How Genetically Engineered Foods Will Be Eradicated
September 01, 2013
Story at-a-glance
While California’s GMO-labeling campaign failed to pass by
an incredibly narrow margin last November, Proposition 37
catalyzed an enormous amount of awareness across the US that
is the beginning of the end of GMOs in the US
More people are now aware of genetically engineered foods
than we could possibly have ever reached through educational
efforts alone, investing the same amount of money that we
invested in Prop. 37
The tipping point of consumer rejection of genetically
engineered foods in the US is almost here. Last year, the
president of Whole Foods confessed that when a product
becomes verified as Non-GMO or GMO-free, sales leap by 15-30
percent—a clear outgrowth of the Prop.37 campaign
Target’s brand will be non-GMO in 2014. Ben & Jerry’s will
be non-GMO by the end of this year, and while Chipotle’s
restaurants are working toward a non-GMO menu, they
voluntarily started labeling in the meantime
We’re in really exciting times with regards to shifting the
tide against genetically engineered (GE) foods and genetically
modified organisms (GMOs).
As you know, I was a big supporter of the
California GMO labeling campaign, and while we lost the vote
by an incredibly narrow margin last November, Proposition 37
catalyzed an enormous amount of awareness across the US.
More people are now aware of GMO’s than we could possibly
have ever reached through educational efforts alone, investing
the same amount of money that we invested in Prop. 37. It really
marked the beginning of the end for GM foods in the US.
Jeffrey Smith, who is one of the leaders in educating people
about the concerns and dangers of GMOs, has been at it for about
17 years. He believes we are now at the most critical stage in
the history of GMO activism in the United States.
“We’ve now hit new stages of what I call the tipping
point of consumer rejection,” he says. “And it
follows very logically from Prop 37. Let me explain what I
mean by a tipping point, and then I’ll explain exactly where
we are in that process.
In January 1999, the biotech industry boldly
predicted that within five years 95 percent of all
commercial seeds in the world would be genetically modified
and patented.
They did not anticipate the gag order of a scientist
being lifted three weeks later in Europe. A firestorm of
media reported on his results of a GMO-feeding study. Over
700 articles were written within a single month in the UK.
In 10 weeks, the tipping point of consumer rejection
was achieved in Europe – heralded not by the European
Commission banning GMOs, but by Unilever banning GMOs, then
Nestlé, and then virtually everyone in Europe because they
realized that using GM ingredients had become a marketing
liability. This is what we call a tipping point.”
US Now Reaching the Tipping Point
In the US, we saw a tipping point against Monsanto’s
genetically engineered bovine growth hormone (rBGH) when it got
kicked out of Walmart, Starbucks, Yoplait, and Dannon.
This was not due to any action taken by the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA), but occurred when mothers across the
nation became aware of the cancer risks associated with milk
from cows treated with bovine growth hormone.
Now, the tipping point of consumer rejection of genetically
engineered foods in the US is almost here.
A clear sign of this occurred last year, when the president
of Whole Foods confessed that when a product becomes verified as
Non-GMO or GMO-free, sales leap by 15-30 percent. Of all the
categories of health and wellness claims, such as “gluten-free,”
etc, “GMO-free” products have the most rapid growth in sales.
“This shows an enormous desire and demand for non-GMO
products,” Smith says. “There are now 10,000
products in our NonGMOShoppingGuide.com database that are
verified as non-GMO, and that’s expanding every day.”
“It’s actually happening in a big way. The next stage
of the tipping point was heralded by a New York Times
article1
on the 27th of May. If you were to read it from the
perspective of a food product manager, you would realize the
absolute need to make a decision.
I call it the stage of “awake and scramble,” where
they wake to the fact that the GMO movement is in place.
It’s not going away. And if they want to participate, they
got to scramble for non-GMO ingredients now because they may
not be able to get it later.”
Signs of the Times
The article touched on a number of vital signs of progress in
the movement against genetically engineered foods, including:
The March Against Monsanto in 52 countries by more than
two million people
Labeling laws proposed in more than two dozen states,
which subsequently passed in Connecticut and Maine.
Washington State will probably pass a GMO labeling bill as
well this fall
Hundreds of companies have enrolled in the Non-GMO
Project, and some non-GMO companies fret they may lose their
sources of non-GMO ingredients to the new-comers
Farmers now receive more non-GMO premiums
Some companies are already going overseas to get non-GMO
ingredients
Besides that, Target has announced that its own brand will be
non-GMO in 2014. Ben & Jerry’s will be non-GMO by the end of
this year, and while Chipotle’s restaurants are working toward a
non-GMO menu, they voluntarily started labeling in the meantime.
