Beware of Frankenfood

I grabbed the first couple of paragraphs of an article that everyone concerned about the food that they eat should read. There is also a link a more in-depth look at 65 health risks of GM foods, excerpted from Jeffrey Smith's comprehensive new book Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods that is also a must read.

You may have heard that genetically modified (GM) foods are safe, properly tested, and necessary to feed a hungry world. UNTRUE! Genetically modified organisms (GMOs), introduced into our food supply in the mid-1990s, are one of history’s most dangerous and radical changes in our diet. These largely unregulated ingredients are in 60-70% of the foods in the US, but are well worth efforts to avoid them.

Fortunately, health-conscious retailers, distributors, manufacturers, and growers are now participating in The Campaign for Healthier Eating in America, which will eliminate GMOs from thousands of products. This will make it easier for you to feed your family a healthier “non-GMO” diet and may even end the genetic engineering of the entire US food supply. This industry-wide rejection of GMOs can be achieved by a “tipping point,” in which a sufficient number of shoppers in the US avoiding GM ingredients force the major food companies to stop using them.

Europe reached the tipping point in April 1999 and within a single week, virtually all major manufacturers publicly committed to stop using GM ingredients in their European brands. This consumer-led revolt against GMOs in the EU was generated by a February 1999 media firestorm after a top GMO safety researcher, Dr. Arpad Pusztai, was “ungagged by Parliament” and able to tell this alarming story to the press.Dr. Pusztai was the world’s top researcher in his field and a senior researcher at the prestigious Rowett Institute in Scotland. He had been working on a UK government grant to design long-term testing protocols that were intended to become part of the official European GM food safety assessment process. But when Pusztai fed supposedly harmless GM to rats, they developed potentially pre-cancerous cell growth, smaller brains, livers, and testicles, partially atrophied livers, and a damaged immune system. Moreover, the results clearly indicated that the cause of the problem was due to the unpredictable side effects arising from the process of genetic engineering itself. In other words, it suggested that the GM foods already on the market, which were created from the same process, might also create such effects. When he expressed his concern he was fired from his job after 35 years and silenced with threats of a lawsuit, his 20 member research team was disbanded, the testing protocols were abandoned, and the pro-GM establishment embarked on an extensive disinformation campaign to discredit the study’s results and protect the reputation of GM foods. But when an invitation to testify before Parliament allowed Pusztai to finally tell his story, all hell broke loose.