All Episodes
Previous Next
Oct. 25, 2010 - InfoWars Special Reports
59:39
20101025_SpecialReport_Alex
Source
| Copy link to current segment Download episode

Time Text
Of the hundreds of researchers that I've interviewed, scientists, you name it, no one has showed a greater overall knowledge and the skill to articulate it in an easily understandable way than Jeffrey M. Smith.
His detailed study of GMOs, Monsanto, suppressing science and research is just amazing.
Well, here's the exclusive, never-before-seen-and-heard interview with Jeffrey M. Smith.
My name is Jeffrey Smith and I'm the Executive Director and Founder of the Institute for Responsible Technology.
Our campaign for healthier eating in America is designed to create a tipping point of consumer rejection against genetically modified foods in order to force them out of the market.
Genetically modified foods are foods where the gene from one species, say viruses or bacteria, are forced into the DNA of plants such as soy, corn, cotton, canola, sugar beets.
Those are the five major GM crops.
And the derivatives of those crops, unfortunately, are in the vast majority of processed foods.
So when you look and see soy lecithin, or soy protein, or high fructose corn syrup, even sugar, unless it says cane sugar, will have genetically engineered sugar beet derivatives.
The reason why genetically modified foods got on the market in the first place was because an FDA policy claimed that the agency wasn't aware of any information showing that the foods were significantly different.
On that basis, they said absolutely no safety testing was necessary if the biotech companies like Monsanto and Dow and DuPont tell us that the foods are safe, then the FDA has no further questions.
The concept that the agency was not aware of differences between GM and non-GM foods was pure fiction.
Documents made public from a lawsuit seven years after the policy was created prove that the agency was very well aware That there was differences.
In fact, the overwhelming consensus among the FDA's own scientists were that genetically modified foods could create allergies, toxins, new diseases, and nutritional problems.
They had urged their superiors to require long-term studies.
But you see, the first Bush administration had ordered the FDA to promote the biotechnology industry.
And so the FDA recruited for a position they created for him They recruited Michael Taylor, Monsanto's former attorney, who later became Monsanto's vice president.
While he was in charge, the policy was created that overruled and ignored the science and the scientists.
Now, Michael Taylor, who I believe may be responsible for more food-related illnesses and deaths than anyone in human history for fast-tracking GMOs onto our food supply, he is now the U.S.
Food Safety Czar under the Obama administration.
While Obama was campaigning in Iowa, where I'm from, he promised us that he would require mandatory labeling of genetically engineered foods.
We've been asking for this for years.
In fact, 9 out of 10 Americans want genetically modified foods to be labeled.
But, because the FDA is ordered to promote the biotechnology industry, they ignore the desire of 9 out of 10 Americans in order to protect the economic interests of 5 GMO companies.
We had hopes that Obama would fulfill his campaign pledge, but so far, no luck.
Instead, Obama has recruited and put into positions of authority, both in the USDA and the FDA, people with very close ties to Monsanto and the biotechnology industry.
So he's been a very big disappointment from the side of those of us looking for a reasonable, rational, and safe policy regarding GMOs.
In 2009, the American Academy of Environmental Medicine urged all doctors to prescribe non-GMO diets to everyone.
They said animal feeding studies have linked GMOs causally with things like reproductive problems, immune system problems, accelerated aging, dysfunctional regulation of insulin and cholesterol, and organ damage and gastrointestinal problems.
They asked for doctors around the country to prescribe non-GMO diets and to give out educational materials to help people understand the risks and the alternatives.
There are two main reasons why people genetically modify foods.
They either drink poison or produce poison.
The poison drinkers are called herbicide tolerant.
Most popular variety is Roundup Ready.
Let me explain.
Monsanto scientists found bacteria growing in a chemical waste dump near their factory, surviving in the presence of their herbicide called Roundup.
So they had the brilliant idea, let's put it in the food supply.
So they took the gene from the bacterium that allowed it to survive applications of Roundup and put it into soybean, corn, cotton, canola, etc.
So now you can spray the field with Roundup and it kills all of the other plant biodiversity in the field, but not the Roundup-ready soy and Roundup-ready corn.
The other variety of genetically modified crops produces a poison.
They take a gene from a soil bacterium that produces a natural insecticide and put it into the DNA of the plant so every single cell of every single plant in millions of acres has its own little spray bottle that can kill an insect by destroying its digestive system.
Because of the herbicide-tolerant crops, particularly the Roundup Ready crops, there's so much more Roundup being used in the United States.
We're just drenching our fields with it.
In fact, in the first 13 years since GMOs were introduced, it's estimated that 383 million pounds more of herbicide were sprayed in the United States because of the GMOs.
The pesticide-producing crops are called Bt for the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis.
Now there is about a 68 million pound decrease of the use of insecticides on these fields over the first 13 years, but the actual amount of insecticide that's produced within every plant, when you add that all up, it's actually more than the insecticide that it displaces.
So the overall impact is greater insecticide use as well.
What these changes mean is that the plant might produce more allergens, more toxins, more anti-nutrients, more carcinogens, or even less of these.
We don't know.
It's a genetic roulette.
In fact, the process of approval of these GM crops do not evaluate these type of changes.
In Monsanto's own studies, which they conveniently left out of their published paper, which we will cover later, they found that in cooked GM soy, there was as much as seven times more of a known allergen called trypsin inhibitor, and about a doubling of an anti-nutrient called soy lectin, which blocks the absorption of certain nutrients.
In genetically modified corn, a gene which is normally switched off was switched on to produce an allergen, and other proteins were truncated, or changed in shape, which can change a harmless protein into a potentially deadly one.
