Are GM Crops Just a Newer Version of Selective Breeding?

Tags: GMO Foods Safe?, Science and Greed, How GMO Foods Make You Sick, Healthy Foods,

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/05/29/jeffrey-smith-interview-specter-rebuttal.aspx European Union has banned GMO foods.

Monsanto which sells GMO seeds had their top Public Relations guy in a decision making position in the FDA in the Approval Process which Lobbied the FDA that GMO crops same as regular crops with the support of Academic GMO scientists.

Our society and its leaders and scientists have changed substantially since the Greed is Good Reagan era. The corporate Republicans posing as the Moral Majority started its takeover of politics in the 1970s. Nixon is now considered a flaming liberal compared to Republicans now and he got kicked out for much milder crimes against humanity.

This is an especially good article because it is the rare one that explains how Monsanto “makes” their GMO monster corn, soybeans, canola oil now replacing trans fat in Fast Food and Restaurant food. About 77% of processed synthetic GMO foods we buy whether on the shelf or frozen food section contain GMO corn or soybeans. These foods taste so bad that lots of high fructose corn syrup sugar is added liberally making us Fat and Sick. In Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma , he visited many people’s with different cultures who ate their very different diets and found that our modern diet makes us sick in comparison.

By paying attention to my body according to what foods I eat and by reading extensively, I very quickly decided to stop eating foods with trans fat soon after it came out, stopped eating GMO foods, started increasing my vitamin D pills well before the experts recommendation when I read that our body makes lots of vitamin D on exposure to UVB, so it must be use by our all our cells and not just bones, and used sunscreens only when absolutely necessary such as vacations and tennis matches.

Be very skeptical of expert opinion and think!

Jim Kawakami, June 04, 2010, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com

Dr. Mercola http://www.mercola.com

Jeffrey Smith, the premiere GMO expert and author of the bestseller Seeds of Deception, and Genetic Roulette, exposes the flimsy rationale, and the complete lack of evidence that tries to pass as “science” when it comes to defending genetic engineering

If You Believe in Science-Based Evidence, then You Must Follow Wherever it Leads

Even the FDAs own scientists have stated that GMOs can lead to allergies, nutritional problems, the creation of toxins and new diseases and should require long term safety studies.

But they too were simply ignored.

Smith recounts a story about a South African pro-GM advocate who claimed that even the National Academy of Sciences in the US had determined that GMOs are “absolutely risk free.”

“So I called the National Academy of Sciences of the United States and I spoke to the person in charge of the biotech division,” Smith says, “And she laughed and said, “If we didn’t think there was any extra risk, why would we have released two reports on it?”

She completely dismissed his statement and said it sounded like someone from the biotech industry organization in the United States, although it was their counterpart in South Africa.

So what we have, actually, is a system of denial, distortion, and deadly dangers that are being ignored.”

What you must understand is that much of today’s scientific research is no longer performed through public funding, as it were in the pre-Reagan days, but rather by the industry itself.

This phenomenon explains why “science-based evidence” can no longer be taken at face value, but must first be vetted by looking at who paid the bill, and what sort of results might the one holding the purse strings be looking for. In the case of GMOs, the biotech industry surely is NOT looking for problems.

Fortunately for you, others are, and they’re doing their best to warn you.

Just last year the American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) reviewed the available research and issued a memorandum recommending that all doctors prescribe non-GMO diets to all patients because they are causally linked in animal feeding studies to:

• Infertility
• Immune system problems
• Gastrointestinal problems
• Organ damage
• Dysfunctional regulation of cholesterol and insulin
• Accelerated aging

They came to this conclusion and issued this recommendation based on scientific evidence, not on individuals who are trying to deny or hide the fact that problems exist.

The AAEM is the same organization that identified the Gulf War syndrome, chemical sensitivity and food allergies, and about a dozen other environmental health threats. They are on the frontlines, and the organization is designed to look for and investigate the sources causing health problems in the United States.

These are the types of organizations you might want to listen to, as opposed to the Specter’s of the world, who offer little or no actual data to back up their opinions.

Specter’s book, for example, provides very little of the scientific evidence he claims you should listen to, and he completely ignores some of the most important studies to date, which, coincidentally, show that his arguments are 100 percent incorrect.

Are GM Crops Just a Newer Version of Selective Breeding?

In order to justify the use of genetically modified foods, many will try to use the argument that we have been essentially genetically modifying our foods for thousands of years, through selective breeding of both plants and animals. In essence, they want you to believe genetic engineering is just an improved version of natural selection.

Nothing could be further from the truth!

“This is really a maddening intentional distortion,” Smith says.

“A Noble laureate said years ago that we should not mistake selective breeding with genetic engineering, because genetic engineering basically creates new organisms overnight that don’t have the benefit of the billions of years of evolution.

Even FDA scientists said in a memo that it is the opinion of the technical experts at the agency that genetic engineering is different, and leads to different risks from traditional breeding.”

Genetic engineering involves taking genes from various species of plants and animals, putting them into gene guns, and blasting millions of genes into a plate of millions of cells, and then cloning the result into a plant.

This can cause hundreds or thousands of mutations up and down the DNA chain. Genes can be switched off, switched on permanently, or change their levels of expression – at random.

“Up to 5 percent of the existing natural genes in the plant can change their levels of expression when a single new gene is introduced. In other words, there is a holistic, not well understood response, plant-wide, throughout the entire genome, where maybe hundreds or thousands of genes change their activity when a newcomer is inserted into the DNA,” Smith explains.

“So this is totally new, totally different.

On top of that, you’re throwing in antibiotic resistant marker genes that are part of the process that might yield antibiotic resistant diseases. This was a major concern by FDA scientists from the British Medical Association.

They’re throwing in viruses, viral promoters, which switch on genes at random. They could switch on genes that already exist in the plant or possibly transfer to our own gut bacteria or maybe our own cells, and switch on genes at random, permanently.

So to me that is an easy argument to overcome simply based on the science itself.”

Further Educational Material…

The angles discussed above are not the only ones Jeffrey Smith delves into in this interview, so for more, please listen to it in its entirety, or read through the transcript.

For example, there’s the assertion that GMOs are necessary for feeding the world and the key to ending hunger. Here too, critics like Michael Specter miss their mark, and Smith explains why.

Lastly, I urge you to take the steps necessary to help eradicate GMOs from the US food supply. It will not happen through government intervention. It can only be accomplished once enough people realize that what they’re eating is a public science experiment gone wild, without any checks or balances whatsoever.

The good news, however, is that you, as an ordinary citizen, have the power to incite change, by steering the market demand toward non-GMO crops and foods. Every time you choose to buy a non-GMO product over a product that contains GM ingredients, you are making a dent in this problem.

So take advantage of local sources of organic foods as often as you can. You can also avoid GM foods by:

• Reducing or Eliminating Processed Foods. Some 75 percent of processed foods contain GM ingredients. Use the Non-GMO Shopping Guide, available for free at www.NonGMOShoppingGuide.com.
• Read produce and food labels. When looking at a product label, if any ingredients such as corn flour and meal, dextrin, starch, soy sauce, margarine, and tofu (to name a few) are listed, there's a good chance it has come from GM corn or soy, unless it bears the USDA organic seal.
• Buy organic produce. Buying organic is currently the best way to ensure that your food has not been genetically modified.

To learn more about the health dangers of GMOs, and other tips for what you can do to help end the genetic engineering of our food supply, please visit www.ResponsibleTechnology.org.