Monsanto: The world's poster child for corporate manipulation and deceit

[mick silver]

At a biotech industry conference in January 1999, a representative from Arthur Anderson, LLP explained how they had helped Monsanto design their strategic plan. First, his team asked Monsanto executives what their ideal future looked like in 15 to 20 years. The executives described a world with 100 percent of all commercial seeds genetically modified and patented. Anderson consultants 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.

This was a bold new direction for Monsanto, which needed a big change to distance them from a controversial past. As a chemical company, they had polluted the landscape with some of the most poisonous substances ever produced, contaminated virtually every human and animal on earth, and got fined and convicted of deception and wrongdoing. According to a former Monsanto vice president, "We were despised by our customers."

So they redefined themselves as a "life sciences" company, and then proceeded to pollute the landscape with toxic herbicide, contaminate the gene pool for all future generations with genetically modified plants, and get fined and convicted of deception and wrongdoing. Monsanto's chief European spokesman admitted in 1999, "Everybody over here hates us." Now the rest of the world is catching on.

"Saving the world," and other liesMonsanto's public relations story about genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are largely based on five concepts.

1. GMOs are needed to feed the world.
2. GMOs have been thoroughly tested and proven safe.
3. GMOs increase yield.
4. GMOs reduce the use of agricultural chemicals.
5. GMOs can be contained, and therefore coexist with non-GM crops.

All five are pure myths -- blatant falsehoods about the nature and benefit of this infant technology. The experience of former Monsanto (http://www.naturalnews.com/Monsanto.html) employee Kirk Azevedo helps expose the first two lies, and provides some insight into the nature of the people working at the company.

In 1996, Monsanto recruited young Kirk Azevedo to sell their genetically engineered cotton. Azevedo accepted their offer not because of the pay increase, but due to the writings of Monsanto CEO Robert Shapiro. Shapiro had painted a picture of feeding the world and cleaning up the environment with his company's new technology. When he visited Monsanto's St. Louis headquarters for new employee training, Azevedo shared his enthusiasm for Shapiro's vision during a meeting. When the session ended, a company vice president pulled him aside and set him straight. "Wait a second," he told Azevedo. "What Robert Shapiro says is one thing. But what we do is something else. We are here to make money. He is the front man who tells a story. We don't even understand what he is saying." Azevedo realized he was working for "just another profit-oriented company," and all the glowing words about helping the planet were just a front.

A few months later he got another shock. A company scientist told him that Roundup Ready cotton plants contained new, unintended proteins that had resulted from the gene insertion process. No safety studies had been conducted on the proteins, none were planned, and the cotton plants, which were part of field trials near his home, were being fed to cattle. Azevedo "was afraid at that time that some of these proteins may be toxic."

He asked the PhD in charge of the test plot to destroy the cotton rather than feed it to cattle, arguing that until the protein had been evaluated, the cows' milk or meat could be harmful. The scientist refused. Azevedo approached everyone on his team at Monsanto to raise concerns about the unknown protein, but no one was interested. "I was somewhat ostracized," he said. "Once I started questioning things, people wanted to keep their distance from me. . . . Anything that interfered with advancing the commercialization of this technology was going to be pushed aside." Azevedo decided to leave Monsanto. He said, "I'm not going to be part of this disaster."

Monsanto's toxic pastAzevedo got a small taste of Monsanto's character. A verdict in a lawsuit a few years later made it more explicit. On February 22, 2002, Monsanto was found guilty for poisoning the town of Anniston, Alabama with their PCB factory and covering it up for decades. They were convicted of negligence, wantonness, suppression of the truth, nuisance, trespass, and outrage. According to Alabama law, to be guilty of outrage typically requires conduct "so outrageous in character and extreme in degree as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency so as to be regarded as atrocious and utterly intolerable in civilized society."(1)

The $700 million fine imposed on Monsanto was on behalf of the Anniston residents, whose blood levels of Monsanto's toxic PCBs were hundreds or thousands of times the average. This disease-producing chemical, used as coolants and lubricants for over 50 years, are now virtually omnipresent in the blood and tissues of humans and wildlife around the globe. Ken Cook of the Environmental Working Group says that based on Monsanto documents made public during a trial, the company "knew the truth from the very beginning. They lied about it. They hid the truth from their neighbors." One Monsanto memo explains their justification: "We can't afford to lose one dollar of business." Welcome to the world of Monsanto.

Infiltrating the minds and offices of the governmentTo get their genetically modified products approved, Monsanto has coerced, infiltrated, and paid off government officials around the globe. In Indonesia, Monsanto gave bribes and questionable payments to at least 140 officials, attempting to get their genetically modified (GM) cotton accepted.(2) In 1998, six Canadian government scientists testified before the Senate that they were being pressured by superiors to approve rbGH, that documents were stolen from a locked file cabinet in a government office, and that Monsanto offered them a bribe of $1-2 million to pass the drug without further tests. In India, one official tampered with the report on Bt cotton to increase the yield figures to favor Monsanto.(3) And Monsanto seems to have planted their own people in key government positions in India, Brazil, Europe, and worldwide.

Monsanto's GM seeds were also illegally smuggled into countries like Brazil and Paraguay, before GMOs were approved. Roberto Franco, Paraguay's Deputy Agriculture Ministry, tactfully admits, "It is possible that [Monsanto], let's say, promoted its varieties and its seeds" before they were approved. "We had to authorize GMO seeds because they had already entered our country in an, let's say, unorthodox way."

In the US, Monsanto's people regularly infiltrate upper echelons of government, and the company offers prominent positions to officials when they leave public service. This revolving door has included key people in the White House, regulatory agencies, even the Supreme Court. Monsanto also had George Bush Senior on their side, as evidenced by footage of Vice President Bush at Monsanto's facility offering help to get their products through government bureaucracy. He says, "Call me. We're in the 'de-reg' business. Maybe we can help."

Monsanto's influence continued into the Clinton administration. Dan Glickman, then Secretary of Agriculture, says, "there was a general feeling in agro-business and inside our government in the US that if you weren't marching lock-step forward in favor of rapid approvals of biotech products, rapid approvals of GMO crops, then somehow, you were anti-science and anti-progress." Glickman summarized the mindset in the government as follows:

"What I saw generically on the pro-biotech side was the attitude that the technology was good, and that it was almost immoral to say that it wasn't good, because it was going to solve the problems of the human race and feed the hungry and clothe the naked. . . . And there was a lot of money that had been invested in this, and if you're against it, you're Luddites, you're stupid. That, frankly, was the side our government was on. Without thinking, we had basically taken this issue as a trade issue and they, whoever 'they' were, wanted to keep our product out of their market. And they were foolish, or stupid, and didn't have an effective regulatory system. There was rhetoric like that even here in this department. You felt like you were almost an alien, disloyal, by trying to present an open-minded view on some of the issues being raised. So I pretty much spouted the rhetoric that everybody else around here spouted; it was written into my speeches."(4)

He admits, "when I opened my mouth in the Clinton Administration [about the lax regulations on GMOs], I got slapped around a little bit."

Hijacking the FDA to promote GMOsIn the US, new food additives must undergo extensive testing, including long-term animal feeding studies.(5) There is an exception, however, for substances that are deemed "generally recognized as safe" (GRAS). GRAS status allows a product to be commercialized without any additional testing. According to US law, to be considered GRAS the substance must be the subject of a substantial amount of peer-reviewed published studies (or equivalent) and there must be overwhelming consensus among the scientific community that the product is safe. GM foods had neither. Nonetheless, in a precedent-setting move that some experts contend was illegal, in 1992 the FDA declared that GM crops are GRAS as long as their producers say they are. Thus, the FDA does not require any safety evaluations or labels whatsoever. A company can even introduce a GM food (http://www.naturalnews.com/food.html) to the market without telling the agency.

Such a lenient approach to GM crops was largely the result of Monsanto's legendary influence over the US government. According to the New York Times, "What Monsanto wished for from Washington, Monsanto and, by extension, the biotechnology industry got. . . . When the company abruptly decided that it needed to throw off the regulations and speed its foods to market, the White House quickly ushered through an unusually generous policy of self-policing." According to Dr. Henry Miller, who had a leading role in biotechnology issues at the FDA from 1979 to 1994, "In this area, the U.S. government agencies have done exactly what big agribusiness has asked them to do and told them to do."

The person who oversaw the development of the FDA's GMO policy was their Deputy Commissioner for Policy, Michael Taylor, whose position had been created especially for him in 1991. Prior to that, Taylor was an outside attorney for both Monsanto and the Food Biotechnology Council. After working at the FDA, he became Monsanto's vice president. He's now back at the FDA, as the US food safety czar.


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[mick silver]

Covering up health dangersThe policy Taylor oversaw in 1992 needed to create the impression that unintended effects from GM crops were not an issue. Otherwise their GRAS status would be undermined. But internal memos made public from a lawsuit showed that the overwhelming consensus among the agency scientists was that GM crops can have unpredictable, hard-to-detect side effects. Various departments and experts spelled these out in detail, listing allergies, toxins, nutritional effects, and new diseases as potential problems. They had urged superiors to require long-term safety studies.(6) In spite of the warnings, according to public interest attorney Steven Druker who studied the FDA's internal files, "References to the unintended negative effects of bioengineering were progressively deleted from drafts of the policy statement (over the protests of agency scientists)."(7)

FDA microbiologist Louis Pribyl wrote about the policy, "What has happened to the scientific elements of this document? Without a sound scientific base to rest on, this becomes a broad, general, 'What do I have to do to avoid trouble'-type document. . . . It will look like and probably be just a political document. . . . It reads very pro-industry, especially in the area of unintended effects."(8)

The FDA scientists' concerns were not only ignored, their very existence was denied. Consider the private memo summarizing opinions at the FDA, which stated, "The processes of genetic engineering and traditional breeding are different and according to the technical experts in the agency, they lead to different risks."(9) Contrast that with the official policy statement issued by Taylor, Monsanto's former attorney: "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."(10) On the basis of this false statement, the FDA does not require GM food safety testing.