In fact, when they looked at that corn variety, they found 43 different proteins that had significantly changed their levels of expression because of the genetic insertion.
So these could be wreaking havoc with our health or the environment, but no one has evaluated them.
One of the most consistent features of the animal feeding studies is immune responses.
Immune responses are the body's reaction to something that it considers foreign and may be harmful.
By definition, genetically modified crops have something foreign, which may be harmful.
Now, the immune system problem has been seen consistently in rats, in mice, in any time they test for GMOs.
What we're seeing in the human population since GMOs were introduced is an increase in autoimmune disease, inflammation, and allergies.
And these are the kinds of things that we would predict if the animal feeding studies were to carry out into human experience.
I want to explain two different categories of things that can go wrong.
One is for the BT crops.
The biotech industry ...feels confident in putting an insecticide, a toxin called Bt, into our corn and cotton plants.
And their excuse is that we have a history of safe use using Bt in agriculture.
It's a soil bacterium.
When it's gathered up, the spores and the bacteria can be sprayed on plants to kill insects.
And it biodegrades or washes off.
But what the biotech engineers do is they take the gene that produces that toxin out of the bacterium and put it into the crop.
But the crop produces the bacterium at thousands of times the concentration of the natural spray form.
It doesn't wash off, it doesn't biodegrade.
In fact, it's designed molecularly to be more toxic than the natural form.
It even has properties of a known allergen.
The natural form by itself, however, is not that safe.
In fact, peer-reviewed published studies show that when the natural Bt toxin is fed to mice, it causes tissue damage and an immune response as powerful as if they've been fed cholera toxin.
According to peer-reviewed published studies, when Bt toxin was sprayed by plane for gypsy moth infestation in the Pacific Northwest, about 500 people complained of allergic or flu-like symptoms.
Some had to go to the hospital.
Now thousands of farm workers in India, who are picking the cotton engineered to produce that same BT in higher concentrations, are complaining of the same allergic and flu-like symptoms and some have to go to the hospital.
When they allow animals to graze on the cotton plants after harvest, thousands of sheep, buffalo and goats have died.
I visited one village where they had allowed their buffalo to graze without harm for years on natural cotton plants after harvest.
They allowed 13 buffalo to graze on BT cotton plants for one day, January 3rd, 2008.
Within three days, all 13 buffalo were dead.
They also lost 26 goats and sheep.
I asked the villagers, how many of you personally have had itching from working in the BT cotton fields?
Most of them raised their hands.
In the state of Haryana, India, they feed cottonseed cake to buffalo.
Most buffalo actually refuse to eat the cottonseed cake, but those that eat it, most have reproductive problems, including sterility, premature deliveries, abortions, and many of the calves die and adults die.
We've also seen about two dozen farmers in the Midwest claim that their cows or pigs became sterile from certain varieties of BT corn.
A farmer in Germany says that 12 of his cows died when fed exclusively a variety of BT corn.
And in the Philippines, when people were living next to a particular BT corn variety, during the time of pollination, the people in the village experienced skin, respiratory, and intestinal reactions and fever.
When the same seeds were planted in four more villages, the same symptoms returned.
They also reported deaths among water buffaloes, chickens, and horses, and unexplained human deaths.
When the Italian government conducted a study and fed Monsanto's BT corn to mice, the mice had massive immune responses.
When the Austrian government fed corn that was both BT and Roundup ready, the animals had less babies and smaller babies.
Now, these are the problems that may be resulting from the VT toxin itself, or they may be resulting from the massive collateral damage that results from the process of insertion.
We don't know because no one is looking.
In the case of Roundup Ready Soy, we see a lot of serious problems.
Soon after the GM soy was introduced to the UK, soy allergies skyrocketed by 50%.
We know that there are many reasons why GM soy might be associated with higher levels of allergies.
In fact, a skin prick test shows that some people can react to the GM soy, but not to a wild variety of soy.
And they also found a new protein that had allergenic properties that was in the GM soy, but not the wild variety.
When they fed GM soy to mice, there was a reduction in digestive enzymes by as much as 77%.
When you impair digestion, it might increase the ability for allergens.
This was of grave concern to the FDA scientists, who said it would be a serious health hazard to introduce an antibiotic-resistant marker gene.
They were concerned that the gene might transfer to pathogenic bacteria and create super-diseases.
Knowing that soy genes transfer, we know that the antibiotic-resistant genes might also transfer to create super-diseases.
When they fed genetically modified soy to female rats before they got pregnant, more than half of their babies died within three weeks.
The babies were also much smaller on average, and in a subsequent study, could not reproduce.
When they fed genetically modified soy to male rats, the testicles actually changed from the normal pink to blue.
When they fed genetically modified soy to male mice, their testicles also changed and damaged the young sperm cells.
And when they looked at the offspring at the embryo stage of parent mice that were fed genetically modified soy, their DNA functioned differently compared to when parent mice ate non-GM soy.
When they fed hamsters genetically modified soy for two years over three generations, by the third generation, most of the parent hamsters that were eating genetically modified soy lost the ability to have babies.
The GM soy group also developed more slowly and matured sexually more slowly as well.
It turns out the Roundup, which is being sprayed on millions of acres, primarily because of the Roundup ready crops, has a tremendous impact on health.
Now, it's designed actually to damage the health of plants.
That's how it's an herbicide.
When you spray a plant with Roundup, what it does is it goes into the plant and accumulates into the parts of the plant that we eat.
It also gets pushed out the roots into the soil where it destroys beneficial microorganisms
and enhances the harmful microorganisms like Fusarium which can produce mycotoxins which
themselves can be harmful to humans and mammals.
