For more information on genetically engineered food and Prop 37, see the links at Genetically engineered food.
Today is general election day in the United States, and Californians are going to the polls to decide whether food that contains genetically engineered ingredients must be labeled as such. The ballot initiative is called Proposition 37. It applies to food sold in California. However, if it passes, it may inspire other states to recognize the right of consumers to know what is in the food they eat.
For more information on genetically engineered food and Prop 37, see the links at Genetically engineered food. A recent article published by NaturalNews.com has persuaded me to update my list of genetically engineered food crops. The article is titled "Infographic unveiled: Top Ten GMO Foods to Avoid Eating." The article is mildly confusing in that the 10 GMO items listed in the article don't match the 10 shown in the infographic. However, by extracting information from the article and the infographic I have added to my previous list of nine the following three genetically modified food crops: tomatoes, rice, and potatoes. The Tainted Nine becomes the Tainted Twelve. The Tainted Twelve are as follows:
Two other GMO foods are listed in the article: dairy and aspartame. Both are omitted from the Tainted Twelve. Neither is a food crop, and aspartame is a food additive, not a food. How to avoid GMO foods In the United States, GMO foods are not typically labeled as such. If you would like to avoid being a guinea pig in a genetic engineering experiment, do this:
Most of the corn (maize for our British readers) produced in the United States is Bt corn. Bt corn has been genetically engineered to produce its own pesticide. Because the genetic information spliced into the corn came from a bacterium, that information can be shared with other bacteria, including the beneficial bacteria in your intestines.
If this occurs, your intestines will become a pesticide factory, producing the Bt toxin in your own body. Mike Adams, the Health Ranger of NaturalNews.com, recently posted a video that discusses this issue. See How GMO foods alter organ function and pose a very real health threat to humans, particularly from 8:10 to 10:54. The introduction of genetically engineered alfalfa in 2011 changed the list of genetically engineered food crops from the Tainted Eight to the Tainted Nine. (See "Genetically modified alfalfa and Roundup herbicides may create an agricultural disaster" at http://www.naturalnews.com/034264_GM_alfalfa_Roundup.html.) The Tainted Nine are now as follows:
_Previously in this blog, I wrote about the Dirty Dozen fruits and vegetables most likely to be high in pesticide residue. The Dirty Dozen, organized to help you and me remember them better, are as follows:
I also wrote previously about the Clean 15, fruits and vegetables that tend to be low in pesticide residue:
My daughter warned me, "If you watch Food, Inc., you won't want to eat meat again unless it's organic." She was right. In Food Inc. (see www.foodincmovie.com), filmmaker Robert Kenner peels back the curtain that hides America's food industry, including the meat industry. A beef with the meat industry
Food production is no longer dominated by farmers but by a handful of soulless multinational corporations where executives in board rooms a thousand miles from the farms make decisions that affect not only farm workers but the food produced by those workers. Despite the image portrayed by product packaging and marketing campaigns, CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) have replaced small family farms as the primary means of meat production in the United States. Food, Inc. features Barbara Kowalcyk, a food safety advocate whose son Kevin died in 2001, 12 days after eating meat contaminated with E. coli bacteria. Kowalcyk said, "We put faith in our government to protect us, and we're not being protected at a most basic level." Kowalcyk is now fighting to give the USDA the power to shut down plants that repeatedly produce contaminated meats. Allen Trenkle, a ruminant nutrition expert at Iowa State University, explains that cattle were designed to eat grass, not corn, which creates an abnormally acid environment in the rumen and promotes the growth of E. coli. Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's dilemma, said, "The industrial food system is always looking for greater efficiency, but each new step in efficiency leads to problems. If you take feedlot cattle off of their corn diet, give them grass for five days, they will shed 80% of the E. coli in their gut. But of course that's not what the industry does. The industry's approach is when it has a systematic problem like that is not to go back and see what's wrong with the system. It's to come up with some high tech fixes to allow the system to survive." Rather than reducing the presence of E. coli, the high tech fix bathes the meat in ammonia to kill the bacteria. Poultry and pork Poultry and pork production have their own set of problems. Chickens are grown in dark, unclean environments with tens of thousands of birds crowded into one hen house, and they're given antibiotics. A woman who formerly raised chickens for Tyson and Purdue said that she became "allergic to all antibiotics" as a result of her work. Food, Inc. shows the Smithfield hog processing plant at Tar Heel, NC, the largest slaughterhouse in the world. 