On May 19, 2009, the American Academy Of Environmental Medicine called for an immediate moratorium on Genetically Modified Foods (GMOs), stating that “GM foods pose a serious health risk.” Citing several animal studies, the AAEM concluded “there is more than a casual association between GM foods and adverse health effects” and that “GM foods pose a serious health risk in toxicology, allergy and immune function, reproductive health, and metabolic, physiologic and genetic health.”
You may not know that over 70% of foods in a conventional grocery store contain Genetically Modified Foods. The most common foods that are genetically engineered include corn, soy, canola, and cottonseed oil, which can be found as ingredients in almost all non-organic packaged foods, and even in the food in most restaurants. Additionally, the vast majority of corn and soybeans in the United States are grown to feed livestock—meaning the GMOs are incorporated into animal tissue and ingested at a much higher rate by humans than if we ate the corn or soybeans directly. So, unless you eat organic both in and outside of your home, you will inevitably participate in the GMO experiment being perpetuated on us all.
The AAEM calls for:
- A moratorium on GM food, implementation of immediate long term safety testing and labeling of GM food.
- Physicians to educate their patients, the medical community and the public to avoid GM foods.[1]
- Physicians to consider the role of GM foods in their patients’ disease processes.
- More independent long term scientific studies to begin gathering data to investigate the role of GM foods on human health.
Why Should You Care?
Consider these facts:
- More and more doctors are already prescribing GM-free diets. Dr. Amy Dean, a Michigan internal medicine specialist, and board member of AAEM says, “I strongly recommend patients eat strictly non-genetically modified foods.” 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.”
- World renowned biologist Pushpa M. Bhargava reviewed more than 600 scientific journals, and concluded that “genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are a major contributor to the sharply deteriorating health of Americans.”
- Among the population, biologist David Schubert of the Salk Institute warns that “children are the most likely to be adversely effected by toxins and other dietary problems” related to GM foods. He says without adequate studies, our children become “experimental animals.”[2] In the US population, the incidence of low birth weight babies, infertility, and infant mortality are all escalating.
- GM corn and cotton are engineered to produce their own built-in pesticide in every cell. When bugs bite the plant, the poison splits open their stomach and kills them. The Bt-toxin produced in GM plants is thousands of times more concentrated than natural Bt spray used by some organic farmers. It is designed to be more toxic,[3] it has properties of an allergen, and unlike the spray, cannot be washed off the plant.
- AAEM states, “Multiple animal studies show significant immune dysregulation,” including increase in cytokines, which are “associated with asthma, allergy, and inflammation”—all on the rise in the US.
- GM soy and corn each contain two new proteins with allergenic properties,[4] GM soy has up to seven times more trypsin inhibitor—a known soy allergen,[5] and skin prick tests show some people react to GM, but not to non-GM soy.[6] Soon after GM soy was introduced to the UK, soy allergies skyrocketed by 50%. Perhaps the US epidemic of food allergies and asthma is a casualty of genetic manipulation.
- The only published human feeding study revealed what may be the most dangerous problem from GM foods. The gene inserted into GM soy transfers into the DNA of bacteria living inside our intestines and continues to function.[7] This means that long after we stop eating GMOs, we may still have potentially harmful GM proteins produced continuously inside of us. Put more plainly, eating a corn chip produced from Bt corn might transform our intestinal bacteria into living pesticide factories, possibly for the rest of our lives.
- In the first nine years after the large scale introduction of GM crops in 1996, the incidence of people with three or more chronic diseases nearly doubled, from 7% to 13%.[9]
Scientists at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had warned about all these problems even in the early 1990s. According to documents released from a lawsuit, the scientific consensus at the FDA was that GM foods were inherently dangerous, and might create hard-to-detect allergies, poisons, gene transfer to gut bacteria, new diseases, and nutritional problems. They urged their superiors to require rigorous long-term tests.[8] But the biotech industry has a powerful lobby, and the White House ordered the agency to promote biotechnology anyway, denied knowledge of scientists’ concerns and declared that no safety studies on GMOs were required!
If Genetically Modified foods are contributing to the rise of autism, obesity, diabetes, asthma, cancer, heart disease, allergies, reproductive problems, or any other common health problem now plaguing Americans, we may never know. Although animals suffer greatly in many ways after consuming Genetically Modified foods, the truth is, we just don’t know exactly how GMOs are affecting human health. But with no safety testing required before their release into the environment, we have all been made unwitting lab rats.
So, What Can You Do?
To help identify how GMOs are causing harm, the AAEM has asked the scientific community to begin research to investigate the role of GM foods on human health, and conduct safe methods of determining the effect of GM foods on human health.
Nobody deserves to be a lab rat. We should all demand a moratorium on GMOs from our state representatives until proper studies have been done. As a first step, we can demand the labeling of foods that contain GMOs by signing this petition to President Obama.
In the meantime, to avoid GMOs in your food, stay away from anything made with soy or corn (such as high-fructose corn syrup, soymilk, margarine, and almost all packaged snack foods like potato and corn chips), anything including or cooked in soybean, cottonseed and canola oil, and sugar from GM sugar beets (found in many non-organic chocolate bars and candies)—unless it is labeled organic or “non-GMO.” This includes food ordered at restaurants, most of which are cooked in cheap GMO soybean and canola oils.
You can also download a pocket Non-GMO Shopping Guide, co-produced by the Institute for Responsible Technology and the Center for Food Safety.
If even a small percentage of people choose non-GMO brands, the food industry will likely respond as they did in Europe—by removing all GM ingredients. So, Don’t Panic, Eat Organic!
Thanks to “Spilling the Beans,” a monthly column available at www.responsibletechnology.org for the research for this article.
- http://www.aaemonline.org/gmopost.html
- David Schubert, personal communication to H. Penfound, Greenpeace Canada, October 25, 2002.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
- 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).
- Netherwood et al, “Assessing the survival of transgenic plant DNA in the human gastrointestinal tract,” Nature Biotechnology 22 (2004): 2.
- See memos at www.biointegrity.org
- 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
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