Many 'natural' foods are loaded with GMOs

[Serpo]

Weed killer is thriving biologically inside most conventional crops as they grow in the fields of America, only to be sprayed with more heavy doses of Roundup, and then shipped to the world's supermarkets as "all natural," with absolutely no GMO disclaimer or warning. Even vegetarian products have been infiltrated by this cancer-causing "Trojan horse."

Corn and soy based products infiltrate the American "norm" for daily general consumption, and the healthcare industry loves the results. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are suffering from infections, serious gluten allergy reactions, headaches, dizzy spells, kidney stones, bowel irregularities, and worst of all, mutagenic cell production leading to cancer. Monsanto's GMO farm land has increased from just 4 million acres in 1997 to over 330 million acres now, most of which is United States soil. Brazil and India are now popular GMO breeding grounds also.

Veggie burgers are no exception, so no more of that for your vegetarian cookouts. Forget about all the soy-based items that are boxed, bagged and bottled in the center aisles of the grocery store. The only place where you should be looking for food in the grocery store is around the outer walls, where the fresh fruits and vegetables are being rinsed. There's no safety in numbers anymore, and the FDA is grasping for straws, constantly changing the names of poisons as more and more educated consumers know where the toxins are and how to read the tricky labels.

Over 93% of all U.S. soy products are Monsanto GMO, which are carcinogenic. Stop eating the following: vegetable oil, lecithin (an emulsifier), soy protein concentrates, tofu (soybean curd), soy sauce, teriyaki and tamari sauce, soy flour, soy nuts, soy nut butter, soy isoflavones, soy milk, hydrolyzed vegetable protein (HVP), hydrolyzed soy yeast, soy-based infant formulas, non-dairy frozen yogurt, and soy isolate fiber (SPF). Soy protein isolates, containing up to 92 percent protein, possess the most dangerous amount of "highly refined protein" of all soy products.

Over 86% of all U.S. corn products are Monsanto GMO and are carcinogenic. If you haven't watched the documentary King Corn, it's a must see. The Bush Administration subsidized this GMO food devil the infamous high fructose corn syrup, for ethanol, and also to serve as feed for livestock, which gives animals digestive infections.

Cows are not evolved enough to digest corn, especially Monsanto GMO cancer causing corn, and as soon as corn products become their main diet, farmers must give them antibiotics to fight off digestive infections. That's how the whole cycle of drugs and meat perpetuates.

Stop eating corn starch, corn chips, baking powder, caramel (made from corn syrup), confectioner's sugar, corn flour, corn gluten, corn syrup, corn meal, corn oil, dextrose, dextrin, maltodextrin (synthetic thickening agent), food starch, modified food starch, fructose, gum arabic, GDL (additive in cured meats), invert sugar, invert syrup, malt syrup and extract, mono and di-glycerides, monosodium glutamate (MSG - popular in Chinese foods), sucrose, treacle (mixture of molasses and corn syrup), vegetable protein, vegetable shortening, and of course, xantham gum. If you like corn, eat organic corn on the cob.

Canola oil is GMO and is carcinogenic. It was never meant for human consumption. It comes from the rapeseed plant and is an excellent insect repellant. Canada paid off the FDA to label it as safe. It has been known to disrupt the central nervous system, cause respiratory illness, constipation, low birth weights in infants, and even lung cancer. Canola is not just another oil to choose from. The only reason Canada promotes this is because it is one of the nation's chief export products.

Also watch out for tomatoes, potatoes, beets and alfalfa that are not truly organic. Stick with grocery stores like Trader Joes and your local farmers markets. True organic food prices are coming down quickly now that the word is getting out about GMO corn and soy, and about the labels that are often lies, like "all natural" and "natural flavors added."

Textured vegetable protein, or TVP, is a meat substitute made from soy flour and comes in small flakes or large chunks. This ground meat-looking staple product isn't suitable for animals, much less humans, but the recipe tells you to add it to your favorite soup, chili or pasta sauce. TVP is in most storable foods.

