Jeffrey M. Smith
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 Animals that avoided gm food include cows, pigs, geese, squirrels, elk, deer, raccoons, mice, and rats.
"w: rhile my cows show a preferencefor open-pollinated corn over the hybrid varieties, they both beat Bt corn hands down."112
— Tim Eisenbeis, South Dakota
Eyewitness reports: Animals avoid GMOs
Avoiding GM soybeans
A flock of geese visit an Illinois pond each year and feed on soybeans from a nearby 50-acre field. The year the farmer planted GM soybeans on half the field, he was shocked to discover that the geese ate only from non-GM side. |
Mark Sircus
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 Researchers are reviving fears that gm food damages human health and certainly would not be indicated for children or people with diabetes.
Diabetic Neuropathy
Diabetic neuropathy, a complication of both Type I and Type II diabetes, is probably the most common complication of the disease.32 Studies suggest that up to 50% of people with diabetes are affected to some degree. Diabetic neuropathy is a nerve disorder caused by diabetes. |
Jeffrey M. Smith
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| Over a nine-week period, the mice consumed 61% non-GM and 39% gm food. (When he forced half the mice to eat only GM and the other half to eat non-GM, the GM group ate more food, gained less weight, and "seemed less active while in their cages." When picked up to be weighed at the end of the experiment, he said the GM-fed mice were "more distressed. ... Many were running round and round the basket, scrabbling desperately in the sawdust, and even frantically jumping up the sides, something I'd never seen before." |
| A gm food supplement killed about 100 people and caused 5,000-10,000 to fall sick........................60
Section 2: Gene insertion disrupts the DNA.......................................................................................................63
2.1 Foreign genes disrupt the DNA at the insertion site.............................................................................64
2.2 Growing GM crops using tissue culture can create hundreds or thousands of DNA mutations...........66
2.3 Gene insertion creates genome-wide changes in gene expression.................................... |
| In fact, in the 1990s, when the GM peas were tested with an inferior 'gel test' method that is sometimes used in gm food assessments, Higgins [the pea developer] didn't see any difference between the GM and non-GM proteins. The peas had passed this test."135
Studies typically combine poor reporting with missing data
Doug Gurian-Sherman Regarding Bt corn from Dow AgroSciences: "FDA determined that the data summary had incomplete information about nutritional composition. |
| It would seem apparent that gm food regulation is currently based on a series of extremely insufficient guidelines. . . . We feel that much more scientific effort and investigation is necessary before we can be satisfied that eating foods containing GM material in the long term is not likely to provoke any form of health problems. It will be essential to adequately test in a transparent manner each individual GM product before its introduction into the market. |
Kaayla T. Daniel, PhD, CCN
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 The York researchers sent their findings to British Health Secretary Frank Dobson, urging the government to act on the information and impose an instant ban on gm food pending further safety tests. Michael Antoniou, M.D., a molecular geneticist at Guy's Hospital, Central London, observed, "This is a very interesting if slightly worrying development. It points to the fact that far more work is needed to assess their safety. At the moment, no allergy tests are carried out before GM foods are marketed and that also needs to be looked at. |
Jeffrey M. Smith
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| Case study: Spinning failure into proclamations of success
GM peas under development were evaluated by tests normally applied to medicine—not to gm food.23 The peas created a dangerous immune response in mice which, if found in humans, might be life-threatening. The 10-year pea project, costing over $2 million, was abandoned. If those same peas had been evaluated with tests used for other GM crops, however, they could have sailed through the approval process anywhere in the world. |
Brenda Watson and Leonard Smith
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 Apparently the only way you can be certain you are not eating a gm food is to eat only organic food, which is a great idea in any case.
Switch to Nontoxic Cooking and Storage Wares
Avoid plastics, nonstick wares, and aluminums when you store (and for that matter, cook) foods. Use nonplastic wares, containers, and wrappings, such as ceramics, porcelain, glass, and natural parchment paper.