Fake safety assessmentsMonsanto participates in a voluntary consultation process with the FDA that is derided by critics as a meaningless exercise. Monsanto submits whatever information it chooses, and the FDA does not conduct or commission any studies of its own. Former EPA scientist Doug Gurian-Sherman, who analyzed FDA review records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, says the FDA consultation process "misses obvious errors in company-submitted data summaries, provides insufficient testing guidance, and does not require sufficiently detailed data to enable the FDA to assure that GE crops are safe to eat."(11)

But that is not the point of the exercise. The FDA doesn't actually approve the crops or declare them safe. That is Monsanto's job! At the end of the consultation, the FDA issues a letter stating:

"Based on the safety and nutritional assessment you have conducted, it is our understanding that Monsanto has concluded that corn products derived from this new variety are not materially different in composition, safety, and other relevant parameters from corn currently on the market, and that the genetically modified corn does not raise issues that would require premarket review or approval by FDA. . . . As you are aware, it is Monsanto's responsibility to ensure that foods marketed by the firm are safe, wholesome and in compliance with all applicable legal and regulatory requirements."(12)

The National Academy of Sciences and even the pro-GM Royal Society of London(13) describe the US system as inadequate and flawed. The editor of the prestigious journal Lancet said, "It is astounding that the US Food and Drug Administration has not changed their stance on genetically modified food adopted in 1992. . . . Governments should never have allowed these products into the food chain without insisting on rigorous testing for effects on health."(14)

One obvious reason for the inflexibility of the FDA is that they are officially charged with both regulating biotech products and promoting them -- a clear conflict. That is also why the FDA does not require mandatory labeling of GM foods. They ignore the desires of 90 percent of American citizens in order to support the economic interests of Monsanto and the four other GM food companies.

Monsanto's studies are secret, inadequate, and flawedThe unpublished industry studies submitted to regulators are typically kept secret based on the claim that it is "confidential business information." The Royal Society of Canada is one of many organizations that condemn this practice. Their Expert Panel called for "completely transparent" submissions, "open to full review by scientific peers" They wrote, "Peer review and independent corroboration of research findings are axioms of the scientific method, and part of the very meaning of the objectivity and neutrality of science."(15)

Whenever Monsanto's private submissions are made public through lawsuits or Freedom of Information Act Requests, it becomes clear why they benefit from secrecy. The quality of their research is often miserable, and would never stand up to peer-review. In December 2009, for example, a team of independent researchers published a study analyzing the raw data from three Monsanto rat studies. When they used proper statistical methods, they found that the three varieties of GM corn caused toxicity in the liver and kidneys, as well as significant changes in other organs.(16) Monsanto's studies, of course, had claimed that the research showed no problems. The regulators had believed Monsanto, and the corn is already in our food supply.

Monsanto rigs research to miss dangers(17)
Monsanto has plenty of experience cooking the books of their research and hiding the hazards. They manufactured the infamous Agent Orange, for example, the cancer and birth-defect causing defoliant sprayed over Vietnam. It contaminated more than three million civilians and servicemen. But according to William Sanjour, who led the Toxic Waste Division of the Environmental Protection Agency, "thousands of veterans were disallowed benefits" because "Monsanto studies showed that dioxin [the main ingredient in Agent Orange] was not a human carcinogen." But his EPA colleague discovered that Monsanto had allegedly falsified the data in their studies. Sanjour says, "If they were done correctly, [the studies] would have reached just the opposite result."

Here are examples of tinkering with the truth about Monsanto's GM products:

• When dairy farmers inject cows with genetically modified bovine growth hormone (rbGH), more bovine growth hormone ends up in the milk. To allay fears, the FDA claimed that pasteurization destroys 90 percent of the hormone. In reality, the researchers of this drug (then owned by Monsanto) pasteurized the milk 120 times longer than normal. But they only destroyed 19 percent. So they spiked the milk with a huge amount of extra growth hormone and then repeated the long pasteurization. Only under these artificial conditions were they able to destroy 90 percent.

• To demonstrate that rbGH injections didn't interfere with cows' fertility, Monsanto appears to have secretly added cows to their study that were pregnant BEFORE injection.

• FDA Veterinarian Richard Burroughs said that Monsanto researchers dropped sick cows from studies, to make the drug appear safer.

• Richard Burroughs ordered more tests on rbGH than the industry wanted and was told by superiors he was slowing down the approval. He was fired and his tests canceled. The remaining whistle-blowers in the FDA had to write an anonymous letter to Congress, complaining of fraud and conflict of interest in the agency. They complained of one FDA scientist who arbitrarily increased the allowable levels of antibiotics in milk 100-fold, in order to facilitate the approval of rbGH. She had just become the head of an FDA department that was evaluating the research that she had recently done while an employee of Monsanto.

• Another former Monsanto scientist said that after company scientists conducted safety studies on bovine growth hormone, all three refused to drink any more milk, unless it was organic and therefore not treated with the drug. They feared the substantial increase of insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) in the drugged milk. IGF-1 is a significant risk factor for cancer.

• When independent researchers published a study in July 1999 showing that Monsanto's GM soy contains 12-14 percent less cancer-fighting phytoestrogens, Monsanto responded with its own study, concluding that soy's phytoestrogen levels vary too much to even carry out a statistical analysis. Researchers failed to disclose, however, that they had instructed the laboratory to use an obsolete method of detection -- one that had been prone to highly variable results.

• To prove that GM protein breaks down quickly during simulated digestion, Monsanto uses thousands of times the amount of digestive enzymes and a much stronger acid than what the World Health Organization recommends.

• Monsanto told government regulators that the GM protein produced in their high-lysine GM corn was safe for humans, because it is also found in soil. They claimed that since people consume small residues of soil on fruits and vegetables, the protein has a safe history as part of the human diet. The actual amount of the GM corn protein an average US citizen would consume, however, if all their corn were Monsanto's variety, would be "about 30 billion to four trillion times" the amount normally consumed in soil residues. For equivalent exposure, people would have to eat as much as 22,000 pounds of soil every second of every day.

• Monsanto's high-lysine corn also had unusual levels of several nutritional components, such as protein and fiber. Instead of comparing it to normal corn, which would have revealed this significant disparity, Monsanto compared their GM corn to obscure corn varieties that were also far outside the normal range on precisely these values. On this basis, Monsanto could claim that there were no statistically significant differences in their GM corn content.

Methods used by Monsanto to hide problems are varied and plentiful. For example, researchers:

• Use animals with varied starting weights, to hinder the detection of food-related changes;
• Keep feeding studies short, to miss long-term impacts;
• Test Roundup Ready soybeans that have never been sprayed with Roundup -- as they always are in real world conditions;
• Avoid feeding animals the GM crop, but instead give them a single dose of GM protein produced from GM bacteria;
• Use too few subjects to obtain statistical significance;
• Use poor or inappropriate statistical methods, or fail to even mention statistical methods, or include essential data; and
• Employ insensitive detection techniques -- doomed to fail.

Monsanto's 1996 Journal of Nutrition study, which was their cornerstone article for "proving" that GM soy was safe, provides plenty of examples of masterfully rigged methods.

• Researchers tested GM soy on mature animals, not the more sensitive young ones. GMO safety expert Arpad Pusztai says the older animals "would have to be emaciated or poisoned to show anything."

• Organs were never weighed.

• The GM soy was diluted up to 12 times which, according to an expert review, "would probably ensure that any possible undesirable GM effects did not occur."

• The amount of protein in the feed was "artificially too high," which would mask negative impacts of the soy.

• Samples were pooled from different locations and conditions, making it nearly impossible for compositional differences to be statistically significant.

• Data from the only side-by-side comparison was removed from the study and never published. When it was later recovered, it revealed that Monsanto's GM soy had significantly lower levels of important constituents (e.g. protein, a fatty acid, and phenylalanine, an essential amino acid) and that toasted GM soy meal had nearly twice the amount of a lectin -- which interferes with the body's ability to assimilate nutrients. Moreover, the amount of trypsin inhibitor, a known soy allergen, was as much as seven times higher in cooked GM soy compared to a cooked non-GM control. Monsanto named their study, "The composition of glyphosate-tolerant soybean seeds is equivalent to that of conventional soybeans."

A paper published in Nutrition and Health analyzed all peer-reviewed feeding studies on GM foods as of 2003. It came as no surprise that Monsanto's Journal of Nutrition study, along with the other four peer-reviewed animal feeding studies that were "performed more or less in collaboration with private companies," reported no negative effects of the GM diet. "On the other hand," they wrote, "adverse effects were reported (but not explained) in [the five] independent studies." They added, "It is remarkable that these effects have all been observed after feeding for only 10 to 14 days."(18)

A former Monsanto scientist recalls how colleagues were trying to rewrite a GM animal feeding study, to hide the ill-effects. But sometimes when study results are unmistakably damaging, Monsanto just plain lies. Monsanto's study on Roundup, for example, showed that 28 days after application, only 2 percent of their herbicide had broken down. They nonetheless advertised the weed killer as "biodegradable," "leaves the soil clean," and "respects the environment." These statements were declared false and illegal by judges in both the US and France. The company was forced to remove "biodegradable" from the label and pay a fine.