Now glyphosate which is the main ingredient or the active ingredient in Roundup was actually
originally patented as a chelator meaning that it binds with or kidnaps and holds hostage
certain mineral nutrients like copper and zinc and manganese and magnesium and iron
And so when you spray the glyphosate on the crop, it bounds up the nutrients in the soil making them less available for the plant.
So that's another way that it helps kill plants.
But when we eat the glyphosate, either in the plant or because of the contaminated groundwater, We also end up chelating some of the nutrients in our bodies, making it less available for our health and protection.
And there's a lot of diseases that are associated with mineral deficiencies.
Now the Roundup itself is also toxic to humans and mammals.
In fact, it interferes with endocrine development.
it can cause in certain rat studies, lower sperm counts, abnormal or dead sperm, lower
testosterone level.
So when we see the genetically modified Roundup Ready soy being fed to animals and causing
reproductive problems, we don't know if it's the GMO component or the high residues of
Roundup.
In addition, the glyphosate in Roundup doesn't just dissipate.
In fact, two courts, one in the United States and one in France, told Monsanto they had
to stop saying that their Roundup was biodegradable.
It actually accumulates in the soil and can last up to three years or longer.
So the more we spray with Roundup, it has an accumulating effect so that anything that's planted in that same field after Roundup can also uptake the Roundup.
And it can be reactivated when you put in fertilizers.
They've even found glyphosate in the manure of chickens.
So now if you spread chicken manure on a field to create increased nutrients, the glyphosate might tie up the nutrients, making it harder to nourish the plants.
And we are flooding our country with this glyphosate.
In fact, the weeds are developing resistance, so people are pouring on more glyphosate and more glyphosate, which is the active ingredient Roundup.
One of the interesting aspects of genetic engineering is the anytime a scientist discovers a problem, they're
attacked.
It doesn't matter how much credibility they have, what level of publication they put it in, they're attacked,
sometimes they lose their funding, sometimes they're fired or lose tenure.
I'll give you an example.
The UK government wanted to prove to a skeptical public that GMOs were safe.
So they put out a grant proposal trying to find someone who could design testing to show that GMOs were safe.
say.
28 different scientists applied.
They gave it to Dr. Arpad Pustai, the world's leading researcher in his field.
He worked at one of the top nutritional research institutes in the country, or in the world, and was leading about 20 or 30 people on this grant.
He fed genetically modified potatoes to rats as part of the protocol.
The potatoes were engineered to produce an insecticide.
Now, he knew this insecticide was harmless to rats.
He had fed huge amounts of the insecticide to rats in previous experiments.
In fact, for this experiment, one group of rats was fed the GM potato that produced its insecticide.
One group of rats were fed natural potatoes, and a third group, natural potatoes plus the insecticide spiked directly into the diet.
Only those that ate the GM potatoes got sick.
So what was the cause?
It was not the insecticide.
It was somehow the process of genetic engineering which caused the massive damage to the rats, including potentially precancerous cell growth in their digestive tract, smaller brains, livers, and testicles, partial atrophy of the liver, and damaged immune system, after only ten days.
He went public with his concerns and was a hero for about two days at his prestigious institute.
Then two phone calls were allegedly placed from the UK Prime Minister's office forwarded through the receptionist to the Director of the Institute.
The next day, Dr. Pustai was fired from his job after 35 years and silenced for threats of a lawsuit.
His team was disbanded, they never implemented his protocols, and his Institute, plus the UK government, launched a campaign to destroy his reputation in order to protect the reputation of biotechnology.
After seven months, by an order of Parliament, his gag order was lifted, he got his data back, and it's now published.
And it remains the most in-depth animal feeding study yet published on GMOs, implicating the process itself as causing harm.
In Moscow, when the scientists discovered that Roundup ready soy fed to female rats caused more than half of their babies to die within three weeks, she was told by her boss, who was being pressured by his boss, No more studies on GMOs.
In fact, documents were burnt on her desk, samples were stolen.
One of her colleagues tried to comfort her by saying, well, maybe the GM soy will solve the overpopulation problem.
One of the criticisms that was leveled at the Russian scientist, which has merit, is that she never conducted a biochemical analysis of the feed.
So maybe there was some toxin mixed with the GM soy that caused this astounding death rate.
But after she had done the research three times with similar results, coincidentally, the rat chow, which was being fed to all of the rats in her Russian facility, switched to be based on GM soy.
So she couldn't do any more studies because she had no controls.
But after two months, she had the brilliant idea to ask her colleagues, what's the infant mortality rate in your mice studies?
Let me say that again.
But after two months, she had the brilliant idea to ask her colleagues after two months, what was the infant mortality in the rats that you're working with?
It had skyrocketed to over 55%, suggesting that it wasn't a particular toxin in her batch, but it's a more generic aspect of genetically modified soy.
When Dr. Carrasco in Argentina linked Roundup to birth defects, both in amphibians and possibly in humans, he was immediately attacked and four people showed up at his place of business and tried to interrogate him in a very aggressive manner.
Time and time again, when scientists discover adverse findings about GMOs, they're attacked viciously in the press, through their colleagues.
It happens so often that many scientists just give up and they refuse to do any more research about GMOs.
One of the myths of biotechnology is that GMOs are going to feed the world.
Actually, they work against feeding a hungry world.
If something is to feed the world, well, first of all, it has to increase yields, it has to be reliable, and yield increase actually has to be a way of solving the hunger problem.
It also has to be healthy and better than competing technologies.
GMOs fail on every count.
First of all, the average GM crop reduces yield.
It does not increase yield.
Second, increased yield actually isn't the solution to hunger today.