There’s also been more news coverage on the dangers of GMOs.
According to Smith:
“The next stage of the tipping point is coming up
very soon. It is called the battle for market share.”
The Battle for Market Share—Ready, Set...
The battle for market share begins the moment a mainstream
food company that is not just sold in Whole Foods or a natural
food chain puts a “Non-GMO Project Verified” sticker on its
package and places it on the shelf next to a popular
GMO-containing counterpart.
“This could happen at any time. It’s expected as
early as August. Once it happens, the stopwatch starts
ticking,” Smith says. “If we can move the sales in
the direction of the Non-GMO Project Verified product and
the other one starts reducing market share, it becomes the
sell signal for the entire industry. If there’s a delay, if
there’s no change in there, then the tipping point may stall
and companies may use that as an excuse to say, “Well, maybe
this will go away or be firewalled into the natural food
space.”
The Institute for Responsible Technology began a massive
campaign this summer to drive the non-health conscious shopper –
the Walmart and Safeway shopper – into the non-GMO product
category by focusing on the following four categories:
Mothers. Moms may sometimes not switch
their own diet for themselves but they’re dedicated when it
comes to protecting their children, and there’s ample
evidence showing that children are most at-risk from GE
foods. An impressive 1.7 million people watched Jeffrey
Smith’s film “Genetic Roulette” during free-showing weeks in
2012, and many of them were parents, who immediately acted
on the information and saw the results for themselves. Says
Smith:
“I was speaking at MIT recently and someone from
the audience said, “We saw the film. Before that, my
six-and-a-half-year old was violent and out of control.
They wanted to take him out of school and actually label
him retarded. After changing his diet, a month later, I
had a new child. All of those problems went away.” We’re
getting that information out to the moms.”
The sick,and their doctors.
Mounting research has linked GE foods to a number of
diseases and disorders. Studies are also implicating two of
the main toxins related to GE foods, Roundup and Bt toxin,
to all sorts of diseases.
“I go around the country and ask audiences, “How
many of you have significantly removed GMOs from your
diet? And then I say, “Okay, tell us all what
improvements you’ve noticed.” We hear: allergies;
headaches; fatigue; gastrointestinal disorders; kidney-
and liver problems; diabetes; high blood pressure; skin
problems; aggression; depression; infertility.
Someone said, “My client couldn’t get pregnant for five
years, switched to a non-GMO diet, and was pregnant three
weeks later. Another woman said, “My four-year-old started
talking.” We hear from parents of autistic kids –even from
an autistic person directly – who told me when they switched
to a non-GMO diet, the symptoms alleviated. An autistic man
in his 60’s came up to me and said, “I would never be able
to come to this meeting with you had I not changed my diet,
because these symptoms were preventing me from this type of
social interaction... A lot of people also lose weight when
they get rid of GMOs. It’s another main feature that we have
to highlight, which we haven’t done a good job at.”
Religious groups. The Institute is also
talking to people of various religious faiths, whose
scriptures tell them to respect the natural way of things.
“They realize when they look inside this
technology of mixing and matching across kingdoms and
species and forcing DNA into new species that have never
been there before, that it is against their faith. And
then when they see the evidence showing that it’s
actually causing health problems, it confirms what they
believe. Many of them are getting onboard to direct
their congregations to avoid GMOs.”
Pet owners. Many pet owners will tell
you, their animals are just as much part of the family as
any child is. And, as with children, animals are also among
the most at-risk.
“We are finding – based on the experiences of
veterinarians and pet-owners – that animals that eat the
byproducts of the human food supply are suffering from
the same diseases and disorders that humans are
suffering from. We have veterinarians saying that
animals and livestock – pets and horses – are all
suffering from eating GMOs and improve when they get rid
of GMOs,” Smith says.
Vote Non-GMO with Every Purchase
The feedback Smith describes offers strong testimony to the
fact that even though it may have looked like we lost the battle
when Prop. 37 failed to pass, we really won the war because it
triggered this process of rapidly mounting awareness. And with
awareness, people are quickly shifting their purchasing habits.
The rapid and dramatic rise in sales of products that are
Non-GMO Verified really demonstrates the power you have as a
consumer. And this is how we will ultimately win, because most
food companies don’t have a particular pro-GMO agenda. They’re
just selling what people will buy, and by using the most
inexpensive ingredients possible they can increase profits. But
if their profits go down due to an undesirable ingredient, they
will change it.
