We Want to Know When It’s GMO—So, Just Label It!

Choosing organic is the only way, right now, that I can make sure I am not feed­ing my fam­ily poten­tially dan­ger­ous biotech ingre­di­ents. And although the food man­u­fac­tur­ers have done a tobacco-industry-worthy job of try­ing to con­vince us that GMOs are safe, the truth is that the sci­ence is start­ing to say otherwise.

There aren’t a whole lot of com­pre­hen­sive stud­ies out there on GMOs and the health impact they have on humans because sci­en­tists have to ask per­mis­sion to do them, and because GMOs are patented by two major cor­po­ra­tions, Monsanto and Syngenta. These patents make it extremely dif­fi­cult to gain access to the infor­ma­tion needed to study how GMOs affect human health. That said, here’s a sam­pling of what has been pub­lished about GMOs:

So far, there’s only been one pub­lished study on how GMO ingre­di­ents affect us when we eat them. It was in the jour­nal Nature Biotechnology, and it found that after we eat GMO soy, some of the GMO genes are trans­ferred to the microflora of our intestines and those GMO genes are still active.

Another study, pub­lished in Reproductive Toxicology, found Bt-toxin (used in genet­i­cally mod­i­fied Bt corn) in the blood of 93 per­cent of the preg­nant women stud­ied and their babies. The study authors sug­gest that aside from eat­ing prod­ucts made from GMO crops, eat­ing meat from ani­mals fed GMO crops may lead to a “a high risk of exposure.”

Finally, an Italian study pub­lished in The Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry found that in young and older mice fed Bt corn, there were changes to their immune sys­tems that cor­re­sponded with aller­gic and inflam­ma­tory responses. In humans these same inflam­ma­tory changes are asso­ci­ated with arthri­tis, inflam­ma­tory bowel dis­ease, aller­gies, and autoim­mune diseases.

So here are three stud­ies: One reports that GMOs sur­vive in our bod­ies — they aren’t killed in the stom­ach, as some have sug­gested, but travel to the intes­tine where they remain active in the body. Another study reports that we are exposed to these GMOs, not only from the GMO foods them­selves, but also from eat­ing ani­mals that eat GMO foods. And finally, ani­mal stud­ies reveal that these GMOs may be linked to disease.

So I say, Just Label It!

Right now there is a grass­roots effort under­way to man­date the FDA to label GMO foods. In October, The Just Label It: We Have a Right to Know cam­paign filed a peti­tion with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to require manda­tory label­ing of GMO foods. It is sup­ported by more than 450 busi­nesses and orga­ni­za­tions ded­i­cated to food safety and con­sumer rights and more than 400,000 [Editor: now over 500,000] peo­ple have already raised their voices to tell the FDA we have the right to know what is in our food.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at HuffingtonPost.com.