We have more food per person than any time in human history, but a billion people go to bed hungry or malnourished.
It's a question of distribution and economic access.
Also, GMOs are not reliable.
Take the case of Bt Cotton in India.
Monsanto has convinced millions of farmers to plant Bt Cotton, and unfortunately it doesn't always perform.
In fact, the UK Daily Mail estimates that more than 125,000 farmers who planted BT cotton, and were unable to even repay the high-interest debts that they took out for the expensive seeds and associated chemicals, committed suicide.
Now this is a catastrophe.
Some people put the number closer to 200,000.
So this is an example of what's happening in a developing country, and they're trying to convince us that GMOs are going to help the developing world.
GMOs are also not better than competing technologies if you're trying to increase yields.
In fact, studies on millions and millions of farmers show that sustainable techniques can increase yields by an average of 79%.
Some studies show that organic agriculture can increase yields by 100%, even 300% in developing countries.
If you look at the Rodale Institute, they did a side-by-side study with organic soy and corn versus non-organic.
And they found that they actually have comparable yields, but the organic is better during times of adverse weather and also has less inputs.
In January 1999 Biotechnology Conference in San Francisco, Arthur Anderson, a company that had consulted with Monsanto, they were also Enron's consultant, revealed how they had worked with their executives to create their plant.
They asked Monsanto executives to describe their ideal future in 15 to 20 years.
And the Monsanto executives described a world in which 100% of all the commercial seeds were genetically engineered and patented.
And Anderson worked backwards from that goal to create the strategy and tactics to achieve it.
At the same conference, another biotechnology company was projecting that within five years, by 2004, they would have a 95% replacement of all natural seeds.
So the biotechnology industry is planning to replace nature.
Fortunately, consumer concern has stopped that moving train.
About three weeks after this conference, the gag order on Dr. Poustai was lifted.
Within one week, 159 column feet of articles were written in Europe.
Within a month, 750 articles were written.
One editor said it divided society into two warring blocks.
Within 10 weeks, the tipping point of consumer rejection had been achieved.
Within a single week, in the end of April 1999, virtually every major food company committed to stop using GM ingredients for their European brands.
But not in the U.S.
Because it wasn't reported in the U.S.
According to Project Censored, the Arpad Pustai story was one of the 10 most underreported events of the year.
In the United States, if you ask the average American, have you ever eaten a genetically modified food in your life?
60% say no, 15% say I don't know.
So three quarters of Americans do not realize that they're eating GMOs in nearly every meal.
The fact that GMOs flourish on the basis of consumer ignorance leaves the biotechnology industry extremely vulnerable.
If some event or campaign were to increase the visibility of GMOs, especially the health dangers, we could see a tipping point in the United States like we've seen in Europe.
In fact, bovine growth hormone, the genetically engineered drug that's injected into cows to increase milk supply, that's being ushered out because of consumer concern.
You see, when you inject cows with bovine growth hormone, it changes the milk.
There's more pus, more antibiotics used, more bovine growth hormone, and of greatest concern, more IGF-1, insulin-like growth factor 1, a very powerful hormone which is linked to cancer.
Now, milk contains IGF-1 anyway, and milk drinkers have higher levels of IGF-1, and those with high levels of IGF-1 are more likely to have breast cancer, prostate cancer, colon and lung cancer.
And it's in much higher levels in milk from cows treated with bovine growth hormone.
I'll let you connect the dots.
But as we explain this to consumers, their concern about drug milk has caused the manufacturers and dairies to kick it out.
Walmart has kicked it out of its store brand, Starbucks out of its stores, Dannon and Yoplait, Kroger's, Publix.
In fact, most of the major dairies in the United States have stopped using bovine growth hormone because of consumer concern.
So our campaign for healthier eating in America is now designed to create a tipping point against all GMOs in the food supply.
In fact, it's already happening.
The fastest growing store brand claim in 2009 was GMO-free.
And Supermarket News, a big trade journal for the food industry, predicted that 2010 would see an unprecedented upsurge of consumer awareness and concern about GMOs.
And as I travel around the country, as I do every year, I see more informed and enthusiastic activists and consumers getting the word out about GMOs.
So we now are equipping them with strategies and tools and speaker training, and we have a campaign to hit the tipping point of consumer rejection in the United States between 10-10-10, that's October 10, 2010, and 11-11-11, within a year, a month, and a day.
So I invite you to come to our website at healthiereating.org To get involved, to sign up for a healthy eating pledge, to get the tools, to invite others to do the same, so that together we can create a tipping point.
You see, we only need about 5% of US shoppers.
We think that's more than enough to create the tipping point.
And 15 million people, 5.6 million households, that's easy.
Why is the number so low?
Because GMOs give no consumer benefits.
There's no reason why a company would say, well, I need to keep my GMOs because there's a better mouthfeel or sweetness or shelf life.
If a small percentage of people were to reject GMOs, it would become a pure marketing liability.
The companies don't even have to switch recipes in order to get rid of GMOs.
They can just use the non-GM corn and soy, as many companies have done already, like Whole Foods for its store brands, like many companies in the natural food industry.
There's also a new third-party verified seal called Non-GMO Project Verified, which is being put on products that show that the non-GMO claim has been third-party verified.
So the entire natural food industry is getting on board, mothers are getting on board, doctors and medical organizations are prescribing non-GMO diets, many spiritual and religious groups are saying that GMO really means God move over, and they're against it.
We have enough people to eliminate GMOs, we just have to get the word out to those who are already receptive.
If we need only 15 million Americans, consider that 28 million Americans already buy organic food on a regular basis, 87 million people are strongly against GMOs, and 159 million people, 53% of Americans, the majority, say they would avoid GMOs if they were labeled.