Monsanto attacks labeling, local democracy, and news coverage• On July 3, 2003, Monsanto sued Oakhurst dairy because their labels stated, "Our Farmers' Pledge: No Artificial Growth Hormones." Oakhurst eventually settled with Monsanto, agreeing to include a sentence on their cartons saying that according to the FDA no significant difference has been shown between milk derived from rbGH-treated and non-rbGH-treated cows. The statement is not true. FDA scientists had acknowledged the increase of IGF-1, bovine growth hormone, antibiotics, and pus, in milk from treated cows. Nonetheless, the misleading sentence had been written years earlier by the FDA's deputy commissioner of policy, Michael Taylor, the one who was formerly Monsanto's outside attorney and later their vice president.

• Monsanto's public relations firm created a group called the Dairy Coalition, which pressured editors of the USA Today, Boston Globe, New York Times and others, to limit negative coverage of rbGH.

• A Monsanto attorney wrote a letter to Fox TV, promising dire consequences if the station aired a four-part exposé on rbGH. The show was ultimately canceled.

• A book critical of Monsanto's GM foods was three days away from being published. A threatening letter from Monsanto's attorney forced the small publisher to cancel publication.

• 14,000 copies of Ecologist magazine dedicated to exposing Monsanto were shredded by the printer due to fears of a lawsuit.

• After a ballot initiative in California established Mendocino County as a GM-free zone -- where planting GMOs is illegal, Monsanto and others organized to push through laws in 14 states that make it illegal for cities and counties to declare similar zones.

Monsanto's promises of riches come up shortBiotech advocates have wooed politicians, claiming that their new technology is the path to riches for their city, state, or nation. "This notion that you lure biotech to your community to save its economy is laughable," said Joseph Cortright, an Oregon economist who co-wrote a report on the subject. "This is a bad-idea virus that has swept through governors, mayors and economic development officials."(19) Indeed, The Wall Street Journal observed, "Not only has the biotech industry yielded negative financial returns for decades, it generally digs its hole deeper every year."(20) The Associated Press says it "remains a money-losing, niche industry."(21)

Nowhere in the biotech world is the bad-idea virus more toxic than in its application to GM plants. Not only does the technology under-deliver, it consistently burdens governments and entire sectors with losses and problems.

Under the first Bush administration, for example, the White House's elite Council on Competitiveness chose to fast track GM food in hopes that it would strengthen the economy and make American products more competitive overseas. The opposite ensued. US corn exports to Europe were virtually eliminated, down by 99.4 percent. The American Corn Growers Association (ACGA) calculated that the introduction of GM corn caused a drop in corn prices by 13 to 20 percent.(22) Their CEO said, "The ACGA believes an explanation is owed to the thousands of American farmers who were told to trust this technology, yet now see their prices fall to historically low levels while other countries exploit US vulnerability and pick off our export customers one by one."(23) US soy sales also plummeted due to GM content.

According to Charles Benbrook, PhD, former executive director of the National Academy of Sciences' Board on Agriculture, the closed markets and slashed prices forced the federal government to pay an additional $3 to $5 billion every year.(24) He says growers have only been kept afloat by the huge jump in subsidies.(25)

Instead of withdrawing support for failed GM crops, the US government has been convinced by Monsanto and others that the key to success is to force open foreign markets to GMOs. But many nations are also reeling under the false promise of GMOs.


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[mick silver]

Canola crashes on GMWhen Canada became the only major producer to adopt GM canola in 1996, it led to a disaster. The premium-paying EU market, which took about one-third of Canada's canola exports in 1994 and one-fourth in 1995, stopped all imports from Canada by 1998. The GM canola was diverted to the low-priced Chinese market. Not only did Canadian canola prices fall to a record low,(26) Canada even lost their EU honey exports due to the GM pollen contamination.

Australia benefited significantly from Canada's folly. By 2006, the EU was buying 38 percent of Australia's canola exports.(27) Nonetheless, Monsanto's people in Australia claimed that GM canola was the way to get more competitive. They told farmers that Roundup Ready canola would yield up to 30 percent more. But when an investigator looked at the best trial yields on Monsanto's web site, it was 17 percent below the national average canola yield. When that was publicized, the figures quickly disappeared from the Monsanto's site. Two Aussie states did allow GM canola and sure enough, they are suffering from loss of foreign markets.

In Australia and elsewhere, the non-GMO farmers also suffer. Market prices drop, and farmers spend more to set up segregation systems, GMO testing, buffer zones, and separate storage and shipping channels to try to hold onto non-GMO markets. Even then, they risk contamination and lost premiums.

GM farmers don't earn or produce moreMonsanto has been quite successful in convincing farmers that GM crops are the ticket to greater yields and higher profits. You still hear that rhetoric at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). But a 2006 USDA report "could not find positive financial impacts in either the field-level nor the whole-farm analysis" for adoption of Bt corn and Roundup Ready soybeans. They said, "Perhaps the biggest issue raised by these results is how to explain the rapid adoption of [GM] crops when farm (http://www.naturalnews.com/farm.html) financial impacts appear to be mixed or even negative."(28)

Similarly, the Canadian National Farmers Union (NFU) flatly states, "The claim that GM seeds make our farms more profitable is false."(29) Net farm incomes in Canada plummeted since the introduction of GM canola, with the last five years being the worst in Canada's history.

In spite of numerous advertising claims that GM crops increase yield, the average GM crop from Monsanto reduces yield. This was confirmed by the most comprehensive evaluation on the subject, conducted by the Union of Concerned Scientists in 2009. Called Failure to Yield, the report demonstrated that in spite of years of trying, GM crops return fewer bushels than their non-GM counterparts. Even the 2006 USDA report stated that "currently available GM crops do not increase the yield potential of a hybrid variety. . . . In fact, yield may even decrease if the varieties used to carry the herbicide tolerant or insect-resistant genes are not the highest yielding cultivars."(30)

US farmers had expected higher yields with Roundup Ready soybeans, but independent studies confirm a yield loss of 4 to 11percent.(31) Brazilian soybean yields are also down since Roundup Ready varieties were introduced.(32) In Canada, a study showed a 7.5 (http://www.naturalnews.com/5.html) percent lower yield with Roundup Ready canola.(33)

The Canadian National Farmers Union (NFU) observed, "Corporate and government managers have spent millions trying to convince farmers and other citizens of the benefits of genetically-modified (GM) crops. But this huge public relations effort has failed to obscure the truth: GM crops do not deliver the promised benefits; they create numerous problems, costs, and risks. . . . It would be too generous even to call GM crops a solution in search of a problem: These crops have failed to provide significant solutions."(34)

Herbicide use rising due to GMOsMonsanto bragged that their Roundup Ready technology would reduce herbicide, but at the same time they were building new Roundup factories to meet their anticipated increase in demand. They got it. According to USDA data, the amount of herbicide used in the US increased by 382.6 million pounds over 13 years. Monsanto's Roundup Ready soybeans accounted for 92 percent of the total increase. Due to the proliferation of Roundup resistant weeds, herbicide use is accelerating rapidly. From 2007 to 2008, herbicide used on GM herbicide tolerant crops skyrocketed by 31.4 percent.(35) Furthermore, as weeds fail to respond to Roundup, farmers also rely on more toxic pesticides such as the highly poisonous 2,4-D.

Contamination happensIn spite of Monsanto's assurances that it wouldn't be a problem, contamination has been a consistent and often overwhelming hardship for seed dealers, farmers, manufacturers, even entire food sectors. The biotech industry recommends buffer zones between fields, but these have not been competent to protect non-GM, organic, or wild plants from GMOs. A UK study showed canola cross-pollination occurring as far as 26 km away.(36)

But pollination is just one of several ways that contamination happens. There is also seed movement by weather and insects, crop mixing during harvest, transport, and storage, and very often, human error. The contamination is North America is so great, it is difficult for farmers to secure pure non-GM seed. In Canada, a study found 32 of 33 certified non-GM canola seeds were contaminated.(37) Most of the non-GM soy, corn, and canola seeds tested in the US also contained GMOs.(38)

Contamination can be very expensive. StarLink corn -- unapproved for human consumption -- ended up the US food supply in 2000 and resulted in an estimated price tag of $1 billion. The final cost of GM rice contamination in the US in 2006 could be even higher.

Deadly deception in IndiaMonsanto ran a poster series called, "TRUE STORIES OF FARMERS WHO HAVE SOWN BT COTTON." One featured a farmer who claimed great benefits, but when investigators tracked him down, he turned out to be a cigarette salesman, not a farmer. Another poster claimed yields by the pictured farmer that were four times what he actually achieved. One poster showed a farmer standing next to a tractor, suggesting that sales of Bt cotton allowed him to buy it. But the farmer was never told what the photo was to be used for, and said that with the yields from Bt, "I would not be able to buy even two tractor tires."

In addition to posters, Monsanto's cotton marketers used dancing girls, famous Bollywood actors, even religious leaders to pitch their products. Some newspaper ads looked like a news stories and featured relatives of seed salesmen claiming to be happy with Bt. Sometimes free pesticides were given away with the seeds, and some farmers who helped with publicity got free seeds.

Scientists published a study claiming that Monsanto's cotton increased yields in India by 70 to 80 percent. But they used only field trial data provided to them by Monsanto. Actual yields turn out to be quite different:

• India News(39) reported studies showing a loss of about 18 percent.

• An independent study in Andhra Pradesh "done on [a] season-long basis continuously for three years in 87 villages" showed that growing Bt cotton cost 12 percent more, yielded 8.3 percent less, and the returns over three years were 60 percent less.(40)

• Another report identified a yield loss in the Warangal district of 30 to 60 percent. The official report, however, was tampered with. The local Deputy Director of Agriculture confirmed on Feb. 1, 2005 that the yield figures had been secretly increased to 2.7 times higher than what farms reported. Once the state of Andhra Pradesh tallied all the actual yields, they demanded approximately $10 million USD from Monsanto to compensate farmers for losses. Monsanto refused.