Use olive oil or coconut oil for cooking, and fill your refrigerator and pantry with 100% organic everything. Until you can remember all of the poisons, print this page and put it in your wallet or purse so you'll have it handy at the stores. Change your eating habits now and you will feel the difference immediately, and your body will reward you with renewed energy and vitality.
http://www.naturalnews.com/033780_natural_foods_GMOs.html

[Serpo]

A new paper reviewing data from 19 animal studies shows that consuming genetically modified (GM) corn or soybeans leads to significant organ disruptions in rats and mice, particularly in livers and kidneys (http://www.enveurope.com/content/23...). "Other organs may be affected too, such as the heart and spleen, or blood cells," stated the paper. In fact some of the animals fed genetically modified organisms had altered body weights, which is "a very good predictor of side effects in various organs."

The GM soybean and corn varieties used in the feeding trials "constitute 83% of the commercialized GMOs" that are currently consumed by billions of people. While the findings may have serious ramifications for the human population, the authors demonstrate how a multitude of GMO-related health problems could easily pass undetected through the superficial and largely incompetent safety assessments that are used around the world.

The researchers, lead by French Professor Gilles-Eric Séralini, found that nearly 1 out of every 10 measured parameters in the studies, including blood and urine biochemistry, organ weights, and microscopic analyses, were significantly disrupted in the animals fed GMOs. The kidneys of males fared the worst, with 43.5% of all the changes. The liver of females followed, with 30.8%. The report, published in Environmental Sciences Europe on March 1, 2011, confirms that "several convergent data appear to indicate liver and kidney problems as end points of GMO diet effects." The authors point out that livers and kidneys "are the major reactive organs" in cases of chronic food toxicity.

Feed'em longer!
One of the most glaring faults in the current regulatory regime is the short duration of animals feeding studies. The industry limits trials to 90 days at most, with some less than a month. Only two studies reviewed in this new publication were over 90 days -- both were non-industry research.

Short studies could easily miss many serious effects of GMOs. It is well established that some pesticides and drugs, for example, can create effects that are passed on through generations, only showing up decades later. IN the case of the drug DES (diethylstilbestrol), "induced female genital cancers among other problems in the second generation." The authors urge regulators to require long-term multi-generational studies, to "provide evidence of carcinogenic, developmental, hormonal, neural, and reproductive potential dysfunctions, as it does for pesticides or drugs."

Pesticide Plants
Nearly all GM crops are described as "pesticide plants." They either tolerate doses of weed killer, such as Roundup, or produce an insecticide called Bt-toxin. In both cases, the added toxin -- weedkiller or bug killer -- is found inside the corn or soybeans we consume.

When regulators evaluate the toxic effects of pesticides, they typically require studies using three types of animals, with at least one feeding trial lasting 2 years or more. One third or more of the side effects produced by these toxins will show up only in the longer study -- not the shorter ones. But for no good reason, regulators ignore the lessons learned from pesticides and waive the GM crops-containing-pesticides onto the market with a single species tested for just 90 days. The authors affirm that "it is impossible, within only 13 weeks, to conclude about the kind of pathology that could be induced by pesticide GMOs and whether it is a major pathology or a minor one. It is therefore necessary to prolong the tests."

GMO approvals also ignore the new understanding that toxins don't always follow a linear dose-response. Sometimes a smaller amount of toxins have greater impact than larger doses. Approvals also overlook the fact that mixtures can be far more dangerous than single chemicals acting alone. Roundup residues, for example, have been "shown to be toxic for human placental, embryonic, and umbilical cord cells," whereas Roundup's active ingredient glyphosate does not on its own provoke the same degree of damage. One reason for this is that the chemicals in Roundup "stabilize glyphosate and allow its penetration into cells."

Furthermore, toxins may generate new substances (metabolites) "either in the GM plant or in the animals fed with it." Current assessments completely ignore the potential danger from these new components in our diets, such as the "new metabolites" in GMOs engineered to withstand Roundup. The authors warn, "We consider this as a major oversight in the present regulations."

"It's not the same stuff that farmers spray"
Regulators claim that the Bt-toxin produced inside GM corn is safe. They say that the Bt gene comes from soil bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), which has been safely applied as a spray-on insecticide by farmers in the past. But the authors insist that "the argument about 'safe use history' of the wild Bt protein . . . cannot, on a sound scientific basis, be used for direct authorizations of . . . GM corns," without conducting proper long-term animal feeding studies.

