There is a newer version of this post, written July 13, 2013: gmos-the-poison-on-your-plate-2.html
Time Magazine Ad from 1949
Americans get sick more than Europeans and more than other industrialized countries. And they’re getting sicker every year.
Since the mid-1990s the number of Americans suffering from at least 3 chronic illnesses has nearly doubled. And America’s international ranking for infant mortality and lifespan has also plunged.
There are many reasons why this is taking place, and one reason may be right in front of you.
Over the past 20 years diseases like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, depression, and gastrointestinal issues have become epidemic.
People are getting sicker. So what changed? The one thing that has changed is the food we eat. And the most radical change of them all is the genetic engineering of our food.
We have gone from food being consumed as a “whole food” form to foods undergoing a scientific experiment.
Hundreds of millions of acres of genetically engineered crops have been planted already. 88% percent of all corn and 94% of soy in the US are genetically modified.
Unsuspecting consumers are staying busy trying to keep up with their households, their jobs, and their kids. Most don’t have time to research what GM food is.
The term GMO stands for Genetically Modified Organism, where scientists take the DNA from one species and force it into another species. This is a mix and match of two species that would have never mated, crossbred, or been crosspollinated. For example, a scientist may take the genes of a spider and inject them into a cow.
One of the main companies leading the charge for GMO is Monsanto, the same company that makes the popular weed killer Round-Up. This is the same company who told us back in the 1940s that DDT and Agent Orange were safe.
Let’s look at an example of how a GMO food may cause health issues. One way to harm our bodies is to consume insecticides. But what if I told you that many of our GMO corn products contain large amounts of insecticide in each bite. This is how it’s done. Monsanto injects a gene from an organism called Bacillus thuringiensis (“Bt”) to produce a toxin that kills insects. Thus every cell in the corn, including the kernels that we consume, produces the toxic protein. The toxin is intended to break open the stomachs of insects.
An article from February 2012 studying the health effects of the Bt toxin in humans confirms it does break open little pores in human gastrointestinal cells and causes the same kind of destruction in our gut as is caused in the insect it kills.
A frightening study recently showed that 93% of pregnant Canadian women were found to have the Bt toxin in their blood and 80% of the unborn fetuses had it in their blood as well.
To make matters worse, the toxin-producing genes may also become embedded within our intestinal flora, leading to a continuous production of Bt toxin from our bacteria that reside within our gut.
Another study from the Mayo Clinic comparing the blood of 10,000 people from 50 years ago to 10,000 people today found that the incidence of full-blown celiac disease increased by 400% during that time period. Certainly our genes didn’t change in 50 years but the food has.
This finding may explain why a condition called intestinal permeability or “leaky gut” is on the rise. Intestinal permeability arises when there is a disruption of the normal intestinal barrier, thus allowing undigested food particles to enter into our bloodstream, setting off an immunological response that includes the overproduction of antibodies. This cascade of immune attack leads to intolerance and allergies to foods as well as inflammation and even autoimmune disease.
An article entitled Surprises from Celiac Disease from Scientific American (August 2009) further alludes to this mechanism in relation to other diseases. It is the leaky gut that many scientists are now focusing on as a major cause of many chronic diseases, including heart disease, cancer, and most autoimmune diseases.
It is clearly important for the public to know which foods are GMO and which ones are not when it comes to their health. The consumer should have the right to know if the very foods they are eating are causing them to be sick or allowing them to be healthy. We need to urge our government to have more regulations when it comes to GMO foods, and all foods should clearly be labeled as GMO if genetically altered in any way.