In sharp contrast to the independent research done by agronomists, Monsanto commissioned studies to be done by market research agencies. One, for example, claimed four times the actual reduction in pesticide use, 12 times the actual yield, and 100 times the actual profit.(41)

In Andhra Pradesh, where 71 percent of farmers who used Bt cotton ended up with financial losses, farmers attacked the seed dealer's office and even "tied up Mahyco Monsanto representatives in their villages," until the police rescued them.(42)

In spite of great losses and unreliable yields, Monsanto has skillfully eliminated the availability of non-GM cotton seeds in many regions throughout India, forcing farmers to buy their varieties.

Farmers borrow heavily and at high interest rates to pay four times the price for the GM varieties, along with the chemicals needed to grow them. When Bt cotton performs poorly and can't even pay back the debt, desperate farmers resort to suicide, often drinking unused pesticides. In one region, more than three Bt cotton farmers take their own lives each day. The UK Daily Mail estimates that the total number of Bt cotton-related suicides in India is a staggering 125,000.

Doctors orders: no genetically modified foodA greater tragedy may be the harm from the dangerous GM foods produced by Monsanto. The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) has called on all physicians to prescribe diets without GM foods to all patients.(43) They called for a moratorium on GMOs, long-term independent studies, and labeling. They stated, "Several animal studies indicate serious health risks associated with GM food," including infertility, immune problems, accelerated aging, insulin regulation, and changes in major organs and the gastrointestinal system. "There is more than a casual association between GM foods and adverse health effects. There is causation…"

Former AAEM President Dr. Jennifer Armstrong says, "Physicians are probably seeing the effects in their patients, but need to know how to ask the right questions." Renowned biologist Pushpa M. Bhargava believes that GMOs are a major contributor to the deteriorating health in America.

Pregnant women and babies at great riskGM foods are particularly dangerous for pregnant moms and children. After GM soy was fed to female rats, most of their babies died -- compared to 10 percent deaths among controls fed natural soy.(44) GM-fed babies were smaller, and possibly infertile.(45)

Testicles of rats fed GM soy changed from the normal pink to dark blue.(46) Mice fed GM soy had altered young sperm.(47) Embryos of GM soy-fed parent mice had changed DNA.(48) And mice fed GM corn had fewer, and smaller, babies.(49)

In Haryana, India, most buffalo that ate GM cottonseed had reproductive complications such as premature deliveries, abortions, and infertility; many calves died. About two dozen US farmers said thousands of pigs became sterile from certain GM corn varieties. Some had false pregnancies; others gave birth to bags of water. Cows and bulls also became infertile.(50)

In the US, incidence of low birth weight babies, infertility, and infant mortality are all escalating.

Food that produces poisonMonsanto's GM corn and cotton are engineered to produce a built-in pesticide called Bt-toxin -- produced from soil bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis. When bugs bite the plant, poison splits open their stomach and kills them. Organic farmers and others use natural Bt bacteria spray for insect control, so Monsanto claims that Bt-toxin must be safe.

The Bt-toxin produced in GM plants, however, is thousands of times more concentrated than natural Bt spray, is designed to be more toxic,(51) has properties of an allergen, and cannot be washed off the plant.

Moreover, studies confirm that even the less toxic natural spray can be harmful. When dispersed by plane to kill gypsy moths in Washington and Vancouver, about 500 people reported allergy or flu-like symptoms.(52)(53) The same symptoms are now reported by farm workers from handling Bt cotton throughout India.(54)

GMOs provoke immune reactionsGMO safety expert Arpad Pusztai says changes in immune status are "a consistent feature of all the [animal] studies."(55) From Monsanto's own research to government funded trials, rodents fed Bt corn had significant immune reactions.(56)(57)

Soon after GM soy was introduced to the UK, soy allergies skyrocketed by 50 percent. Ohio allergist Dr. John Boyles says "I used to test for soy allergies all the time, but now that soy is genetically engineered, it is so dangerous that I tell people never to eat it."

GM soy and corn contain new proteins with allergenic properties,(58) and GM soy has up to seven times more of a known soy allergen.(59) Perhaps the US epidemic of food llergies and asthma is a casualty of genetic manipulation.


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[mick silver]

Animals dying in large numbersIn India, animals graze on cotton plants after harvest. But when shepherds let sheep graze on Bt cotton plants, thousands died. Investigators said preliminary evidence "strongly suggests that the sheep mortality was due to a toxin. . . . most probably Bt-toxin."(60) In one small study, all sheep fed Bt cotton plants died; those fed natural plants remained healthy.

In an Andhra Pradesh village, buffalo grazed on cotton plants for eight years without incident. On Jan. 3, 2008, 13 buffalo grazed on Bt cotton plants for the first time. All died within three days.(61) Monsanto's Bt corn is also implicated in the deaths horses, water buffaloes, and chickens in the Philippines.(62)

Lab studies of GM crops by other companies also show mortalities. Twice the number of chickens fed Liberty Link corn died; seven of 40 rats fed a GM tomato died within two weeks.(63) And a farmer in Germany says his cows died after exclusively eating Syngenta's GM corn.

GMOs remain inside of usThe only published human feeding study revealed that even after we stop eating GMOs, harmful GM proteins may be produced continuously inside of us; genes inserted into Monsanto's GM soy transfer into bacteria inside our intestines and continue to function.(64) If Bt genes also transfer, eating corn chips might transform our intestinal bacteria into living pesticide factories.

Hidden dangersBiologist David Schubert of the Salk Institute says, "If there are problems [with GMOs], we will probably never know because the cause will not be traceable and many diseases take a very long time to develop." In the nine years after GM crops were introduced in 1996, Americans with three or more chronic diseases jumped from 7 percent to 13 percent.(65) But without any human clinical trials or post marketing surveillance, we may never know if GMOs are a contributor.

Un-recallable contaminationIn spite of the enormous health dangers, the environmental impacts may be worse still. That is because we don't have a technology to fully clean up the contaminated gene pool. The self-propagating genetic pollution released into the environment from Monsanto's crops can outlast the effects of climate change and nuclear waste.

Replacing nature: "Nothing shall be eaten that we don't own"As Monsanto has moved forward with its master plan to replace nature, they have led the charge in buying up seed businesses and are now the world's largest. At least 200 independent seed companies have disappeared over 13 years, non-GMO seed availability is dwindling, and Monsanto is jacking up their seed prices dramatically. Corn is up more than 30 percent and soy nearly 25 percent, over 2008 prices.(66)

An Associated Press exposé (67) reveals how Monsanto's onerous contracts allowed them to manipulate, then dominate, the seed industry using unprecedented legal restrictions. One contract provision, for example, "prevented bidding wars" and "likely helped Monsanto buy 24 independent seed companies throughout the Farm Belt over the last few years: that corn seed agreement says that if a smaller company changes ownership, its inventory with Monsanto's traits 'shall be destroyed immediately.'"

With that restriction in place, the seed companies couldn't even think of selling to a company other than Monsanto. According to attorney David Boies, who represents DuPont -- owner of Pioneer Seeds: "If the independent seed company is losing their license and has to destroy their seeds, they're not going to have anything, in effect, to sell," Boies said. "It requires them to destroy things -- destroy things they paid for -- if they go competitive. That's exactly the kind of restriction on competitive choice that the antitrust laws outlaw." Boies was a prosecutor on the antitrust case against Microsoft. He is now working with DuPont in their civil antitrust lawsuit against Monsanto.

Monsanto also has the right to cancel deals and wipe out the inventory of a business if the confidentiality clauses are violated:

"We now believe that Monsanto has control over as much as 90 percent of (seed genetics). This level of control is almost unbelievable,' said Neil Harl, agricultural economist at Iowa State University who has studied the seed industry for decades."

Monsanto also controls and manipulates farmers through onerous contracts. Troy Roush, for example, is one of hundreds accused by Monsanto of illegally saving their seeds. The company requires farmers to sign a contract that they will not save and replant GM seeds from their harvest. That way Monsanto can sell its seeds -- at a premium -- each season.

Although Roush maintains his innocence, he was forced to settle with Monsanto after two and a half years of court battles. He says his "family was just destroyed [from] the stress involved." Many farmers are afraid, according to Roush, because Monsanto has "created a little industry that serves no other purpose than to wreck farmers' lives." Monsanto has collected an estimated $200 million from farmers thus far.

Roush says, "They are in the process of owning food, all food." Paraguayan farmer Jorge Galeano says, "Its objective is to control all of the world's food production." Renowned Indian physicist and community organizer Vandana Shiva says, "If they control seed, they control food; they know it, it's strategic. It's more powerful than bombs; it's more powerful than guns. This is the best way to control the populations of the world."

Our food security lies in diversity -- both biodiversity, and diversity of owners and interests. Any single company that consolidates ownership of seeds, and therefore power over the food supply, is a dangerous threat. Of all the corporations in the world, however, the one we should trust the least is Monsanto. With them at the helm, the impact could be cataclysmic.

To learn more about the health dangers of GMOs, and what you can do to help end the genetic engineering of our food supply, visit www.ResponsibleTechnology.org (http://www.responsibletechnology.org/).

To learn how to choose healthier non-GMO brands, visit www.NonGMOShoppingGuide.com (http://www.nongmoshoppingguide.com/).

About the authorInternational bestselling author and filmmaker Jeffrey Smith is the leading spokesperson on the health dangers of genetically modified (GM) foods. His first book, Seeds of Deception, is the world's bestselling and #1 rated book on the topic. His second, Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods, provides overwhelming evidence that GMOs are unsafe and should never have been introduced. Mr. Smith is the executive director of the Institute for Responsible Technology, whose Campaign for Healthier Eating in America is designed to create the tipping point of consumer rejection of GMOs, forcing them out of our food supply. Watch the free online video today, for the big picture.

