DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU EAT?
Genetically Modified Foods, The Silent Killer
SEEDS OF DECPETION - CLICK ME to read the full story : )
JUST SAY NO TO GMO's!
This article is about the corporation MONSANTO. I recommend combing through the whole article to really get an idea of what exactly is going on with our food supply SO THAT YOU KNOW! Please avoid buying any GMO foods (most inorganic food at supermarkets or any restaurant .... ask if you don't know) and RBGH MILK PRODUCTS (anything that is not organic has RBGH in it - why do you think your daughters are developing breasts earlier? It's the hormones in your FOOD!).
Genetically Modified Foods, The Silent Killer
SEEDS OF DECPETION - CLICK ME to read the full story : )
JUST SAY NO TO GMO's!
This article is about the corporation MONSANTO. I recommend combing through the whole article to really get an idea of what exactly is going on with our food supply SO THAT YOU KNOW! Please avoid buying any GMO foods (most inorganic food at supermarkets or any restaurant .... ask if you don't know) and RBGH MILK PRODUCTS (anything that is not organic has RBGH in it - why do you think your daughters are developing breasts earlier? It's the hormones in your FOOD!).
~Elanatron~
1. "Mice avoid eating GMO foods when they have the chance, as do rats, cows, pigs, geese, elk, squirrels, and others. What do these animals know that we don’t? The Washington Post reported that laboratory mice, usually happy to munch on tomatoes, turned their noses up at the genetically modified FlavrSavr tomato. Scientist Roger Salquist said of his tomato, “I gotta tell you, you can be Chef Boyardee and mice are still not going to like them.” The mice were eventually force fed the tomato through gastric tubes and stomach washes. Several developed stomach lesions; seven of forty died within two weeks. The tomato was approved without further tests."
2. "On May 23, 2003, President Bush proposed an Initiative to End Hunger in Africa using genetically modified (GM) foods. He also blamed Europe’s “unfounded, unscientific fears” of these foods for thwarting recovery efforts. Bush was convinced that GM foods held the key to greater yields, expanded U.S. exports, and a better world. His rhetoric was not new. It had been passed down from president to president, and delivered to the American people through regular news reports and industry advertisements.
The message was part of a master plan that had been crafted by corporations determined to control the world’s food supply. Arthur Anderson Consulting Group explained how his company had helped Monsanto create the plan. First, they asked Monsanto what their ideal future looked like in fifteen to twenty years. Monsanto executives described a world with 100 percent of all commercial seeds genetically modified and patented. Anderson Consulting then worked backwards from that goal, and developed the strategy and tactics to achieve it. They presented Monsanto with the steps and procedures needed to obtain a place of industry dominance in a world in which natural seeds were virtually extinct.
Integral to the plan was Monsanto’s influence in government, whose role was to promote the technology worldwide and to help get the foods into the marketplace quickly, before resistance could get in the way. A biotech consultant later said, “The hope of the industry is that over time, the market is so flooded that there’s nothing you can do about it. You just sort of surrender.” He showed graphs projecting the year-by-year decrease of natural seeds, estimating that in five years, about 95 percent of all seeds would be genetically modified.
While some audience members were appalled at what they judged to be an arrogant and dangerous disrespect for nature, to the industry this was good business. Their attitude was illustrated in an excerpt from one of Monsanto’s advertisements: “So you see, there really isn’t much difference between foods made by Mother Nature and those made by man. What’s artificial is the line drawn between them.”
To implement their strategy, the biotech companies needed to control the seeds-so they went on a buying spree, taking possession of about 23 percent of the world’s seed companies. Monsanto did achieve the dominant position, capturing 91 percent of the GM food market. But the industry has not met their projections of converting the natural seed supply. Citizens around the world, who do not share the industry’s conviction that these foods are safe or better, have not “just sort of surrendered.”