In order to justify their claim that the wild Bt-toxin is safe, the authors state that it must first be separately tested on animals and humans and then authorized individually for food or feed, which it has not. And even if the wild variety had been confirmed as safe, the GM versions are so different, they must require their own independent studies. The paper states:

"The Bt toxins in GMOs are new and modified, truncated, or chimerical in order to change their activities/solubility in comparison to wild Bt. For instance, there is at least a 40% difference between the toxin in Bt176 [corn] and its wild counterpart."

Even though the isolated Bt-toxin from GM corn has not been tested on animals, rodent studies on corn containing the toxin do show problems. Male rats fed Monsanto's MON863 corn, for example, had smaller kidneys with more focal inflammation and other "disrupted biochemical markers typical of kidney filtration or function problems."

Stop with the dumb excuses
If statistically significant problems show up in their studies, biotech company researchers often attempt to explain away the adverse findings. But the authors of this review paper describe their excuses as unscientific, obsolete, or unjustified.

When male and female animals have different results, for example, biotech advocates claim that this couldn't possibly be related to the feed. Since both genders eat the same amount, they argue, both would have to show the same reaction in all of their organs, etc. And if the group of animals fed with less of the GMO feed exhibit more severe reactions than the group fed the larger amount, advocates claim that this discrepancy also means that the GMOs could not be the cause, since there must always be a linear dose relationship.

The authors of this paper, however, point out that effects found in a GMO animal feeding study "cannot be disregarded on the rationale that it is not linear to the dose (or dose-related) or not comparable in genders. This would not be scientifically acceptable." In fact, most "pathological and endocrine effects in environmental health are not directly proportional to the dose, and they have a differential threshold of sensitivity in both sexes. This is, for instance, the case with carcinogenesis and endocrine disruption."

What's the culprit, pesticide or plant?
The shortcomings of the feeding studies make it impossible to determine whether a particular problem is due to the added pesticide, such as Roundup residues or Bt-toxin, or due to the genetic changes in the modified plants' DNA.

Mice fed Roundup Ready soybeans, for example, showed numerous changes indicating increased metabolic rates in the liver (i.e. irregular hepatocyte nuclei, more nuclear pores, numerous small fibrillar centers, and abundant dense fibrillar components). Since studies on Roundup herbicide also show changes in the liver cells of mice and humans, the Roundup residues within the soybeans may be a significant contributing factor to the metabolic changes.

Similarly, rats fed Roundup Ready corn showed indications that their kidneys leaked. Such an effect "is well correlated with the effects of glyphosate-based herbicides (like Roundup) observed on embryonic kidney cells." Thus, the rats' kidney problems may also be caused by the Roundup that is accumulated within Roundup Ready corn kernels.

In addition to the herbicide, the Bt-toxin insecticide produced inside GM corn might also cause disorders. The authors state, "The insecticide produced by MON810 [corn] could also induce liver reactions, like many other pesticides." Studies do confirm significant liver changes in rats fed Bt corn.

On the other hand, "unintended effects of the genetic modification itself cannot be excluded" as the possible cause of these very same health problems. The process of gene insertion followed by cloning plant cells (tissue culture) can cause massive collateral damage in the plant's DNA with potentially harmful side-effects. In MON810 corn, for example, the insertion "caused a complex recombination event, leading to the synthesis of new RNA products encoding unknown proteins." The authors warn that "genetic modifications can induce global changes" in the DNA, RNA, proteins, and the numerous natural products (metabolites), but the faulty safety assessments are not designed to adequately identify these changes or their health impacts.

Population at risk
In addition to the shortcomings mentioned above, the paper shows how GMO feeding trials are "based on ancient paradigms" with "serious conceptual and methodological flaws," employ statistical methods that obscure the findings, add irrelevant control groups that confuse and confound the analysis, and rely on numerous assumptions that either remain untested or have already proved false.

Unlike drug approvals, biotech companies do not conduct human studies. They would therefore fail to identify both general human health reactions, and the potentially more serious ones endured by sub-populations. "If some consumers suffer from stomach problems or ulcers," for example, the paper states, "the new toxins will possibly act differently; the digestion in children could be affected too." The paper recommends the implementation of post market monitoring, which, among other things, "should be linked with the possibility of detecting allergenicity reactions to GMOs in routine medicine."