(1) Michael Grunwald, "Monsanto Held Liable for PCB Dumping," Washington Post, February 23, 2002
(2) "Monsanto Bribery Charges in Indonesia by DoJ and USSEC," Third World Network, Malaysia, Jan 27, 2005, http://www.mindfully.org/GE/2005/Monsanto-In... (http://www.mindfully.org/GE/2005/Monsanto-Indonesia-Bribery27jan05.htm)
(3) "Greenpeace exposes Government-Monsanto nexus to cheat Indian farmers: calls on GEAC to revoke BT cotton permission," Press release, March 3, 2005, http://www.greenpeace.org/india_en/news/deta... (http://www.greenpeace.org/india_en/news/details?item_id=771071)
(4) Bill Lambrecht, Dinner at the New Gene Café, St. Martin's Press, September 2001, pg 139
(5) See Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act (FFDCA)
(6) See Smith, Seeds of Deception; and for copies of FDA memos, see The Alliance for Bio-Integrity, www.biointegrity.org (http://www.biointegrity.org/)
(7) Steven M. Druker, "How the US Food and Drug Administration approved genetically engineered foods despite the deaths one had caused and the warnings of its own scientists about their unique risks," Alliance for Bio-Integrity, http://www.biointegrity.org/ext-summary.html
(8) Louis J. Pribyl, "Biotechnology Draft Document, 2/27/92," March 6, 1992, www.biointegrity.org (http://www.biointegrity.org/) http://www.biointegrity.org/FDAdocs/04/view1... (http://www.biointegrity.org/FDAdocs/04/view1.html)
(9) Linda Kahl, Memo to James Maryanski about Federal Register Document "Statement of Policy: Foods from Genetically Modified Plants," Alliance for Bio-Integrity(January 8, 1992) http://www.biointegrity.org (http://www.biointegrity.org/)
(10) "Statement of Policy: Foods Derived from New Plant Varieties," Federal Register 57, no. 104 (May 29, 1992): 22991.
(11) Doug Gurian-Sherman, "Holes in the Biotech Safety Net, FDA Policy Does Not Assure the Safety of Genetically Engineered Foods," Center for Science in the Public Interest, http://www.cspinet.org/new/pdf/fda_report__f... (http://www.cspinet.org/new/pdf/fda_report__final.pdf)
(12) FDA Letter, Letter from Alan M. Rulis, Office of Premarket Approval, Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, FDA to Dr. Kent Croon, Regulatory Affairs Manager, Monsanto Company, Sept 25, 1996. See Letter for BNF No. 34 at http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~lrd/biocon.html
(13) See for example, "Good Enough To Eat?" New Scientist (February 9, 2002), 7.
(14) "Health risks of genetically modified foods," editorial, Lancet, 29 May 1999.
(15) "Elements of Precaution: Recommendations for the Regulation of Food Biotechnology in Canada; An Expert Panel Report on the Future of Food Biotechnology prepared by The Royal Society of Canada at the request of Health Canada Canadian Food Inspection Agency and Environment Canada" The Royal Society of Canada, January 2001.
(16) de Vendômois JS, Roullier F, Cellier D, Séralini GE. A Comparison of the Effects of Three GM Corn Varieties on Mammalian Health. Int J Biol Sci 2009; 5:706-726. Available from http://www.biolsci.org/v05p0706.htm
(17) For citations on rigged research, see, Jeffrey M. Smith, Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods, Yes! Books, Fairfield, Iowa, USA, 2007
(18) Ian F. Pryme and Rolf Lembcke, "In Vivo Studies on Possible Health Consequences of Genetically Modified Food and Feed -- with Particular Regard to Ingredients Consisting of Genetically Modified Plan Materials," Nutrition and Health 17(2003): 1–8.
(19) Chee Yoke Heong, Biotech investing a high-risk gamble, Asia Times, July 31, 2004, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Asian_Economy/F... (http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Asian_Economy/FG31Dk01.html)
(20) David P. Hamilton, "Biotech's Dismal Bottom Line: More Than $40 Billion in Losses: As Scientists Search for Cures, They Gobble Investor Cash; A Handful Hit the Jackpot - 'The Ultimate Roulette Game'", Wall Street Journal, 20 May 2004, www.mindfully.org/GE/2004/Biotech-$40B-Losse... (http://www.mindfully.org/GE/2004/Biotech-$40B-Losses20may04.htm,)
(21) Leslie Parrilla, Biotechnology grant trains workers, Associated Press, August 18, 2004, http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2004-08-18... (http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2004-08-18-biotech-grant_x.htm)
(22) Hugh Warwick and Gundala Meziani, Seeds of Doubt, UK Soil Association, September 2002
(23) "Corn Growers Challenge Logic of Promoting Biotechnology in Foreign Markets" Press Release American Corn Growers Association June 5, 2001 http://www.biotech-info.net/foreign_markets.... (http://www.biotech-info.net/foreign_markets.html)
(24) Hugh Warwick and Gundala Meziani, Seeds of Doubt, UK Soil Association, September 2002
(25) Charles Benbrook, "Premium Paid for Bt Corn Seed Improves Corporate Finances While Eroding Grower Profits," Benbrook Consulting Services, Sandpoint, Idaho, February 2002
(26) NFU (2005a) GM Crops: Not Needed on the Island, - Recommendations of the National Farmers Union to the Prince Edward Island Legislature's Standing Committee on Agriculture, Forestry, and the Environment, www.nfu.ca/briefs/2005/PEI%20GMO%20BRIEF%20T... (http://www.nfu.ca/briefs/2005/PEI%20GMO%20BRIEF%20TWENTY%20SEVEN%20FINAL.pdf,) viewed 20/6/07.
(27) Foster, M. et al (2003) Market Access Issues for GM Products: Implications for Australia, ABARE Research Report 03.13, p. 9. Available at: http://abareonlineshop.com/product.asp?prodi... (http://abareonlineshop.com/product.asp?prodid=12559,) viewed 24/6/05.
(28) Fernandez-Cornejo, J. and McBride, W., May 2002. Adoption of Bioengineered Crops. ERS USDA Agricultural Economic Report, p.24. http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/aer810/
(29) NFU (2007) Submission by the National Farmers Union on The Farm Income Crisis Business Risk Management, and The "Next Generation" Agricultural Policy Framework, April 26th, 2007 www.nfu.ca/briefs/2007/NFU_Brief_to_Commons_... (http://www.nfu.ca/briefs/2007/NFU_Brief_to_Commons_Ag_Committee_on_the_Farm_Inco me_Crisi%5B1%5D..pdf,) viewed 13/8/07.
(30) Fernandez-Cornejo, J. & Caswell. April 2006. Genetically Engineered Crops in the United States. USDA/ERS Economic Information Bulletin n. 11. http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/eib11/e... (http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/eib11/eib11.pdf)
(31) See for example, Charles Benbrook, Ag BioTech InfoNet Technical Paper Number 1, July 13, 1999, and Oplinger, E.S et al., 1999. Performance of Transgenetic Soyabeans, Northern US. http://www.biotech-info.net/soybean_performa... (http://www.biotech-info.net/soybean_performance.pdf)
(32) ABIOVE, 2006a. Sustainaibility in the Legal Amazon. Presentation by Carlo Lovatelli at the Second Roundtable on Responsible Soy. Paraguay, 1 September 2006. http://www.abiove.com.br/english/palestras/a... (http://www.abiove.com.br/english/palestras/abiove_pal_sustent_amazonialegal_us.pdf)