Widespread resistance to GM food has resulted in a global showdown. U.S. exports of genetically modified corn and soy are down, and hungry African nations won’t even accept the crops as food aid. Monsanto is faltering financially and is desperate to open new markets. The U.S. government is convinced that EU resistance is the primary obstacle and is determined to change that. On May 13, 2003, the U.S. filed a lawsuit with the World Trade Organization (WTO), charging that the European Union’s restrictive policy on GM food violates international agreements.
On the day the WTO suit was filed, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick declared, “Overwhelming scientific research shows that biotech foods are safe and healthy.” This has been industry’s chant from the start. It is the key assumption at the basis of their master plan, the WTO challenge, and the president’s campaign to end hunger.
It is also, however, untrue.
The following chapters reveal that it was industry influence, not sound science, which allowed these foods onto the market. Moreover, if overwhelming scientific research suggests anything, it is that the foods should never have been approved.
Just as the magnitude of the industry’s plan was breathtaking, so too are the distortions and cover-ups. The impact of GM foods is personal. Most people in North America eat them at every meal.
You can protect yourself and your family.
3. "When eminent scientist Arpad Pusztai went public about his accidental discovery that genetically modified (GM) potatoes severely damage the immune system and organs of rats, he was suspended from the prestigious Scottish research institute where he had worked for thirty-five years. He was silenced with threats of a lawsuit while the Institute denied or distorted his findings."
4. "Canada’s leading paper described the story of six Canadian government scientists who tried to stand up to pressure to approve Monsanto’s genetically engineered bovine growth hormone (rbGH) which they believed was unsafe. The scientists were threatened by senior government officials, files were stolen from their locked file cabinets, Monsanto allegedly offered them a bribe of $1-2 million, and one senior official suddenly quit and disappeared, avoiding an appearance before a Parliamentary Committee. The FDA eventually approved rbGH on the basis of a research summary submitted by Monsanto that had distorted and deleted data about serious health effects, including cancer."
The FDA’s article states, “it has also been determined that at least 90 percent of bovine growth hormone (bGH) activity is destroyed upon pasteurization of milk. Therefore, bGH residues do not present a human food safety concern.” Robert Cohen decided to investigate this claim. He uncovered blatant scientific fraud. The research had been conducted by undergraduate Paul Groenewegan. His three co-authors all had close ties with Monsanto. The paper described how they heated milk at 162ºF for thirty minutes.
Robert Cohen said, “when I read that, I said, wait a second, milk is pasteurized for 15 seconds at that temperature-not 30 minutes. They intentionally tried to destroy the hormone… That must have been their mission. Why else would they heat the milk for 30 minutes at a high temperature reserved for a 15 second treatment?” But even after thirty minutes only 19 percent of the bGH in milk from hormone-treated cows was destroyed. According to Cohen, “They then ‘spiked’ the milk. This is their word, ‘spike.’ They added artificial bGH … 146 times the level of naturally occurring bST in powdered form to the milk and heated it. The powdered bGH in milk was destroyed! They saved the day for Monsanto. The experiment worked. These men of science could claim that heat treatment destroys bGH.”
5. "GMO foods are to be considered just as safe as natural, non-GMO foods. And sidestepping “unnecessary regulation” means that the government does not require any safety tests or any special labels identifying the foods as genetically engineered. The rationale for this hands-off policy was spelled out in an FDA document. “The agency is not aware of any information showing that foods derived by these new methods differ from other foods in any meaningful or uniform way.” Monsanto had what it wanted: government endorsement of safety, and no regulations that would interfere with its plans for rapid worldwide sales.
The Division of Food Chemistry and Technology outlined four potential dangers:
- Increased levels of known naturally occurring toxins
- Appearance of new, not previously identified” toxins
- Increased tendency to gather “toxic substances from the environment” such as pesticides or heavy metals
- Undesirable alterations in the levels of nutrients
FDA veterinarian Richard Burroughs described the changes he saw at the FDA. “There seemed to be a trend in the place toward approval at any price. It went from a university-like setting where there was independent scientific review to an atmosphere of approve, approve, approve. The thinking is, ‘How many things can we approve this year?’ Somewhere along the way they abdicated their responsibility to the public welfare.”