So we have a non-GMO shopping guide to help people make healthier non-GMO choices.
So go to www.nongmoshoppingguide.com to see for yourself which products are non-GMO and how to avoid them.
Right now it is legal to call something non-GMO.
But the Codex Negotiation Team in 2010, in May, went to a conference in Quebec armed with a new proposal that could ultimately make it very difficult for people to label something as non-GMO or even keep the requirements in Europe for GMO labeling.
Fortunately, the US didn't get much traction at that meeting and only got supported by about three countries out of 50 that participated and we hope that that can go away very soon.
When RBGH was approved, Michael Taylor, Monsanto's former attorney, who later became Monsanto's vice president, was in charge.
So it got approved with very little testing and no labeling requirements.
In fact, Taylor wrote a white paper suggesting that if any dairies want to label their products as free from RBGH, he suggested that they also include a disclaimer that says, according to the FDA, there's no difference between milk from cows supplemented with RBGH and those not supplemented.
Now this was a recommendation, it wasn't a requirement.
But as soon as companies started to actually say RBGH-free on their labels, Monsanto came in and sued them.
And now companies are putting that disclaimer on there to meet Monsanto's very illegal and inappropriate requirements.
But then Monsanto got some states To actually implement a requirement that dairies put that disclaimer on there.
In fact, Ohio right now has a horrible law which specifies the font size and the location of the disclaimer in such a horrible way that some companies are saying that they'd rather take the RBGH-free claim altogether off of their milk carton rather than having to fulfill that requirement.
And that means any national brand that's sold in Ohio has that problem.
So it really is a problem.
We're actually trying to convince the governor of Ohio to change his mind immediately so we don't lose the traction that we've gained all these years.
The junk food eating couch potato in America does not know that he or she is eating GMOs and will never know that we got rid of it for them.
Because it only takes a small percentage to reject GMOs in the marketplace.
We don't need to inform everyone.
In fact, there are so many people receptive to our message, we can get rid of GMOs without having to convince anyone who is resistant.
There is, in fact, an economic divide between those that can afford organic and those that can't.
Those in inner cities don't have access to fresh vegetables and fruits very often.
But as far as GMOs go, I'm optimistic that we can get rid of them so quickly that it won't be a problem for very long.
Of all of the toxins that are released into the environment.
GMOs are of a special class.
You see, with genetic engineering you have pollution of the gene pool.
It's a self-propagating genetic pollution.
The genes that we released in this generation already can outlast nuclear waste.
They can go on forever.
We have no technology to fully clean up this type of pollution.
Certainly we can reduce it dramatically.
But until we have some technique to identify GMOs at a distance, we are stuck with GMOs possibly forever.
Imagine being hired by a company that says, we have a little problem, we'd like you to organize the recall of our salmon from the ocean.
There's a company that wants to introduce genetically modified mosquitoes.
Imagine trying to do a recall there.
GM pollen has already contaminated the indigenous corn varieties of Mexico.
And we have no technology to clean that up.
What we've done is irreversible damage.
And this is something that is highly irresponsible, unconscionable.
And it was done over the objections of scientists, over the objections of science.
A collusion between government and industry.
If you look back at the records of what actually happened at the FDA in 1991 and 92, the scientists were very clear.
They said GMOs could create higher levels of existing toxins, new toxins, they might bioaccumulate toxins from the environment, they might produce allergies or new diseases or nutritional problems.
They said the process of genetic engineering is different and leads to different risks.
So what did the government say?
The government said, we know of no significant differences, we know of no significant risks.
Completely lying about what actually was said within the department.
The first genetically modified crop to be reviewed by the FDA was the Flavorsaver tomato, engineered for longer shelf life.
And that was the only company that actually gave raw feeding study data to the FDA to evaluate.
It turns out the rats refused to eat the tomato.
Now, this is not uncommon.
In fact, eyewitness reports from all over North America and around the world show that a variety of animals, when given a choice, avoid eating GMOs.
Cows, pigs, squirrels, geese, elk, deer, raccoons, mice, rats, chickens, and buffaloes.
So it's my job to get humans up to the level of animals.
When they force-fed the rats, the tomatoes, 7 of 20 developed stomach lesions, 7 of 40 died within 2 weeks.
Now, if you look at the data, That was recovered from a lawsuit from within the FDA.
They're clear that there were unanswered questions related to safety and that the tomatoes did not meet their normal standard of reasonable certainty of no harm.
But the political appointees did not put up any red flag to block the tomatoes.
In fact, they said that the tomatoes passed with such flying colors that no subsequent GM application Is he going to even require the level of evaluation that the tomatoes had?
From that point on, it was purely a voluntary consultation process where the companies can choose if they wanted to even talk to the FDA.
And they could determine what data, if any, they were to turn over to the FDA.
And it's always been summary data, not enough to properly evaluate safety.
If the reviewers want more information and ask for it, they're typically ignored.
And at the end of the exercise, they write a letter.
For example, a letter to Monsanto which says, Monsanto believes its foods are safe and understands it's responsibility to make that determination.
So the FDA has no further questions.
The FDA does not even approve GM crops.
They let the companies do it themselves.
When you look at the actual research that's done by the companies, they have rigged their research to avoid finding problems.
Even very serious problems, even deaths of animals, are dismissed as not statistically significant, or not biologically significant, or not treatment-related, without scientific justification.
I've analyzed with many, many scientists around the world how these biotech companies have bad science down to a science.
They use the wrong controls, the wrong detection methods, the wrong statistics, the wrong reporting protocols.
It's absolutely horrendous.