But even if authorities wanted to conduct epidemiological studies on GMOs, the authors acknowledge that they "are not feasible in America, since there is no organized traceability of GMOs anywhere on the continent." Not only is labeling of GMOs urgently needed to allow such studies to proceed, the study says:

"The traceability of products from animals fed on GMOs is also crucial. The reason for this is because they can develop chronic diseases which are not utterly known today…. Labeling animals fed on GMOs is therefore necessary because some pesticide residues linked to GMOs could pass into the food chain."

They also point out that "even if pesticides residues or DNA fragments are not toxic nor transmitted by themselves" nevertheless, "nobody would want to eat disabled or physiologically modified animals after long-term GMOs ingestion."

"New experiments," they concluded, "should be systematically performed to protect the health of billions of people that could consume directly or indirectly these transformed products."

http://www.naturalnews.com/033784_GMO_animal_feed.html

[Serpo]

Whole Foods Market, a grocery chain with a reputation for bringing "natural" foods to consumers, has suffered substantial criticism in recent months due to its failure to identify products that contain genetically modified ingredients.

The nonprofit Organic Consumers Association organized a demonstration at a Chicago Whole Foods in May to raise awareness about the lack of labeling of food with genetically modified ingredients. A group of protesters in white hazmat suits staged a "food dump" in front of the store, destroying products containing GMOs.

"No one would guess that there are genetically engineered foods right here in Whole Foods," said Alexis Baden-Mayer, political director of the Organic Consumers Association, to the Chicago Tribune.

A genetically modified organism is created by combining DNA molecules from different sources into one molecule, resulting in an organism with new or altered genes.

There have been very few studies conducted on the safety of GMOs. Scientists have warned the Environmental Protection Agency "that industry influence had made independent analysis of transgenic crops impossible" (http://seedmagazine.com/content/art...). Among the research that does exist, the studies that found health risks is roughly equal to the number of studies that did not find health risks. However, the studies suggesting that GMOs are safe were largely funded by the biotech industry itself (http://www.naturalnews.com/031951_G...).

Beyond the health risks to humans, biotechnology could create significant ecological problems as well. For starters, these altered organisms may threaten soil quality, create herbicide-resistant weeds and cross-contaminate non-GMO crops (http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agri...).

There is no mandatory labeling of GMOs in the U.S., which is one of the few industrialized countries without such regulation in place. Despite overwhelming public distrust of these organisms, Americans are largely unaware of the widespread occurrence of GMOs in their food supply due to food manufacturers non-disclosure of information and the Food and Drug Administration's lack of regulation of genetically modified foods.

The Chicago Tribune cites a study for the Pew Initiative for Food and Biotechnology that found that only 26 percent of American consumers believed they'd ever consumed food with GMOs.

But because so many crops are GM (93 percent of all soy and canola seeds, and 86 percent of all corn seeds planted in the U.S.), about 70 percent of all processed foods sold in this country contain genetically engineered ingredients, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Earlier this year, Whole Foods admitted that it stocked products with GMOs. "Until there's federal government mandated labeling of GMO ingredients, there's no way to tell if packaged products contain GMO ingredients," said Joe Dickson, quality standards coordinator for Whole Foods Markets (http://www.naturalnews.com/032628_W...).

Whole Foods has enrolled all of its store brand products in the new "Non-GMO Project" program, a third-party certification that verifies that less than 0.9 percent of a product's ingredients are genetically modified.

However, many critics argue that Whole Foods should use their heft to lobby for mandatory labeling of GMOs, or at least refuse to sell unlabeled genetically modified products.

"We need to tell natural food giants like Whole Foods or Trader Joe's that you can't claim to support GMO labeling, and then proceed to sell billions of dollars of unlabeled GMO food in your stores, greenwashed as natural," Alexis Baden-Mayer said in an interview (http://www.organicconsumers.org/art...).

May's Whole Foods protest was part of the Millions Against Monsanto program hosted by the Organic Consumers Association. Their website at http://organicconsumers.org/monsant... explains how to join the "Truth in Labeling" Campaign.