ENHANCE DIGESTION WITH ENZYMES AND PROBIOTICS
Up to now, I've been covering mostly external toxins. |
Patrick Holford
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 No adequate safety tests have been carried out and no one is monitoring the impact of gm food on the diets of those countries now selling significant quantities of GM products for human consumption. Far too little is known about genes and DNA to predict what the possible unexpected effects of genetic engineering will be.
The only known trial of gm food on humans was commissioned by the British government's Food Standards Agency and carried out by the University of Newcastle in 2002. Seven people were given a meal containing GM soy. |
| The implications for human health and the environment remain unknown, though there are concerns that gm food could pose a serious health risk, with possible health problems involving antibiotic resistance, the creation of new toxins, and unexpected allergic reactions. The reality is that these concerns remain largely speculative because no one can predict what the outcome of the introduction of gm food into the food chain will be. |
Peter Pringle
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 No more GM crops would be authorized for local planting, and imports of gm food grains would be curtailed. The GM controversy devastated sales of U.S. farm products, halving soybean exports to Europe.
The arrival of the Ideal Progress launched two years of demonstrations. European protesters began blocking shipments of GM crops in the Netherlands, dumping soybeans in Brussels and Paris, and ripping up test plots in the United Kingdom. Monsanto, the U.S. agribusiness giant that had engineered the herbicide-resistant soybeans, thought the protests would die down. |
| OECD, 1993
Because a gm food is "substantially equivalent" to a conventional one does not mean that it is "safe."
—British government report, 1999
In the early days of bioengineering, two flowering plants were particularly hospitable to alien genes. One was tobacco, which is perhaps the easiest plant in the world for biotech experiments. The other was the modest but cooperative petunia. A petunia field test in Germany caused an unusual stir in the biotech community during the summer of 1990. |
| Importantly, European health officials concluded that for a gm food to be substantially equivalent to a conventional one does not mean that it is "safe."13
But within the United States and Canada, the confusion still worked in the companies' favor. Substantially equivalent would mean substantially equivalent enough to pass a consumer's squeeze test, little more.14 For those who were watching what was going on in the world of futuristic agriculture, the concept provided "an excuse for not requiring biochemical and toxicological tests," as one dissenting scientist put it years later. |
Doris J. Rapp, M.D.
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 Mercola Newsletter, "Prominent Scientists Form Group to Counter gm food." http://www.i-sis.org.uk
62 Gersema, Emily, "School Lunches Will Include Irradiated Burgers," The Arizona Republic, May 30, 2003.
CHAPTER 10 It Could Happen to Your Family!
You Could Buy a Home Poisoned with Dursban®1"5'12'13a'49
For many years, hundreds of gallons of the termiticide Dursban® have been used in the foundations of homes. This chemical can gradually seep into the inside of your home. |
Peter Pringle
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| None of the developing countries in Asia had given its farmers official permission to plant any significant gm food or feed crops. Bt cotton has been released for commercial use in India and Indonesia. China is actively pursuing its own Bt crops. In Africa, only South Africa has approved the commercial growing of any GM crops (Bt cotton and Bt maize). In the remainder of Africa, only Kenya has supported field tests of GM crops.12 In South America, Argentina was quick to go ahead with several GM crops, while Brazil and Chile officially did not allow them. |
| In Africa gm food could literally weed out poverty. . . . In Africa most weeding is done by women, [so] reducing that would have a major impact."29 Wambugu complains that aid workers have been "brainwashed" by Greenpeace and other antibiotech civil society groups into believing that transgenic crops are unsafe and will ruin traditional varieties in Africa. Moreover, she believes that Europeans are being force-fed "half-truths" about the dangers of biotech crops. |
Patrick Holford
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| The only known trial of gm food on humans was commissioned by the British government's Food Standards Agency and carried out by the University of Newcastle in 2002. Seven people were given a meal containing GM soy. It was found that in at least three people the GM material moved out of the food and entered their gut bacteria after only one meal! A Faustian feast, no less. Our gut bacteria perform an important role in digestion and any changes to their characteristics are a cause for concern.