I'll give you some examples.
When Monsanto wanted to pretend that injecting cows with bovine growth hormone did not interfere with the fertility of cows, stolen documents from the FDA made public revealed that they apparently added cows secretly to the study that were pregnant before injection.
When researchers wanted to prove that pasteurization destroys bovine growth hormone in milk, they pasteurized the milk 120 times longer than normal.
They only destroyed 19% of it.
So they added powdered hormone to the milk at huge volumes, and then heated it 120 times longer than normal, and only under that rigged condition did they destroy 90% of the hormone.
But that's what the FDA reported, that pasteurization destroys 90% of the hormone.
That's just an example of what we read over and over again.
And sometimes it's very subtle, and sometimes it's very, very blatant lies and misinformation.
Because GMOs are not labeled, it's hard to file a lawsuit because it's hard to trace back who's eating GMOs and who's not.
So it's one of the ways that the biotech industry protects itself by not letting us know what is GMO and what is not.
I've talked to some former Monsanto employees and got quite an interesting insight into the company.
One scientist told me that his colleagues were doing safety studies on milk from cows injected with their bovine growth hormone.
When they saw how much IGF-1, insulin-like growth factor 1, was in the milk, these three scientists refused to drink milk again, unless it was organic.
He also told me that there was a study that showed problems with rodents that were fed one of Monsanto's GM crops.
So instead of withdrawing the crops, they decided to rewrite the study to make it look less of an adverse finding.
A former salesman for Monsanto, He took the job because he was so impressed by the words of former CEO Robert Shapiro, who claimed that GMOs would help the world.
And so, when the employee orientation meeting happened in St.
Louis, this man, Kirk Acevedo, stood up and described all these great things that Robert Shapiro had said.
After the meeting, a vice president pulled him aside and said, wait a minute.
What Robert Shapiro says is one thing.
What we do is something else.
We're here to make money.
We don't even know what he's talking about.
The FDA has proven to be a regulatory agency that has been hijacked by industry, both on the drug side and the food side.
Many of the people that approved bovine growth hormone either worked for Monsanto directly or indirectly, and one person actually did research for Monsanto and then took over the department that evaluated her own research.
As far as what we need, we need an independent body to evaluate the safety of GMOs.
We need generations of evaluating GMOs before they're put onto the market.
You see, we're just babes in the woods in our understanding about the DNA.
And we're making fundamental changes in an area that we have very little understanding of.
We redefine what a gene is, how a DNA functions, every few months.
And yet the science behind the genetic engineering of food It's based on assumptions that have already been proven wrong 30 years ago.
So we're in a situation right now where industry has pulled the wool over the eyes of the public and has millions of people that they support within the agricultural industry and with the academic side and of course within government that keep pushing the same myths.
They give the myth that it's safe, that it's been proven safe, that it's precise technology, that it'll feed the world, that it's needed, and that it's here to stay.
All of those things are false.
In fact, it's a very dangerous technology fraught with unpredicted side effects.
It hasn't been proven safe.
In fact, the industry research is rigged to avoid finding problems, and FDA doesn't require a single piece of research for safety.
It's unreliable.
It can easily be withdrawn in terms of, well, it can be stopped, but it won't be 100% withdrawn from the genetic pollution.
But we can do a good job there too.
Henry Miller used to work for the FDA and said to the New York Times that Big Ag has gotten everything they have asked or told the regulatory agencies to do.
And that's the way it is.
Big ag, big corporations.
It's hard to define where corporations end and where the government starts.
There's a connection there which is extremely unhealthy and could have long-term consequences and already has long-term consequences.
And GMOs are one of the most serious because it affects everyone who eats and all future generations and the entire ecosystem.
What you see in genetic engineering is a pattern which is prevalent throughout the government, where corporations have influenced the regulations over themselves in such a way that they were given free reign to make big bucks without consideration for health and environmental consequences.
And fortunately, from the side of GM food, it is easier to stop than the other major problems.
It's easier to stop than problems that require policy change.
Because we can do it from the side of the market.
Because people vote with their forks, they vote with their dollars, we can have a revolution in the kitchen.
And that's what we're focused on.
We realize, you know, I have a small NGO, small non-profit organization.
How can I go against the millions upon millions that Monsanto spends to lobby Washington, to buy and pay for elections, etc.?
We can't.
We can go to consumers who are concerned about their health, to health-conscious shoppers, to parents of young kids, to doctors and their patients, to the general public where they're concerned about what they put in their mouths and the mouths of their families.
And give them accurate, defensible information about why GMOs are unhealthy and why we shouldn't eat GMOs at all.
And then give them a shopping guide.
How to avoid eating GMOs.
These are the tools to affect policy, at this point, greater than lobbyists, greater than money for campaigns.
Because this is the tool that will get the food companies to kick out GMOs when they become a marketing liability.
Years ago, they called 98% of the DNA junk genes.
Because they didn't code for proteins, they figured they were just a refuse pile of previously accumulated genetic material.
Now they realize, oh, it's very important.
They used to think that genes could be sorted and move in any direction and anywhere on the genome because they acted independently.
Now they realize that there are families of genes that work together as a network.
They used to think that one gene produced one protein produced one trait.
That's false.
So what we have here is an evolving understanding of the most fundamental level of biology.
And yet the technology of genetic engineering is based largely on the false assumptions.
Now, the fact that one gene does not produce one protein producing one trait in almost every case is why they've limited their genetic engineering to basically two traits, poison drinking and poison production.
They can't easily create drought tolerance or salt tolerance or higher yields because that involves a family of genes and a network of genes that we don't understand the language that they're speaking.