(33) Fulton, M and Keyowski, L. "The Producer Benefits of Herbicide Resistant Canola." AgBioForum Vol 2 No 2, 1999, as reported in Stone, S. Matysek, A. and Dolling, A. Modeling Possible Impacts of GM Crops on Australian Trade Productivity Commission Staff Research Paper, October 2002 at 32.
(34) NFU (2005a) GM Crops: Not Needed on the Island, - Recommendations of the National Farmers Union to the Prince Edward Island Legislature's Standing Committee on Agriculture, Forestry, and the Environment, www.nfu.ca/briefs/2005/PEI%20GMO%20BRIEF%20T... (http://www.nfu.ca/briefs/2005/PEI%20GMO%20BRIEF%20TWENTY%20SEVEN%20FINAL.pdf,) viewed 20/6/07.
(35) Charles Benbrook, Ph.D., "Impacts of Genetically Engineered Crops on Pesticide Use: The First Thirteen Years" November 2009 http://www.organic-center.org/science.pest.p... (http://www.organic-center.org/science.pest.php?action=view&report_id=159)
(36) Ramsay, G., Thompson, C. & Squire, G. (2004) Quantifying landscape-scale gene flow in oilseed rape, Scottish Crop Research Institute and the UK Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), October 2004, p. 4. www.defra.gov.uk/environment/gm/research/pdf... (http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/gm/research/pdf/epg_rg0216.pdf,) viewed 16/7/07.
(37) Friesen, L., Nelson, A. & Van Acker, R. (2003) Evidence of Contamination of Pedigreed Canola (Brassica napus) Seedlots in Western Canada with Genetically Engineered Herbicide Resistance Traits," Agronomy Journal 95, 2003, pp. 1342-1347, cited in NFU (2005b).
(38) Mellon, M & Rissler, J. (2004) Gone to Seed: Transgenic Contaminants in the Traditional Seed Supply, Union of Concerned Scientists, cited in NFU (2005b).
(39) May 6, 2005, India News
(40) Abdul Qayum & Kiran Sakkhari. Did Bt Cotton Save Farmers in Warangal? A season long impact study of Bt Cotton - Kharif 2002 in Warangal District of Andhra Pradesh . AP Coalition in Defence of Diversity & Deccan Development Society, Hyderabad, 2003.
(41) Abdul Qayum & Kiran Sakkhari. Did Bt Cotton Save Farmers in Warangal? A season long impact study of Bt Cotton - Kharif 2002 in Warangal District of Andhra Pradesh . AP Coalition in Defence of Diversity & Deccan Development Society, Hyderabad, 2003.
(42) Abdul Qayum & Kiran Sakkhari. Did Bt Cotton Save Farmers in Warangal? A season long impact study of Bt Cotton - Kharif 2002 in Warangal District of Andhra Pradesh . AP Coalition in Defence of Diversity & Deccan Development Society, Hyderabad, 2003.
(43) http://www.aaemonline.org/gmopost.html
(44) Irina Ermakova, "Genetically modified soy leads to the decrease of weight and high mortality of rat pups of the first generation. Preliminary studies," Ecosinform 1 (2006): 4–9.
(45) Irina Ermakova, "Experimental Evidence of GMO Hazards," Presentation at Scientists for a GM Free Europe, EU Parliament, Brussels, June 12, 2007
(46) Irina Ermakova, "Experimental Evidence of GMO Hazards," Presentation at Scientists for a GM Free Europe, EU Parliament, Brussels, June 12, 2007
(47) L. Vecchio et al, "Ultrastructural Analysis of Testes from Mice Fed on Genetically Modified Soybean," European Journal of Histochemistry 48, no. 4 (Oct–Dec 2004):449–454.
(48) Oliveri et al., "Temporary Depression of Transcription in Mouse Pre-implantion Embryos from Mice Fed on Genetically Modified Soybean," 48th Symposium of the Society for Histochemistry, Lake Maggiore (Italy), September 7–10, 2006.
(49) Alberta Velimirov and Claudia Binter, "Biological effects of transgenic maize NK603xMON810 fed in long term reproduction studies in mice," Forschungsberichte der Sektion IV, Band 3/2008
(50) Jerry Rosman, personal communication, 2006
(51) See for example, A. Dutton, H. Klein, J. Romeis, and F. Bigler, "Uptake of Bt-toxin by herbivores feeding on transgenic maize and consequences for the predator Chrysoperia carnea," Ecological Entomology 27 (2002): 441–7; and J. Romeis, A. Dutton, and F. Bigler, "Bacillus thuringiensis toxin (Cry1Ab) has no direct effect on larvae of the green lacewing Chrysoperla carnea (Stephens) (Neuroptera: Chrysopidae)," Journal of Insect Physiology 50, no. 2–3 (2004): 175–183.
(52) Washington State Department of Health, "Report of health surveillance activities: Asian gypsy moth control program," (Olympia, WA: Washington State Dept. of Health, 1993).
(53) M. Green, et al., "Public health implications of the microbial pesticide Bacillus thuringiensis: An epidemiological study, Oregon, 1985-86," Amer. J. Public Health 80, no. 7(1990): 848–852.
(54) Ashish Gupta et. al., "Impact of Bt Cotton on Farmers' Health (in Barwani and Dhar District of Madhya Pradesh)," Investigation Report, Oct–Dec 2005.
(55) October 24, 2005 correspondence between Arpad Pusztai and Brian John
(56) John M. Burns, "13-Week Dietary Subchronic Comparison Study with MON 863 Corn in Rats Preceded by a 1-Week Baseline Food Consumption Determination with PMI Certified Rodent Diet #5002," December 17, 2002 http://www (http://www/).
monsanto.com/monsanto/content/sci_tech/prod_safety/fullratstudy.pdf
(57) Alberto Finamore, et al, "Intestinal and Peripheral Immune Response to MON810 Maize Ingestion in Weaning and Old Mice," J. Agric. Food Chem. , 2008, 56 (23), pp 11533–11539, November 14, 2008
(58) See L Zolla, et al, "Proteomics as a complementary tool for identifying unintended side effects occurring in transgenic maize seeds as a result of genetic modifications," J Proteome Res. 2008 May;7(5):1850-61; Hye-Yung Yum, Soo-Young Lee, Kyung-Eun Lee, Myung-Hyun Sohn, Kyu-Earn Kim, "Genetically Modified and Wild Soybeans: An immunologic comparison," Allergy and Asthma Proceedings 26, no. 3 (May–June 2005): 210-216(7); and Gendel, "The use of amino acid sequence alignments to assess potential allergenicity of proteins used in genetically modified foods," Advances in Food and Nutrition Research 42 (1998), 45–62.
(59) A. Pusztai and S. Bardocz, "GMO in animal nutrition: potential benefits and risks," Chapter 17, Biology of Nutrition in Growing Animals, R. Mosenthin, J. Zentek and T. Zebrowska (Eds.) Elsevier, October 2005
(60) "Mortality in Sheep Flocks after Grazing on Bt Cotton Fields -- Warangal District, Andhra Pradesh" Report of the Preliminary Assessment, April 2006, http://www.gmwatch.org/archive2.asp
(61) Personal communication and visit, January 2009.
(62) Jeffrey M. Smith, Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods, Yes! Books, Fairfield, IA USA 2007
(63) Arpad Pusztai, "Can Science Give Us the Tools for Recognizing Possible Health Risks for GM Food?" Nutrition and Health 16 (2002): 73–84.
(64) Netherwood et al, "Assessing the survival of transgenic plant DNA in the human gastrointestinal tract," Nature Biotechnology 22 (2004): 2.
(65) Kathryn Anne Paez, et al, "Rising Out-Of-Pocket Spending For Chronic Conditions: A Ten-Year Trend," Health Affairs, 28, no. 1 (2009): 15-25
(66) http://farmertofarmercampaign.com/Out%20of%2... (http://farmertofarmercampaign.com/Out%20of%20Hand.FullReport.pdf)
(67) http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091214/ap_on_bi... (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091214/ap_on_bi_ge/us_seed_giant)

