Is genetically engineered food in your body's best interest?
"If it is true that you are what you eat, now is the time to start scrutinizing the fine print. Just five years after genetically engineered foods were quietly introduced into the market place, gene-manipulated soy, papaya, yellow-neck squash, canola, potatoes, tomatoes, and dairy and animal products are on [our] tables, with another hundred or so, including wheat, expected soon. According to most estimates, 60—70 percent of all processed food contains genetically altered ingredients.
"But there is no fine print. Food regulations in the US don't require segregation of genetically engineered products." Barbara Keeler writes in A Nation of Lab Rats.
I wish I had a means of getting to you this entire article as well as the other 13 pages of the Sierra Club's July/August 2001 magazine devoted to the cover story, "Brave New Nature: What happens when biology meets big business: on the farm, in the laboratory, in the halls of Congress, and on your plate." Perhaps you'll want to find it in your library.
Kessler continues: "Health Canada (the FDA's Canadian equivalent), the UN Food Safety Agency, the UK's Ministry of Agriculture have all questioned the safety of certain genetically engineered foods, especially dairy products from cows treated with recombinant bovine growth hormone, or rBGH. Last year, the EU declined to approve Monsanto's Roundup Ready corn for human consumption because of a concern about potential allergic reactions. Roundup Ready [meaning ready for Monsanto's herbicide Roundup] corn and soy are ubiquitous in the US food supply, despite Monsanto's own study for the FDA, which revealed large differences between its modified and unmodified soybeans."
Four important points:
- Antibiotic resistant genes in GMO crops could render useless eight antibiotics that doctors use to fight fatal diseases.
- Combining plant and animal species may create compounds that are toxic to humans, or alter food quality.
- Genetic engineering could transfer unidentified proteins, triggering allergic reactions. After GMO soybeans were introduced, the UK noted a 50% increase in soy allergies. Soy now ranks among the top ten allergic foods.
- Cows treated with rBGH produce elevated levels of the hormone IGF-1, linked with increased cancer risk in humans.
GMO foods are unlabeled in the US. Are we lab rats?
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