Millions Against Monsanto's next event will be October 1-2 in New York City and will include a march to area grocery stores to protest the sale of unlabeled genetically modified products.

http://www.naturalnews.com/033785_Whole_Foods_GMOs.html

[Serpo]

http://www.rockpic.net/images/poison-6.png

[Twisted Titan]

The only food that's a 100% organic is the produce you grow in your own back yard

even farmer markets are SUSPECT( not due to nefarious reasons but being strangled by regulation compliance)

[chad]

so that's like, what, the whole entire food chain then? i don't understand who, short of the ghost of laura ingalls wilder, could manage to eat like this. you'd have to have no job other than making + growing your own food 19 hours a day.

[ximmy]

The only food that's a 100% organic is the produce you grow in your own back yard

even farmer markets are SUSPECT( not due to nefarious reasons but being strangled by regulation compliance)

even many of the seeds have been tainted... already

[Serpo]

"One question means one career." This was the harsh warning of UC Berkeley Professor Ignacio Chapela for those daring to conduct independent research on genetically engineered foods and crops. "You ask one question, you get the answer and you might or might not be able to publish it; but that is the end of your career." Both he and biologist Arpad Pusztai dared to asked questions and do the research. And then all hell broke lose.

Using stunning visuals filmed on three continents, veteran German filmmaker Bertram Verhaag tracks the fate of these two scientists at the hands of a multi-billion dollar industry that is desperate to hide the dangers of their genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

Watch the trailer at:
http://www.responsibletechnology.or...

BR Online says of the film, "Belief in noble and incorrupt research and science is reduced to absurdity." Arthouse says the "movie shows how purchased truth becomes the currency in the perfidious business between science and multinationals." And GMWatch writes, "Original research showing problems with GM crops is buried under a deluge of smears and follow up studies are not done."

The insect-killing, career-ending potato
"As a scientist looking at it and actively working on the field, I find that it's very, very unfair to use our fellow citizens as guinea pigs."
-- Arpad Pusztai, UK's World in Action TV show

When Dr. Pusztai voiced his concerns about the health risks of genetically modified (GM) foods during a nationally televised interview in August 1998, his was not simply just another voice in a contentious debate. Pusztai was the world leader in his field, and he had received major government funding to come up with the official method for testing the safety of GM foods. His protocols were supposed to become the required tests before any new GMO entered the European market. Pusztai was an insider, and an advocate of GM foods -- that is until he actually ran those tests on supposedly harmless GM potatoes.

The high-tech spuds were engineered to produce their own pesticide. "The point of the whole genetic modification experiment was to protect the potato against aphids, which are one of the major pests in Scotland," he said. His team inserted a gene from the snowdrop plant into the potatoes, which did in fact protect the GM crop from the insects.

As part of his safety studies, he fed that insecticide producing GM potato to rats, along with a complete and balanced diet. Another group of rats ate natural potatoes. A third was fed not only the natural potatoes, but they also received a dose of the same insecticide that the GM potato produced. This way, if the insecticide was harmful, he would see the same health problems in both the group that ate the GM potatoes, and those that ate the diet spiked with the insecticide. To his surprise, only those that ate the GM potato had severe problems -- in every organ and every system he looked at.

Massive health problems linked to GMOs
"After the animals were killed and dissected," Pusztai recalled, "we found out that in comparison with the non-genetically modified potatoes, their internal organs developed differently." The intestines and stomach lining, for example, increased in size, the liver and kidneys were smaller, and the overall rate of growth was retarded. And the immune system suffered. Pusztai emphasized, "They found in those data 36 – 36! very highly significant differences between the GM-fed animals and the non-GM fed animals."

Since the rats that ate the natural potatoes plus the insecticide did not have these issues, there was one obvious conclusion -- the process of genetically engineering the potatoes caused unpredicted side effects, turning a harmless food into a dangerous one.

When Pusztai saw the extensive damage that his potatoes caused in the lab animals, he also realized that if biotech companies had done the safety studies, the dangerous potatoes would have easily made it to market. He knew this because a few months earlier, he had reviewed the confidential submissions from the biotech companies which allowed their GM soy and corn onto the market. "They were flimsy," he said. "They were not scientifically well founded." They would never detect the changes in GMO-fed animals.