7. An infant girl in England broke out in cold sores from drinking soymilk, but was tested as “not allergic” to normal soy. Was she allergic to something in GM soy instead? Perhaps it was the increased amount of the allergen-trypsin inhibitor-found in Monsanto’s Roundup Ready soybeans? Could this also explain why soy allergies in the UK jumped by 50 percent after Roundup Ready soy was introduced? It took the FDA nearly a year to develop a test to see if StarLink was allergenic. The test was so poorly designed and unreliable, even the EPA rejected the results.
8. Pathologist Michael Antoniou said that the increased allergic responses “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.”
9. At a business lunch with co-workers, 35-year-old Grace Booth dined on three chicken enchiladas. Within about fifteen minutes, however, something went wrong. She felt hot, itchy. Her lips swelled; she lost her voice and developed severe diarrhea. “I felt my chest getting tight, it was hard to breathe,” recalled Booth. “She didn’t know but she was going into shock,” reported CBS news. “I thought, oh my God, what is happening to me? I felt like I was going to die.” Her co-workers called an ambulance.
Grace Booth didn’t know what had caused her near deadly allergic reaction. But this was September 2000 and within a few days she heard the news. A genetically modified corn product called StarLink, a potential allergen not approved for human consumption, was discovered in tacos, tortillas, and other corn products. More than 300 items were eventually recalled from the grocery store shelves in what was to become one of the world’s biggest GM food debacles.
10. The biotech industry uses its considerable resources to mold public opinion about genetically modified foods. In addition to promoting a one-sided image of the foods as safe and necessary, they stifle coverage about health and environmental damage. For example, a Fox TV station canceled a news series, a publisher canceled a book contract, scientific journals refused papers, and a printer shredded 14,000 magazines, all due to fear of lawsuits by Monsanto.
11. A national TV commercial showed a montage of smiling Asian children, caring doctors, rice paddies, and a narrator who says that golden rice can ‘help prevent blindness and infection in millions of children’ suffering from vitamin-A deficiency.” Time magazine went so far as to claim on their cover, “This rice could save a million kids a year.” The biotech company Syngenta claims one month of a delay in marketing Golden Rice, would cause 50,000 children to go blind.
The biotech industry had found its poster child: “The Great Yellow Hype.” Golden rice impales Americans on the horns of a moral dilemma. According to a Greenpeace report, golden rice provides so little vitamin A, “a two-year-old child would need to eat seven pounds per day.” Likewise, an adult would need to eat nearly twenty pounds to get the daily-recommended dose.
“This whole project is actually based on what can only be characterized as intentional deception. We recalculated their figures again and again. We just could not believe serious scientists and companies would do this. It is shameful that the biotech industry is using starving children to promote a dubious product.”
12. There are the numerous ways in which industry researchers apparently doctored their studies to avoid finding problems with GM foods. For example, Aventis heated StarLink corn four times longer than standard before testing for intact protein; Monsanto fed mature animals diets with only one tenth of their protein derived from GM soy; researchers injected cows with one forty-seventh the amount of rbGH before testing the level of hormone in the milk and pasteurized milk 120 times longer than normal to see if the hormone was destroyed; and Monsanto used stronger acid and more than 1,250 times the amount of a digestive enzyme recommended by international standards to prove how quickly their protein degraded. Cows that got sick were dropped from Monsanto’s rbGH studies, while cows that got pregnant before treatment were counted as support that the drug didn’t interfere with fertility; differences in composition between Roundup Ready soy and natural soy were omitted from a published paper; antibody reactions by rats fed rbGH were ignored by the FDA; and deaths from rats fed the FlavrSavr tomato remain unexplained.
****NOW ASK YOURSELF IF YOU WANT TO SPEND ONE MORE DOLLAR SUPPORTING THESE CRIMINALS? YOU HAVE A VOICE! YOU HAVE POWER AS ONE! DO NOT SUPPORT WITH YOUR SPENDING POWER! ****