Is your water fit to drink?
Water is not simply H20. |
Jeffrey M. Smith
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 Meacher elaborated on the dangers of transferring allergies into a gm food, overuse of herbicides, and the accidental switching on of a host organism's gene at random. He also discussed horizontal gene transfer—where genes can jump between organisms with unpredictable consequences. He said "the only human GM trial, commissioned ironically by the [UK's] Food Standards Agency," confirmed that GM DNA did, in fact, transfer to bacteria in the human gut. "Previously many scientists had denied that this was possible," he said. |
| At the end of the document, the scientists recount the major problems characteristic of the gm food debate thus far.
As you read their list below, it may draw to mind examples that you have read in this book. I hope this will reinforce your confidence to voice these arguments yourself. Overturning a myth is not easy and cannot be accomplished by only a few individuals. Please join with those of us who are dedicated to getting the truth out, and doing what we can to protect our world and ourselves. |
| Hogendoorn then changed his experiment, to look for differences between a group fed gm food and another fed natural food. The GM-fed group ate more, probably because they were slightly heavier on average to begin with, but curiously, they gained less weight. In fact, by the end of the short experiment, they actually lost weight. On the other hand, the mice fed the non-GM diet ate less but gained more weight, continuing to gain weight until the end of the experiment. The results were statistically significant. |
| Although major media had avoided reporting on gm food safety issues, when the butterfly appeared to be under attack, the press rushed to its aid with months of attention.
And finally that week, the Independent on Sunday broke the story about the ministers' secret media plans, which were depicted as the "most damning description yet, of ministers' objectives in the controversy." The paper described the government's actions as a "a cynical public relations exercise," attempting to "save ministers' faces. |
| GM food to be planted, sold, and eaten without prior safety testing.
Pusztai's team engineered a potato plant to create a different pesticide—a lectin, a natural insecticidal poison that some plants produce to ward off insects. Arpad Pusztai had spent nearly seven years researching this lectin's properties. He was the world's expert on lectins and he knew this particular lectin was safe for humans to eat. In fact, in one of his published studies, he fed rats the equivalent of 800 times the amount of lectins that the GM potatoes were engineered to produce, with no apparent damage. |
| This alternative hypothesis appears to have saved the reputation of the biotech industry, allowing gm food and supplements to continue to be sold without safety testing. Let's analyze this alternative hypothesis to see if it justifies the FDA's hands-off approach.
The Blame Game
In the New England Journal of Medicine article Osterholm and his colleagues explain, "Although the powdered carbon may have contributed to the removal of the [toxic] agent, it does not explain how the agent was introduced into the product. |
Gary Null
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| That's because our laws do not require labeling of gm food. Already, genetically modified ingredients are being added into the processed food we buy, without our knowledge, even though surveys have shown that the vast majority of Americans favor such labeling. There's an ethical problem with consumers being kept in the dark about the true nature of the food they are buying, eating, and feeding their children; it is particularly troubling for vegetarians, who can now no longer be sure that a seeming plant food does not contain animal genes. |
Peter Pringle
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| Argentina imposed an effective freeze on new gm food and feed crop approvals in an effort to avoid losses in export sales to Europe.13 Ultimately, developing countries feared that biotech companies might be able to engineer crops that grow in Northern climates to produce essentially tropical foods, thus threatening their traditional exports.14 This was already a trend. The agricultural economies of these countries depended to a large extent on producing special commodities, such as lauric acid oils from palm trees, used in soaps and detergents and once found only in the tropics. |
the Editors of FC&A Medical Publishing
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 Common gm food crops include soybeans, corn, potatoes, squash, canola, and papaya.
One of the goals of genetic modification is for scientists to change the DNA make-up of plants so they are more resistant to insects and weeds. This way, farmers can use fewer chemical insecticides or herbicides.
To change a food this way, a scientist first inserts an extra gene into a plant. This gene may come from an entirely different species. For example, a bacterium gene is often added to a corn plant so it can create its own insecticide. |
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