Reading the industry studies was a turning point in Pusztai's life. He realized what he was doing and what the industry scientists were doing was diametrically opposed. He was doing safety studies. Companies like Monsanto, on the other hand, were doing as little as possible to get their foods on the market as quickly as possible.

Pusztai also realized that the GM soy and corn already on the market had been produced using the same process that had created his dangerous potato. Thus, the GM crops being consumed in the UK and the US might lead to similar damage in the gut, brain and organs of the entire population.

Thus, during his TV interview, Pusztai flatly stated: "If I had the choice, I would certainly not eat [GM foods] until I see at least comparable experimental evidence which we are producing for genetically modified potatoes."

Ambushed
After the TV show aired, Pusztai was a hero at his prestigious Rowett Institute, where the director praised his work to the press, calling it world-class research. After two days of high-profile media coverage throughout Europe, however, the director received two phone calls from the UK Prime Minister's Office.

"It's only when we think there was political pressure coming from the top that the situation changed," said Pusztai. "And then the director, to save his own skin, decided that the best way to deal with the situation [was] A) to destroy me, B) to make me shut up."

Pusztai was told the next morning that his contract would not be renewed, he was silenced with threats of a lawsuit, his team was disbanded, and the protocols were not to be implemented in GMO safety assessments. And then came the attacks.

Coordinated between the Institute, biotech academics, and even the pro-GMO UK government, a campaign to destroy Pusztai's reputation was launched. They were determined to counter the negative media coverage and protect the reputation of GMOs -- even if it meant promoting blatant lies and sacrificing a top scientist's career. Because Pusztai was gagged, he said, "whatever they did say on TV, radio and wrote in the newspapers, I could not deny it, I could not correct it, I could not say what was the real situation."

"The most hurtful thing of all," remembers Pusztai's wife Susan, "was that he wasn't allowed to talk to his colleagues and his colleagues were not allowed to talk to him. So whenever he entered a room, they went silent within seconds."

After seven excruciating months, a committee at the UK Parliament invited Pusztai to speak. This lifted the gag order, which allowed Pusztai to ultimately publish his research, and be interviewed for this film.

Oops -- GMOs weren't supposed to be there
Ignacio Chapela, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, had "a long-term relationship with a group of indigenous communities" in Mexico. Although GM corn was not yet legally grown in the country, Chapela decided to equip the Mexicans with a laboratory that could test for its presence, in case GMOs were eventually introduced. To help with the training, his colleague David Quist brought GM corn from the US. For the non-GM control corn, Chapela said, "we thought we should just use the local corn, which, of course, is going to be clean and wonderful. And the surprise came when the negative control started coming out positive. That means we started finding transgenic materials where they were not supposed to be."

Chapela says, "The reason why our findings were so astounding was because it was thought that there was no transgenic corn being planted in Mexico at all. And people wanted it that way. . . . Why? Because Mexico is the center of origin of corn. The Mexican government was worried about maintaining the integrity of the land races." Apparently GM corn imported as food was unknowingly being grown, and had already started contaminating the source of corn's biodiversity.

According to Chapela the industry "had been telling the world that they really had control over these crops, that if they planted . . . transgenic corn in one field, that transgenic corn would not go anywhere else. So our discovery that we were finding transgenic corn maybe a thousand miles from the nearest legal transgenic corn field was a huge problem for them because it really showed very simply, and with real evidence, that they really did not have control."

Chapela and Quist wrote up the finding, which was accepted for publication by the prominent journal Nature. This made "many people within the industry very nervous and very unhappy," says Chapella. They "started a discreditation campaign for the paper. They did not want the paper to be published."

Unable to stop Nature, however, a Monsanto PR company -- the Bivings Group -- deployed plan B. "They created two fictitious characters, two doctors," recounts Chapela. "And these two doctors went on the internet and started spreading rumors that what we had said was false and that the paper was flawed." The disinformation campaign went viral. It put huge pressure on Nature, spread the false notion that contamination had not taken place, and resulted in a campaign against Chapela by biotech advocates in his University.