32,000 hogs are slaughtered there per day. The documentary exposes the working conditions at the plant, where many of the employees allegedly are illegal aliens who are afraid to complain about the conditions for fear of being deported. Corn subsidies Food, Inc. exposes the federal farm subsidy program, which enables the food industry to purchase corn below cost of production. That corn finds it way into a multitude of foods via maltodextrin, high fructose corn syrup, and other corn-derived products. As sugar consumption has increased, incidence of obesity and diabetes have increased. According to statistics cited by Food, Inc.:
Genetic engineering Food, Inc. also discusses the use of genetic engineering and the problems that it causes. Until the 1980s, patenting life was unknown. The documentary discusses Monsanto's efforts to control the food supply through genetic engineering and patents and the devastating impact that this has had on small farmers whose crops have been contaminated by Monsanto's patented genes. A viable alternative? Joel Salatin, owner of Polyface Farms in Shenandoah Valley, VA, provides an example of an alternative to CAFOs: a family farm producing food organically. The FDA tried to shut him down for alleged unsanitary conditions, but he was allowed to continue when laboratory tests showed much less bacterial contamination than what is typical of CAFOs. Conclusion Food, Inc. is an educational, informative documentary that I recommend to all Americans who care about their food and their health. My two main disagreements with Food, Inc. are these:
The call for a new religion overlooks the fact that we already have a religion that, if its teachings were followed, would protect the environment. That religion is called Christianity, though not all who claim to be Christian have followed its teachings. Jesus Christ, the founder of Christianity, said that the greatest commandments are these:
If we truly loved our neighbors as ourselves, we would not mistreat workers and taint the food supply. The problem in fulfilling the second-greatest commandment is that our human nature pulls us in opposite direction. That's where the object of the greatest commandment comes in. Man was created in God's image but fell from innocence through sin. His Son, Jesus, came, lived a sinless life, and died for our sins. If we accept that sacrifice, we can be reconciled to God and have help from God to love our neighbor as ourselves. Being in a right relationship with God promotes not only good food in this life but good fruit for all eternity. Today I updated my links to other websites, adding new links in every category. One of the additions under "Genetically engineered food" is a link to an interview with Dr. Jeffrey Smith, arguably the world's leading expert on genetically modified organisms (GMOs).
Smith says, "GMOs are not safe and should never have been introduced. In fact, the scientists at the FDA had said over and over again that these products are different and risky and should be tested carefully. They said it could create allergies, toxins, new diseases, and nutritional problems, but they were ignored in fact by the person in charge of policy, who was a former attorney to Monsanto, Michael Taylor, who was in charge of policy at the FDA, later Monsanto's vice president, and now the U.S. food safety czar. Monsanto, of course, is a big biotech company. So now the concerns by the FDA scientists have been validated. The American Academy of Environmental Medicine says all doctors should prescribe non-GMO diets to everyone, citing animal feeding studies showing reproductive problems, accelerated aging, organ damage, gastrointestinal problems, and other problems." According to Smith, five of the things that can go wrong when food crops are genetically engineered are as follows:
In my previous blot post I listed the "Dirty Dozen" and the "Clean 15"—fruits and vegetables that are most likely and least likely to be tainted with pesticide residue. In this blog post I list the eight foods in the United states that are commonly genetically engineered. Those eight are as follows:
For more information about the Tainted Eight, see The Dirty Secret GMO Companies Dont Want You to Know. For information about the risks of genetically engineered foods, click Links before this blog post and see the genetically engineered food articles.
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AuthorI was a technical writer for more than 30 years. I am interested in health and environmental issues. Archives
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