But there's an arrogance that we can just go in there and try things and put it on the market without actually even testing the safety of the products that they're creating on animals or humans.
They feed in animal GM crops for 90 days at low concentrations and figure if it passes 90 day test, then we can feed it to humans at high volume for the rest of their lives.
It's complete arrogance and extremely dangerous.
One of Monsanto's plans is to introduce Terminator technology.
It's not yet introduced, but it can have a catastrophic effect on agriculture around the world.
It's a technology that forces plants to grow sterile seeds, so that farmers cannot plant them year after year.
Now, Monsanto, when it was originally developed by a number of companies, including the USDA, they were targeting the developing countries where 1.4 billion farmers save their seeds.
If there's changes in weather, if there's damage from insects or from disease, we have a huge diversity of plants growing on farmers' fields around the world.
We can find the genetics to withstand these changes.
But if you wipe out the diversity and limit it just to the few seeds that are available in the catalog, you are risking the entire population's food supply in order to promote the profits of these companies.
So this is a huge and horrific mess.
And the world has risen up against Terminator technology because they want to protect the ability of farmers to save seeds year after year and not turn them into bio-surfs where they go back like a new bio-colonialism where the Monsantos of the world force farmers to buy seeds year after year in order to maintain a profit and lifestyle.
The Department of Justice and Department of Agriculture have teamed up to do an evaluation of whether the agriculture industry in the United States has reached a level of monopoly or duopoly or whatever.
And I certainly think that it's very, very dangerous right now, that it's too concentrated.
They're controlling prices, they're controlling distribution, they're pushing their GM seeds, eliminating the availability of non-GM seeds, reducing the genetic diversity, and basically keeping farmers desperate.
They're always removing enough money from the system to keep farmers desperate, which is one way that they apparently control them or convince them to keep doing whatever the next magic bullet is from Monsanto and these other companies.
Contamination is a real serious issue.
The biotech industry originally promised it would be impossible to contaminate.
In fact, one executive from a company testified in Europe that you'd be more likely to get pregnant from a toilet seat than be contaminated by a GM crop.
Now they've changed their tune and say, well, contamination is inevitable, but it's not important.
It's very important.
Contamination happens at a higher rate than anyone's predicted.
Someone was looking at genetically modified alfalfa, which is out in very small quantities right now because it was taken off the market because it was approved illegally, but a small amount got on there.
So someone was checking it in 2008.
There was a 3% contamination of the 200 lots that he tested.
In 2009, it was up to 12%.
In canola, which cross-pollinates very easily and the seeds move by wind, they looked at 33 bags of non-GMO canola seed, 32 of the 33 had at least a very tiny amount of contamination.
It is difficult to get clean seed in canola, a little bit less difficult in corn, a little bit less difficult in soy, depending on the cross-pollination, but you also have contamination year after year.
You plant GM canola in one year, and if you plant non-GM canola, you'll still have over 1% contamination for the next 16 years, because unharvested canola seed can drop into the soil and germinate year after year, and they produce thousands of seeds, and they also partially drop and not get harvested, so there's a contamination over time.
Then you have this bizarre, ridiculous movement to introduce pharmaceuticals and industrial
chemicals grown inside the plant.
And we've had a near miss a few years ago where there was corn varieties engineered
to produce a vaccine for pig diarrhea.
And the following year, the corn sprouted, the stubble remained inside a soybean field
and was harvested and they found that out just in time and saved it from the food supply.
But I suspect that other of these industrial chemical producing crops have contaminated the food supply at some point.
I think it's just ridiculous that they plant crops that produce pharmaceutical chemicals outdoors and in food crops.
Years ago, there was a few countries in sub-Sahara Africa that had a famine, and so the U.S.
sent genetically modified corn as a food aid.
When they discovered it was genetically modified, they asked the U.S.
to please substitute non-GM corn, and the U.S.
refused.
Some countries decided to accept it, but said, please mill it so it won't be in seed form, so our farmers won't plant it.
The U.S.
said, tough.
You have to eat it or starve.
Fortunately, South Africa came in and milled it.
But one country, Zambia, sent out a fact-finding team to the U.S.
and Europe.
And they came back, and for many reasons, including scientific reasons, they said, absolutely do not allow genetically modified corn to be distributed to the famine victims in this country.
So they were able to find other sources of food.
But this really upset the U.S., because the myth was that GMOs would feed the hungry world, and here was a hungry country saying no.
So they did a full court press on Zambia and I visited there and heard some of the stories.
There was a couple of Jesuit priests who were talking at conferences about the inappropriateness of genetic engineered crops based on the statistics that they had gathered.
So the US government tried to stifle the Jesuit priests.
Colin Powell contacted the Vatican, and someone else contacted the head of the Jesuits in the U.S., and they kept trying to... they were lying about what these Jesuit priests were saying, and I spoke to and interviewed one of the Jesuit priests.
One of the ministers, I believe the Minister of Agriculture, was introduced to the Secretary of Agriculture in the US,
Ann Veneman.
And when she heard he was from Zambia, she just rebuffed him, saying, backward country,
and walked away.
They sent congressmen and senators and professors.
It was like they were just doing their best to try and convince Zambia that genetic engineering was OK.
But the Zambian people, the Zambian scientists, and the government held their ground.
And I think it was a very smart idea.
Because you see, those that get food aid, that 90% of their caloric intake is the aid itself.
So if the food aid was genetically modified BT corn, or Roundup Ready corn, that means
they were going to have a much higher level of this genetically
modified crop in their system than any animal has ever been fed in a laboratory for a test.