"In my case," says Chapela, "I was pushed out of the university at least three times. Every time I fought back and we managed to keep my job. But it's been very difficult."

Trashing scientists worldwide
The treatment of Pusztai and Chapela illustrates what happens around the world to scientists who discover harm from GM crops. The work of Russian scientist Irina Ermakova, for example, was viciously attacked, and there were repeated attempts to intimidate her: papers were burnt on her desk and samples were stolen from her lab.

Peeking through these stories of personal attacks are the very real dangers of GMOs, which compel the audience to question the use of GMOs in their own diets. Consider the impact of Ermakova's research on young women planning to raise a family. After she fed genetically engineered soy flour to female rats, more than half of their offspring died within three weeks.

The film also unravels the claims of biotech benefits on the farm level. A visit to Brazil introduces herbicide-tolerant Roundup Ready soybeans, engineered to make weeding a field easier. Farmers can spray Monsanto's Roundup herbicide right on the field, and the GMOs survive. But this has led to massive overuse of Roundup, which in turn has led to the emergence of herbicide-tolerant superweeds -- no longer controllable with Roundup.

A natural reaction to these stories might be to ask why isn't the government telling us the truth and protecting us. Unfortunately, they are part of the problem.

FDA cover-up
The FDA scientists who reviewed GMOs in the early 1990s were uniformly concerned about their health impacts, according to attorney Andrew Kimbrell, who runs the D.C.-based Center for Food Safety. He was on the team that sued the FDA in 1998, forcing them to turn over nearly 60,000 pages of secret internal memos. Kimbrell extracts key memos from massive filing cabinets in his office, reading the scientists' warnings: toxins, nutritional problems, loss of biodiversity, change in water use, etc.

"So the scientists asked for these studies," says Kimbrell. "But the politicians at the FDA and in the administration at that time said no. They suppressed the science. And these questions, these studies, have never been done."

Instead, the US government maintains the illusion that nothing is wrong, and that this science works just as the biotech companies are telling us. This is beautifully illustrated with excerpts of biotech apologist Nina Fedoroff, the former science advisor to the Secretary of State. Her bland assurances about the safety of GMOs crumble with each new revelation in the film.

Unprecedented risks; no benefits
"No one gets up in the morning saying I want to go buy a genetically engineered food," says Kimbrell. "They offer no benefits, no more nutrition, no more flavor, no nothing. They only offer risks." He says the average rational person would ask, "Why would I buy a food that offers me no new benefits but only risks?" Kimbrell, who wrote the book Your Right to Know, says it was "critical for the industry to get these foods out without anyone knowing, because if they knew, they would obviously choose not to buy them."

But as Chapela's discovery of self-propagating GMO contamination illustrates, the risk of GMOs extends well beyond individual considerations. He warns, "We are manipulating life in a way that we really do not understand, we cannot control, and then we're letting it go into the environment. So it's a change that is radical, that is unprecedented, that is beyond anything we can understand, and it is irretrievable. We cannot get it back. That's my concern!"

Scientists Under Attack is recommended for all those who love nature, and for everyone who eats. To view the trailer, click the following link:
http://www.responsibletechnology.or...

Bonus film
The Scientists Under Attack DVD includes a 30 minute bonus film Monster Salmon, also by Bertram Verhaag. It describes the efforts by the US firm AquaBounty to bring fast-growing genetically engineered salmon to market in the US. Given the FDA's recent attempts to fast-track this controversial fish, this additional documentary is important and timely.

Jeffrey M. Smith is the author of Seeds of Deception (http://www.seedsofdeception.com/Pub...), the world's bestselling book on GMOs. He is also the author of Genetic Roulette (http://www.geneticroulette.com), and the Executive Director of the Institute for Responsible Technology (http://www.responsibletechnology.org). The Institute's Non-GMO Shopping Guide website (http://www.nongmoshoppingguide.com), iPhone app ShopNoGMO, and pocket guide, help people navigate to healthier non-GMO foods. Join the Institute's Non-GMO Tipping Point Network (http://action.responsibletechnology...) to connect with others in your area, to bring the truth about GMOs to your friends and community.

http://www.naturalnews.com/033804_Scientists_Under_Attack_GMOs.html