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[mick silver]

http://naturalnews.com/Cartoons/Human_Roundup_600.jpg

[mick silver]

With modern humans engaged in highly destructive behaviors towards nature (pollution, toxic chemicals production, CO2 emissions, abuse of animals, use of Roundup herbicides, etc.), did you ever wonder what nature would do to humans if it had the chance? In this CounterThink cartoon, the trees march on human cities, spraying "Human Roundup" as workers flee the campus of Monsanto, the company that manufactures Roundup.
It brings to mind images from the Lord of the Rings, where the Ents, fed up with the evil mage Saruman's reckless destruction of nature, attacked his fortress at Isengard. (Click here to read up on the Saruman saga at Wikipedia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saruman)) The Ents, led by Treebeard, hurled boulders at Saruman's army and even unleashed a river by smashing a dam, drowning orcs in a torrent of water that only the trees could withstand due to their mass and height.
It was a brilliant display of evil being defeated by the forces of nature. All the weapons used by the Ents were elementals, too: the boulders were from rock, the flood was composed of water, and the trees themselves were made of wood. The symbolism in this work is very powerful, and the message remains valid even in modern times: That nature is more powerful than evil men.
Today, as mankind continues to destroy the planet's environment and ecosystems, some rather inconvenient natural events are about to be unleashed that will no doubt severely impact human populations. It doesn't mean trees will uproot themselves and march upon our cities, of course. That's just a cartoon depiction. What's far more likely to happen is that imbalanced ecosystems will unleash famines and infectious diseases that will ultimately devastate humankind.
Why famines? Because radical weather patterns caused by global warming will disrupt food production, causing droughts in some areas and floods in others. As food production plummets, famine will become widespread. We are, after all, in a "food bubble" right now.
Why infectious disease? Because only balanced, healthy ecosystems keep infectious disease at bay. When ecosystems are disrupted, they become breeding grounds for infectious pathogens. Those pathogens spread quickly through non-natural animal production facilities (bird farms, cattle ranches, fish farming ponds, etc.), accelerating the mutation rate and greatly increasing the chance of cross-species infections that can then be spread by human-to-human contact. Bird flu, for example, remains globally uncontrolled and could mutate into a human form at any moment.
On top of this, our hospitals are actually breeding antibiotic-resistant superbugs through the rampant abuse of antibiotics, and our food supply has very little safety oversight (as we've seen with deadly bacterial contaminations of peanut butter, spinach, onions and other food items over the past two years). There's also mad cow disease, which can easily pass to humans through beef products, and which cannot be killed by cooking the meat. And don't forget our modern corporate-controlled agricultural practices which eliminate biodiversity and base the future of humanity on a few patented strains of food-producing crops that are practically begging to be wiped out by blight or some other crop disease.
Then we turn to the forces of nature. Consider these: The rising intensity of hurricanes (Katrina, anyone?), the devastating 2004 Tsunami in the Indian Ocean, the disruption of seasonal crop-producing rains in India, the recent cold-freeze decimation of the California citrus industry, the floods and droughts happening now on virtually every continent, earthquakes, sinkholes and volcanoes... the more you look at natural events, the more it becomes increasingly obvious that Earth changes are accelerating at an alarming pace. Nature is giving humanity a dose of its own medicine, so to speak, and humans are poised to pay a dear price for the destruction they have unleashed upon the planet.
Of course, nature is not vengeful, and she does not act out of cruelty or anger. Rather, nature responds in kind to the treatment it has received. When humans treat nature with respect, she responds with abundant crops, predictable weather and stable ecosystems that sustain life. But when humans treat planet Earth as a dumping ground for chemicals, pharmaceuticals, power plant emissions and automobile exhaust, nature responds in a way that ultimately "rebalances" the global ecosystem.
And how do you rebalance the global ecosystem? The most direct way, from nature's point of view, is to get rid of the cancer that's destroying the planet. That cancer, of course, is us. Humans are, by far, the most destructive force on the planet and the greatest threat to life and biodiversity on planet Earth. It's almost like finding two fish in a fishbowl who have hatched plans to crack the bowl and drain the water out because it would make room for more fish. Silly fish, huh?
But humans are ultimately no different. It is a simple fact that for planet Earth to attain a state of balance, the current population of human beings will need to be radically reduced. The alternative to that scenario is that human beings would find ways to live in harmony with the planet, but given the foolishishness and short-term thinking tendancy of the human species, this is highly unlikely. The most likely scenario is the continued destruction of nature, followed by a radical planetary alteration that collapses the human population bubble, followed by a period of planetary cleansing and rebalancing during which animals, plants and natural resources flourish, along with whatever remaining humans manage to survive the crunch.
It is clear that humankind, as situated today, is incompatible with sustainable living, and unless humans can somehow find a way to radically reduce their "footprint" on planet Earth, the natural consequences will be quite severe.
Of course, it's only severe from the point of view of humans. From planet Earth's point of view, humankind can simply be shrugged off in the blink of an eye (say, 10,000 years), and the planet will go on living without the destructive presence of modern humans.
Virtually everything modern civilization now values -- from technology and science to knowledge and intellectual property -- was developed in the last 5,000 years. And most of it in just the last 50 years. Yet with all the advances we've been able to create, and all the apparent mastery over the laws of nature, we've really only proved that we do not have the wisdom to live in harmony with our own world. We're destroying the ground beneath our feet, and that is not an attribute of an advanced civilization.
Let's face it: Humans are infants, and we act like children in the way we deal with our home planet. Perhaps a future civilization will do better than this one, because the one we live in right now is headed for certain disaster. Remember: modern human civilization is not the first civilization to rise and fall on this planet, nor will it be the last. All we can hope for is that future beings who inhabit this world will be wiser than we have been and will somehow find the presence of mind to stop destroying their planet before it destroys them.
In the mean time, you can do your best to honor and protect the planet by living a green lifestyle and remembering where you came from -- the Earth. We're all made of this Earth, and it is Earth water that fills that soggy mass of neurons in your skull. It is Earth iron that turns your blood red, and Earth air that fills your lungs with each breath. To honor the Earth is to honor yourself, for you are not separate from this planet, and your own health is inevitably tied to the health of the world you inhabit.
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There's a new plot underway to sterilize your food and destroy the nutritional value of fresh produce. The players in this plot are the usual suspects: The USDA (which backed the "raw" almond sterilization rules now in effect in California) and the American Chemical Society -- a pro-chemical group that represents the interests of industrial chemical manufacturers. The latest push comes from USDA researchers who conducted a study to see which method more effectively killed bacteria on leafy green vegetables like spinach.
To conduct the study, they bathed the spinach in a solution contaminated with bacteria. Then, they tried to remove the bacteria using three methods: Washing, chemical spraying and irradiation. Not surprisingly, only the irradiation killed nearly 100 percent of the bacterial colonies. That's because radiation sterilizes both the bacteria and the vegetable leaves, effectively killing the plant and destroying much of its nutritional value while it kills the bacteria.
The USDA claims this is a huge success. By using radiation on all fresh produce, they claim, the number of food-borne illness outbreaks that happen each year could be substantially reduced. It all makes sense until you realize that by destroying the nutritional value of all fresh produce sold in the United States, an irradiation policy would greatly increase the number of people killed by infections and chronic diseases that are prevented by the natural medicines found in fresh produce!
Why fresh, living produce helps prevent sicknessThe USDA, you see, has zero recognition of the difference between living produce and dead produce. To uneducated government bureaucrats, pasteurized or irradiated vegetable juice is identical to fresh, raw, living vegetable juice. They believe this because they've never been taught about the phytonutrients, digestive enzymes and life force properties that are found in fresh foods, but that are destroyed through heat or irradiation. This, the USDA is operating out of extreme ignorance when it comes to food and nutrition.
Even a simple leaf of spinach contains hundreds of natural medicines -- phytonutrients that help prevent cancer, eye diseases, nervous system disorders, heart disease and much more. Every living vegetable is a powerhouse of disease-fighting medicine: Broccoli prevents cancer, beet greens cleanse the liver, cilantro removes heavy metals, celery prevents cancer, berries prevent heart disease and dark leafy greens help prevent over a dozen serious health conditions while boosting immune function and helping prevent other infections. But when you subject these fruits and vegetables to enough radiation to kill 99.9% of the pathogens that may be hitching a ride, you also destroy many of the phytonutrients responsible for these tremendous health benefits!
This means that while irradiating food may decrease outbreaks of food-borne illnesses, it will have the unintended consequence of increasing the number of people who get sick from other infections (and chronic diseases) due to the fact that their source of natural medicine has been destroyed. For many Americans, you see, salad greens are their one remaining source for phytonutrients. Given their diets of processed foods, junk foods and cooked foods, there are very few opportunities for these consumers to get fresh, phytonutrient-rich foods into their diet. And now the USDA wants to take that away, too, by mandating the irradiation of all fresh produce.
Let me make a rather obvious prediction, on the record: If the irradiation of fresh produce goes into effect in the United States, rates of infection among consumers will sharply increase, not decrease, due to the removal of immune-boosting natural medicine from the food supply. Consumers will also experience higher rates of cancer, heart disease, dementia, eye disorders, diabetes and even obesity. By destroying these thousands of healing phytonutrients, irradiation will leave many consumers defenseless against modern society's many health challenges.
It is no exaggeration to say that a policy of mass irradiation of fresh produce is as blatantly stupid as the Romans building their aqueducts with lead-lined waterways. As historians have explained, after the aqueducts were built, the water delivered to the Roman population was contaminated with lead -- a heavy metal that causes numerous health problems, including insanity. Many historians blame the lead-lined aqueducts as one of the primary reasons why the Roman Empire fell: Its leaders went mad, and the rest is history.
I would argue that America's leaders are already mad, but that's beside the point. If we start irradiating our food, thereby destroying its nutritional value, we are going to unleash a cascade of unintended consequences even greater than the Roman's aqueducts. Absent the protections of phytonutrients found in plants, the health of most consumers will rapidly decline, and we'll see the U.S. thrust into a quagmire of chronic disease and medical bankruptcy. (It's already heading there, of course, but killing the food supply will only accelerate the downward spiral of health.)
Let's sterilize all the food!The USDA has never met a food sterilization plan it didn't like. It backed the recent almond sterilization law that went into effect in California last year, forcing all almond growers to sterilize their almonds by subjecting them to toxic chemicals or cooking them at high enough temperatures to kill anything that might have been alive (such as the almond itself). Now, all the raw almonds consumed in America are purchased from overseas growers, where raw still means raw.
Raw milk has also been under attack in California and elsewhere. The USDA supported laws that essentially banned the sales of raw milk, requiring milk to be sterilized, too. If you now irradiate all the fresh produce, you have a food supply that is predominantly sterilized -- otherwise known as "dead." And dead foods lead to dead people.
That a society's health regulators would want all foods to be dead should be downright shocking to anyone who knows anything about health and nutrition. Live foods keep people alive, but dead foods make people dead. It's really not a complicated concept. The USDA's definition of "food safety," however, is based on the idea that the health of one immune-system-compromised individual who can't handle a little E. Coli is more important than the ongoing health of the entire population. Thus, all foods must be killed for everyone.
I strongly disagree with this approach. Foods should not be expected to be sterilized. In terms of food safety, emphasis should be placed on boosting the health and immune systems of individuals so they can survive occasional contact with E. Coli rather than trying to create a sterile environment in which nothing is alive. As it turns out, the people susceptible to food-borne illnesses are precisely those individuals who have compromised immune systems due to their intake of vaccines and antibiotics. Thus, it is modern medicine that has made these people vulnerable to food-borne illnesses. Blame the drug companies, not the bacteria.