And if BT toxin does in fact disrupt the immune system or have toxic reactions or cause leaky gut or any of these things that it might do, then this particular population that's already malnourished and probably immune deficient would be just absolutely targets for a disaster.
So I actually congratulated the government for finding other non-GMO foods when I was there and went on national television and national radio saying, you know, thank you for fighting off the American bully in this case.
A colleague of mine was debating a senior executive from USAID, which is a big pro-GM organization from the U.S.
government.
And they were debating in South Africa, and after the lights went down, the cameras stopped, they continued to argue.
And in the middle of this executive's anger, she let it loose, saying, you just wait, there'll be so much GM corn in South Africa, no one in Africa could plant non-GM corn.
So this was an indication of their plan for contaminating the African continent.
This was their plan.
It's interesting that when it comes to safety regulations, the biotech industry insists that its crops are no different from conventional natural varieties.
When it comes to patenting, they say, oh no, it's completely unique and worthy of patenting.
Patenting of life, patenting of crops, these are real problems that have allowed the biotech juggernaut to take off And to sacrifice issues of health for profit.
We need to re-examine and revoke this concept of patenting life and also look at the way that they actually file patents on indigenous knowledge.
Companies have tried to patent flour used for chapati, chapati breads in India, for neem in India, which is a natural product that's been developed for years, for basmati rice, for all these different things.
They'll go in like bioprospectors and biopirates to steal some of the indigenous resources that have possibly been developed by farmers over generations.
And because they discover some ways in which the characteristics work on a molecular level,
they file a patent.
And then they can sell the products of their patent back to the indigenous countries that developed it.
So it's an absolutely unfair situation and needs to be looked at.
Now, my focus is primarily the food safety.
And I chose food safety because I believe that's the leverage to get rid of GMOs.
You can be very against Monsanto.
You can watch the World Economy of Monsanto and want to break something at the end of it.
But it doesn't really speak so much about the health, so you don't realize that eating a corn chip might be just that bad.
You know, the soy might be just that bad.
There's tremendous harm that could come from eating GMOs if you look at the animal feeding studies, the livestock issues, and what's happened in the U.S.
since GMOs were introduced from a correlational side.
So, if you talk about the patent issue, or the environmental issue, or the social justice issue, or corporate takeover, you can arouse anger in people, but they may just go out and buy a GMO and eat it.
If you explain that eating a corn chip that's genetically engineered might turn your intestinal bacteria into living pesticide factories, then they put the brakes on, for themselves and their family.
And that is what's going to be leveraged for getting rid of GMOs.
When people understand the health dangers and make healthier choices.
The bees are dying in a thing called Colony Collapse Disorder, which is not well understood.
Now, in my opinion, it's definitely not primarily caused by GMOs because they're dying in large numbers in other countries where they don't plant GMOs.
More recent information suggests that the seed treatments from neonicotinoid insecticides are the cause.
These are insecticides created from nicotine or tobacco.
When biotech companies introduced a variety of BT corn that kills the rootworm, they found that it wasn't very effective for the first few weeks of the corn plant's life.
So the rootworm or soil-based organisms could destroy the seed and the early plant.
So what they did is they developed a way to Encapsulate a systemic insecticide based on tobacco called neonicotinoid insecticides and put them on the seeds and the insecticide would then infiltrate into the seed and into the plant and exude out of all the different cells of the plant for several weeks.
That way it would sort of do the job to protect against the soil-based organisms until the BT kicked in.
But this neonicotinoid insecticide is known to disrupt the navigation ability and memory of bees, where they may not be able to get back to the hive.
Now, it was believed that the seed treatments, that these type of seed treatments were responsible, in large part or completely, for colony collapse disorder.
And when they banned these type of insecticides from several countries in Europe, like in Italy, the next year there was no colony collapse the next year, except in one hive where they used the old seeds, it still had it.
They couldn't figure out the vector, how it was that the bees were getting the seed treatment from the plants, until they discovered that plants, they exude a certain nectar or water that's concentrated with their nutrients in the morning, like dew.
And these bees fan the hive to keep the air conditioning going all night, and they get exhausted, so they immediately leave the hive in the morning and go to the nearest source of nutrition, which is this nectar on the plants nearby.
But this nectar or water contains the insecticide as well.
So now they understand the vectors in terms of how these honey bees are getting large doses of this insecticide.
And one of the characteristics of colony collapse disorder is that there's oftentimes no bees in the hive.
That they go out and they don't come back.
So we think that the neonicotinoid seed treatments, which were increased because of the use of genetic engineering, probably responsible for, or at least in large part, of
colony collapse disorder.
But there are more deaths among the bees in the United States than in other
countries, and we think that that increase might be the result of
genetically engineered crops, particularly the Bt toxin, which is
designed to kill insects.
It's not acutely toxic to bees, but in some studies they found that the bees that grabbed pollen from the corn plants that were genetically engineered, they actually were susceptible to a viral infection, whereas the controls were not.
There was another study that showed that when the bees took the pollen, Genetically modified foods and crops are one of the most dangerous health and environmental catastrophes we're facing.
inside the guts of the bees. This also happens in humans.
This could mean long-term effects from short-term exposure. Genetically
modified foods and crops are one of the most dangerous health and
environmental catastrophes we're facing and yet very few people know about it. There's
very few money.
There's very few organizations funding those of us who are trying to stop it.
I mean, I struggle year after year with, you know, a skeleton crew, and I see things like Global Warming just pulling millions and millions of dollars, and we just get Trump change and volunteers to try and stop this juggernaut.
Fortunately, it's easier to stop GMOs than it is these other problems, because we don't have to affect government policy.
We can do it through market choices, and that's what we plan to do.
▲
Export Selection