So, to keep the momentum going, I urge you to purchase
Non-GMO Project Verified foods, and to tell your friends and
relatives to do the same. Explain to them why, and point them
toward resources if they’re skeptical, or they’re concerned that
this is all some over-emotional response that has no basis in
science.
“We know that the information that we’re presenting
at the Institute for Responsible Technology2
has been tested to verify change in people’s diet very
quickly,” Smith says.”I recommend getting involved
in our materials—our free newsletter at
ResponsibleTechnology.org, for example—and sharing that
information with others.”
Results from Animal-Feeding Studies Correlate with Human Disease
Patterns
According to Smith, there are definitive correlations between
the results from animal-feeding studies and the patterns of
human disease we’re now seeing. For example, the American
Academy of Environmental Medicine has done a number of
animal-feeding studies on GMO’s and specifically enumerated the
particular categories of diseases and disorders found in these
controlled environments:
Gastrointestinal problems
Immune problems
Reproductive problems
Organ damage
Dysfunction and dysregulation of cholesterol
Dysfunction and dysregulation of insulin
“You look at the three different corresponding
factors: (1) what humans are getting better from, (2) what
livestock is getting better from, (3) what afflictions are
afflicting the lab animals fed with GMOs, and then you look
at what diseases are really taking off in the United States
– they’re the same categories,” Smith says.
For example, kidney problems have been demonstrated in
19 different animal-feeding studies, and kidney diseases are
on the rise in the US. Could there be a connection? Smith and I
both believe this to be the case. According to Smith:
“We heard from two people at a meeting in Arizona,
someone whose husband was nearly on dialysis and someone
else who had three kidney transplants – both situations
reversed when they changed their diet.
You see things like the animal-feeding study out of
Russia where the babies were a lot smaller after being fed
GE soy, and you see the incidence of low-birth-weight babies
is going up in the United States... Deaths from senile
dementia moved along at a certain pace, and then when GMOs
or Roundup were introduced, it shot up... So, you see these
correlations between these four things now: (1) the
animal-feeding studies, (2) people getting better [when
removing GMO], (3) livestock getting better [when removing
GMO], and (4) changes in the disease rates.”
Glyphosate Toxicity—Another Hidden Danger of GE Foods
There’s also another potent toxin associated with genetically
engineered foods that is unrelated to the Bt toxin or the
genetic alteration itself, and that is
glyphosate—the active ingredient in Monsanto’s
broad-spectrum herbicide, which is used on both GE crops and
many conventional crops as well. The contamination appears to be
greater in GE crops however, especially in so-called Roundup
Ready crops. These are genetically altered to withstand
otherwise lethal doses of the herbicide, and it’s important to
realize that the glyphosate permeates the entire plant.
It cannot be washed off.
In June, groundbreaking research was published detailing a
newfound
mechanism of harm for Roundup. The finding suggests that
glyphosate may actually be the most important factor in
the development of a wide variety of chronic diseases,
specifically because your gut bacteria are a key component of
glyphosate’s mechanism of harm.
Monsanto has steadfastly claimed that Roundup is harmless to
animals and humans because the mechanism of action it uses
(which allows it to kill weeds), called the shikimate pathway,
is absent in all animals. However, the shikimate pathway IS
present in bacteria, and that’s the key to understanding how it
causes such widespread systemic harm in both humans and animals.
The bacteria in your body outnumber your cells by 10 to 1. For
every cell in your body, you have 10 microbes of various kinds,
and all of them have the shikimate pathway, so they will all
respond to the presence of glyphosate!
Glyphosate causes extreme disruption of the microbe’s
function and lifecycle. What’s worse, glyphosate
preferentially affects beneficial bacteria,
allowing pathogens to overgrow and take over. At that point,
your body also has to contend with the toxins produced by the
pathogens. Once the chronic inflammation sets in, you’re well on
your way toward chronic and potentially debilitating disease...
As stated by Smith:
“Roundup is actually patented as a biocide. It’s an
antibiotic, it kills bacteria. That affects not only the
soil, killing the beneficial bacteria that provide the
nutrients to the soil, but it also kills the beneficial
bacteria in your gut... It kills the Bifidus. It kills the
Lactobacillus. But it keeps alive the E.coli, salmonella,
and botulism, which is not something we want to keep alive.