But the USDA would rather blame the food. Blaming conventional medicine for the harm it has caused to the human immune system is not politically correct. It's better to blame the food, then use scare tactics to announce yet more outbreaks and hope for a public outcry for widespread food irradiation. And that brings me to the "final solution" on food irradiation.
How the USDA plans to join the FDA in keeping everyone sickThere is a corporate-sponsored plot underway in the U.S. today to keep people sick and deny them access to information about natural cures (such as medicinal foods) that would prevent disease and keep people out of the hospitals. In more than 1,500 articles on this website, I've documented the FDA's criminality, the USDA's indefensible actions, and the criminal behavior of drug manufacturers who only earn profits if they can find a way to keep the entire population sick and diseased for another generation or two.
Destroying the natural medicine in the food supply sure would be a highly effective way to create more customers for Big Pharma, wouldn't it? I think it's all part of the "keep the population sick and diseased" plot being carried out by an evil partnership between drug companies and the U.S. government. We already know that the FDA and USDA work for the corporations, not the People. We already know that they will do practically anything to boost their profits (including conducting medical experiments on infants, drugging schoolchildren, lying to the public, fabricating clinical trials and more). Is it any surprise that they would now attempt a "final solution" on the food supply that kills the food and thereby results in a huge reduction in the population's intake of the disease-fighting nutrients found in fresh produce?
The social engineering recipePulling this off, of course, requires a bit of social engineering by the USDA in order to force the public into demanding something be done. If you're the USDA, you can't just suddenly announce a national food sterilization plan; you have to prime the pump with a bit of dirty work. Here's the simple plan for accomplishing that, if you're the USDA:
1) Conduct poor inspections of fresh produce on purpose, in order to cause a large increase in food-borne illness outbreaks. (We've seen this increase happen over the last 12 - 24 months.) This can be easily accomplished by reducing the budget of food inspection offices, or removing inspectors from the payroll altogether (which has already happened).
2) Wait for the outbreaks to happen. When consumers get sick, run national press releases announcing how dangerous the food supply is.
3) Watch the consumer reaction as people and lawmakers demand "something be done!"
4) Fudge a study with the American Chemical Society to show that washing doesn't work and that irradiation is the only solution. Time the release of this news to coincide with the public outcry that "something be done!"
5) Once the public is demanding a solution to food-borne illnesses, roll out a national produce irradiation requirement that sterilizes all the food.
Mission accomplished! This, of course, leads to point #6:
6) Watch the population become increasingly sick and diseased (thanks to the lack of phytonutrients that used to be found in the fresh produce), and cash in on your Big Pharma shares as the population is herded into hospitals for lucrative treatments with monopoly-priced pharmaceuticals.
It's the same old social engineering trick that's been used to hoodwink the American people hundreds of times. How do you get the public to support a war in the Middle East? Stage an attack on U.S. soil first, and wait for the public outcry. How do you get the People to support the mass sterilization of their own food supply? Lower your inspection standards, let the sickness spread, and then wait for the public outcry. It's the way governments get things done these days: They manipulate the public into demanding the things they wanted to accomplish in the first place. These are sometimes called "false flag operations" in a military context, and they've been conducted by the U.S. government on numerous occasions, just like they were conducted by Hitler in Nazi Germany to justify his invasions of neighboring countries. You can read about False Flag operations on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag
What "they" really want: A dead food supplyLet's be blunt about this: The corporations running this country (which also run the U.S. government) want the U.S. food supply to be dead. They don't want foods to be used as medicines, and they sure don't want the natural medicines found in foods competing with their own patented pharmaceutical medicines (that just happen to earn them a whole lot more money than any food ever did).
Don't you find it curious that this attack on the food supply is coming out now, right after all this incredible news about the healing power of foods has been hitting the science journals? Every week, it seems, we find out about another amazing health property in a food. Black raspberries reverse oral cancer. Pomegranates halt prostate cancer. Green tea halts breast cancer. The list goes on. Just on this website alone, we've probably published 1,000 stories over the last two years on the disease-fighting properties of foods.
The thing to realize here is that many of the healing properties of these foods are destroyed through pasteurization or irradiation. If you're a government that wants to "take away the People's medicine," the fastest way to accomplish that is to mandate the sterilization of the food supply. Kill the foods and you take away the People's medicine, and that forces the population to use pharmaceuticals instead.
The FDA, for its part, has for many decades conducted its natural medicine censorship campaign, whose only purpose is to deny the People access to accurate information about the healing properties of natural medicines found in foods and herbs. But apparently that wasn't enough: The Internet came along and people found a way to educate themselves. So since the FDA couldn't keep the truth about natural medicine bottled up and censored, the government has now apparently decided to just sterilize all the foods, thereby destroying the natural medicine and transforming Mother Nature's gifts into dead calories.
The USDA's decisions here are not based on public safety, folks. They're based on corporate greed. Just look at how they handled the raw almond controversy in these related articles: http://www.naturalnews.com/almonds.html
The USDA as operated today is a front group for wealthy corporations. It is not interested in helping the People. It's interested in protecting the profits of corporations... even if that means destroying the food supply and turning the population into "dead eaters" who die from other diseases caused by the lack of phytonutrient protection.
How you can help stop this latest atrocity against our food supplyWhat can you do to stop this? Be prepared to fight irradiation plans with a massive outcry that demands our food supply be protected from radiation. There are two things that need to be accomplished, and of course the USDA and FDA oppose them both:
1) Require the labeling of all irradiated foods with a large "Irradiated" label or sticker.
2) Block any attempts to mandate the irradiation of fresh produce.
Stay tuned to NaturalNews.com for more on this story. We'll be joining with other pro-consumer groups (like the Organic Consumers Association) to rally our readers in opposition to this food irradiation effort.
I believe we must keep our food supply fresh and alive. (Sounds kinda obvious, huh?) And if there's a little extra bacteria on the spinach, it's nothing that a healthy body can't handle anyway. Take some probiotics and avoid antibiotics, and you'll be just fine. E. Coli is really only a threat to the health of individuals who have had their immune systems (or intestinal flora) destroyed by pharmaceuticals in the first place. There's nothing wrong with some living organisms in your milk, on your almonds or on your spinach. Wash your food, get plenty of sunlight and avoid using antibiotics.
The human body is NOT a sterile environment. To try to make our food supply sterile is insane, and anyone who supports the irradiation of the food supply is, in my opinion, supporting a policy of genocide against the American people. To destroy the vitality of the food supply is a criminal act of such immense evil that it stands alongside the worst crimes ever committed against humanity.
You see, it's not enough for them to poison our water (fluoride), poison our children (vaccines) and lie to us about the sun (skin cancer scare stories). Now they want to destroy our foods... and thereby take away any natural medicine options that might actually keep people healthy and free. Remember: A diseased population is an enslaved population.
Now go eat your Big Mac, drink your Pepsi and don't ask too many questions.
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Factory food manufacturers have figured out that slapping an "all natural" claim onto their processed, chemically-altered food products results in increased sales. Consumers, it seems, are trying to shop for healthier foods, and they're easily fooled by "all natural" claims, even though the vast majority of food products sporting such claims are anything but natural.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not regulate claims of "all natural." They might claim to, but in reality, they don't. Food companies can get away with using all sorts of non-natural processes and chemical ingredients in a food product that they claim is all natural. For example, foods fried at high temperatures, resulting in the formation of cancer-causing acrylamides, are routinely labeled "all natural" in the snack section of the grocery store. And yet frying starches at high temperatures isn't natural at all -- it's a human-invented process for making boring foods like potatoes taste interesting by loading them up with fat and salt.
The salt used in such foods isn't natural either. It's almost entirely processed salt, and even the products that claim to be made from "sea salt" are actually using a white, processed sea salt (not a full-spectrum brown or pink salt like you might find with Celtic Sea Salt, which is truly natural).
Grocery product makers are also adding various chemical additives to their "all natural" products, hiding them under innocent-sounding ingredients that don't raise red flags with consumers. Monosodium glutamate (MSG), for example, is a neurotoxic substance classified as an excitotoxin. Consuming it causes migraine headaches, endocrine system damage, loss of appetite regulation (leading to obesity), neurological damage in fetuses (when consumed by expectant mothers) and many other problems. This is well known throughout the industry. Baby food manufacturers, for example, voluntarily removed MSG from their products decades ago following a public outcry about the dangers of MSG to babies and infants.
And yet today, numerous "all natural" food companies continue to use hidden forms of MSG in their foods, hiding them under innocent-sounding ingredients like yeast extract, autolyzed or hydrolyzed proteins (all of which contain MSG). Even the companies you've grown to trust in the "natural" food business are engaged in the blatant hiding of MSG in their products. Pay special attention to vegetarian food products such as veggie burgers. Read the ingredients on everything you buy and you'll find that the largest "natural" food manufacturers still use hidden MSG.
(The newest ingredient to hide MSG under is called torula yeast. Watch for it on labels.)
What's the definition of all-natural, anyway?The truth is that food manufacturers can use just about any ingredients or processes they want while still claiming their foods are all-natural. They can take whole wheat berries from nature, mill them down and strip out 98% of the nutrients, bleach the flour with chemicals, "enrich" the flour with synthetic chemical vitamins, and then claim their wheat is "all natural."
And why is it natural? Because it comes from the earth, they would say. It was grown by nature.
Sure it was, but then it was physically and chemically modified, adulterated, contaminated and altered in ways that destroy its natural properties. The final product has no resemblance to anything truly natural.
In the food industry today, there's no official definition of "all natural." It means whatever the food companies want it to mean. It can mean, for example, that all the chemicals found in the product simply aren't listed on the label. (There's no requirement for food companies to list chemical contaminants found in their foods.) A food labeled "all natural" can contain pesticides, herbicides, toxic heavy metals, trace amounts of PCBs, toxic fluoride, hidden MSG, high-temperature cooking byproducts, synthetic chemical vitamins and dozens of other non-natural substances. This is all perfectly allowed and tolerated by the FDA as well as all virtually every media outlet in the world. Cable news stations, magazines, newspapers and other media giants are all too happy to take money from junk food manufacturers and run their advertisements claiming their foods are "all natural." There is absolutely no effort to determine whether such claims are really true or even partially credible. Media companies simply take the money and run the promotions, regardless of whether such promotions tell the truth.
There is little truth left in the food industryConsumers are a gullible bunch, and food manufacturers have mastered the art of selling people crap while getting them to believe it's actually good for them. There's really no effort taken by the mainstream food industry to make foods healthy; there's only an effort to make them appear to be healthy. It's all about marketing. The same junk food crap that wasn't labeled with any health claims two years ago is now labeled "all natural" and positioned in the healthy food section of the grocery store. Same ingredients, new spin. It's all about positioning.
All this doesn't mean there aren't some genuinely natural products available in the marketplace today. There are, but they aren't manufactured by the big brand-name food companies. A few smaller, niche-market companies are offering real food these days, but you have to search them out. Companies like Ewehorn make honest cereals with no garbage ingredients, and there are lots of raw foods companies that produce truly outstanding food products (such as www.RawBakery.com). FoodsAlive (www.FoodsAlive.com) also makes real food, as do dozens of other companies I could mention.
But the real secret to being a smart, skeptical consumer is to read the ingredients labels yourself. Analyze the ingredients and ignore the health claims on the front of the package. Health claims are meaningless. Visit our informative article: How to read ingredients labels (http://www.newstarget.com/021929.html) to learn more.
Permissions to use: Want to use this cartoon? Specific, limited permission is granted to reprint in any book, movie, website, magazine, newspaper, animation or other media under the following 'professional courtesy' conditions:

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You may not charge for this cartoon.
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