, report that most buf­falo that ate GM cot­ton­seed had repro­duc­tive com­pli­ca­tions such as pre­ma­ture deliv­er­ies, abor­tions, infer­til­ity, and pro­lapsed uteruses. Many calves died.

In the US pop­u­la­tion, the inci­dence of low birth weight babies, infer­til­ity, and infant mor­tal­ity are all escalating.

Food, A Registered Pesticide?

When insects bite genet­i­cally mod­i­fied Bt corn and cot­ton, they get a mouth­ful of a built-in toxin, pro­duced by every cell of the plant. The poi­son splits open their stom­ach and kills them. The GM plants are reg­is­tered as pes­ti­cides with the Environmental Protection Agency.

Biotech com­pa­nies claim that Bt-toxin has a his­tory of safe use, since organic farm­ers and oth­ers use Bt bac­te­ria spray for nat­ural insect con­trol. Genetic engi­neers insert genes from the bac­te­ria into the DNA of the corn and cot­ton, so the plants them­selves do the killing.

They fail to point out that the Bt-toxin pro­duced in GM plants:

• Is thou­sands of times more con­cen­trated than nat­ural Bt spray;
• Is designed to be more toxic;
• Has prop­er­ties of an aller­gen; and
• Unlike the spray, can­not be washed off the plant.

But even the less toxic nat­ural bac­te­r­ial spray is harm­ful. When dis­persed by plane to kill gypsy moths in the Pacific Northwest, about 500 peo­ple reported allergy or flu-like symp­toms. Some had to go to the emer­gency room.

Those exact same symp­toms are now being reported by farm work­ers han­dling Bt cot­ton grown in India. According to Sunday India, med­ical records con­firm that “vic­tims of itch­ing have increased mas­sively . . . related to Bt cot­ton farming.”

If GM Crops Kill Animals, How Safe Are They for Us to Eat?

When sheep grazed on Bt cot­ton plants after har­vest, thou­sands died. Post mortems showed severe irri­ta­tion and black patches in their intestines and liv­ers. Investigators said pre­lim­i­nary evi­dence “strongly sug­gests that the sheep mor­tal­ity was due to a toxin. . . . most prob­a­bly Bt-toxin.” In a small feed­ing study, 100% of sheep fed Bt cot­ton died within 30 days, while those graz­ing on nat­ural cot­ton plants in the adjoin­ing field had no symptoms.

Similarly, buf­falo that grazed on nat­ural cot­ton plants for years with­out inci­dent are react­ing to the Bt vari­ety. In one vil­lage, for exam­ple, they allowed their 13 buf­falo to graze on Bt cot­ton plants for a sin­gle day in January 2008. All died within three days.

Bt corn was also impli­cated in the deaths of cows in Germany, and horses, buf­faloes, and chick­ens in The Philippines. Even Monsanto’s own 90-day rat feed­ing study showed evi­dence of poi­son­ing in major organs due to their Bt corn. And a 2008 Italian gov­ern­ment study found that Bt corn pro­voked immune responses in mice.

GMOs Contain Allergens

Immune sys­tem prob­lems in GMO-fed ani­mals are “a con­sis­tent fea­ture of all the stud­ies,” accord­ing to GM food safety expert Dr. Arpad Pusztai. The American Academy of Environmental Medicine specif­i­cally notes an increase in cytokines, “asso­ci­ated with asthma, allergy, and inflam­ma­tion.” While all three con­di­tions are on the rise in the US, it is the upsurge in food aller­gies among chil­dren that has gen­er­ated the most alarm nationwide.

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