When you kill the beneficial gut bacteria, it affects your
immune system and digestive tract.”
This remarkable finding was immediately followed by tests
showing that people in 18 countries across Europe have
glyphosate in their bodies3,
while yet another study revealed that the chemical has
estrogenic properties and drive breast cancer proliferation in
the parts-per-trillion range4.
This finding might help explain why rats fed Monsanto’s maize
developed massive breast tumors in the first-ever
lifetime feeding study published last year.
Other recently published studies demonstrate glyphosate’s
toxicity to cell lines, aquatic life, food animals, and humans.
In fact, research5
has shown that Roundup is toxic to human DNA even when diluted
to concentrations 450-fold lower than used in
agricultural applications. Liver-, embryonic- and
placental cell lines are adversely affected by glyphosate at
doses as low as 1 ppm. GMO corn can contain as much as 13 ppm of
glyphosate, and Americans eat an average of 193 lbs of GMO foods
annually6.
The Road Ahead...
There’s every reason to be optimistic when it comes to
getting GMOs out of our food supply. First of all, realize
that we don’t have to affect policy change in order to take GMOs
out; we can do it based on personal empowerment and individual
decision making. To find out which brands and products have
been Non-GMO Project Verified, see NonGMOShoppingGuide.com, or
use the iPhone application ShopNoGMO – both are free. Another
alternative with which you cannot go wrong is to buy organic
whole foods, ditching processed fare altogether. But there’s
more good news:
“We’re seeing now that it’s a movement that has its
own life,” Smith says. “[At a recent event] someone
said to me, “My dad saw the film Genetic Roulette, took GMOs
out of his diet, sent us all a copy of the thing, and bought
land so that he can produce food.”
What’s happening now is that there is a
self-organizing and spontaneous uprising of people who have
been maybe prescribed a non-GMO diet by the thousands of
doctors who are doing so, or been inspired to remove it by
watching our film or your materials, etc. This is a
movement. The food industry now recognizes it. Those who are
in a position to move quickly will take the most advantage
of it. They’ll see an increase in sales in the US as
happened in Europe and Australia in the early days when
their tipping point happened.
Right now, in the 17 years that I’ve been working on
this, when I was first alerted to the health dangers of GMOs
by a genetic engineer, I have never seen a more potent
window of opportunity. We know that we can’t ask the Obama
administration for a bow out. We can’t wait for the FDA to
become awake. We have to do it ourselves. The key is we are
already doing it ourselves. There’s a momentum. Non-GMO
products are growing faster than anything else right now in
terms of categories, and the momentum is on our side.
The big test will be very shortly when we look inside
the aisles of Safeway, Walmart, and Kroger – not the Whole
Foods – to see if our message is moving the needle to win
the battle for market share. If it does, every GMO-laden
product, every product manager will realize it. It’ll become
the industry sell signal. They will scramble to get their
non-GMO products available quickly, and we will win.”
Join Us in Your Right to Know by Getting GMOs Labeled!
While California Prop. 37 failed to pass last November by a
very narrow margin, the fight for GMO labeling is far from over.
In the past few weeks, Connecticut and Maine have passed
GMO-labeling bills, and 20 other states have pending legislation
to label genetically engineered foods. So, now is the time to
put the pedal to the metal and get labeling across the
country—something 64 other countries already have.
I hope you will join us in this effort.
The field-of-play has now moved to the state of Washington,
where the people's initiative 522, "The People's Right to Know
Genetically Engineered Food Act," will require food sold in
retail outlets to be labeled if it contains genetically
engineered ingredients. Please help us win this key GMO
labeling battle and continue to build momentum for GMO labeling
in other states bymaking a donationto the Organic
Consumers Association (OCA).
Remember, as with CA Prop. 37, they need support of people
like YOU to succeed. Prop. 37 failed with a very narrow margin
simply because we didn't have the funds to counter the massive
ad campaigns created by the No on 37 camp, led by Monsanto and
other major food companies. Let's not allow Monsanto and its
allies to confuse and mislead the people of Washington and
Vermont as they did in California. So please, I urge you to get
involved and help in any way you can.
No matter where you live in the United States, please
donate money to these labeling efforts through the
Organic
Consumers Fund.
Sign up to learn more about how you can get involved by
visiting
Yeson522.com!
For timely updates on issues relating to these and other
labeling initiatives, please join the Organic Consumers
Association on
Facebook,
or follow them on
Twitter.
Talk to organic producers and stores and ask them to
actively support the Washington initiative.