On Memorial Day weekend, 2 million people marched across the U.S. and in more than 50 other countries in a protest against seed giant Monsanto for the purpose of bringing awareness to hazards from genetically modified food, which it and other companies manufacture. Organizer Tami Canal said protests were held in 436 cities in 52 countries.
Genetically modified plants are grown from genetically modified, or engineered, seeds, which are created to resist insecticides and herbicides so that crops can be grown to withstand a weed-killing pesticide or integrate a bacterial toxin that can ward off pests.
The Chicago Tribune reported that because genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, not listed on food or ingredient labels, few Americans realize they're eating GMO foods every day. Genetically modified crops constitute 93 percent of all soy, 86 percent of all corn and 93 percent of all canola seeds planted in the U.S., and are used in an about 70 percent of all American processed food.
The Tribune reported that the Food and Drug Administration has permitted the sale and planting of genetically modified foods for 15 years and that the Obama administration has approved an "unprecedented number of genetically modified crops," such as ethanol corn, alfalfa and sugar beets. The Alliance for Natural Health added that the U. S. Dept. of Agriculture now wants to eliminate any regulatory controls from genetically altered corn and cotton.
And Monsanto, the world's largest seed maker and a publicly traded American multinational agricultural biotechnology corporation, is leading the pro-GMO march and moving full-steam ahead in being the No. 1 U.S. and global farm supplier.
CEO Hugh Grant said this past week, "We're in a growth mode, and with the combination of momentum in our core businesses and new layers of growth coming online from an increasingly global portfolio, we have the strategic drivers in place to continue our growth trajectory next year and beyond."
However, Europe's resistance against GMOs paid off as Reuters reported Friday that Monsanto is "not pushing for expansion of genetically modified crops in most of Europe as opposition to its biotech seeds in many countries remains high."
And the Washington Post also reported the same day that South Korea recently joined Japan in suspending imports of U.S. wheat after an experimental and unapproved strain of GM wheat, designed to resist the deadly effects of Monsanto's most popular herbicide and weed killer, Roundup, was discovered growing on an Oregon farm. (Just last Wednesday, the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture found the rogue Monsanto wheat sprouts in the Beaver State when an Oregon farmer, who was attempting to wipe out a field by spraying Roundup, couldn't kill the wheat crops.)
There's good reason that most European countries, Japan and South Korea are resisting GMO crops. Business columnist Al Lewis summarized the dilemma Monsanto faces in his column for Dow Jones Newswires: "For Monsanto, it comes down to saving the nine billion people expected to populate the planet by 2050. Monsanto is the company that allows farmers to grow more food with less land, water and energy. But it is also the company that brought us products we now know were far more dangerous than advertised, including the insecticide DDT, the toxic industrial chemicals known as PCBs and the Vietnam-era defoliant Agent Orange, which poisoned our own soldiers with dioxins. Monsanto also brought us saccharine – sweet, yet artificial, and known to cause cancer in laboratory rats."
The Alliance for Natural Health cited the late George Wald, a Nobel laureate in medicine and physiology and one of the first scientists to speak out about the dangers of genetically engineered foods: "Recombinant DNA technology [genetic engineering] faces our society with problems unprecedented, not only in the history of science, but of life on the Earth. … Now whole new proteins will be transposed overnight into wholly new associations, with consequences no one can foretell, either for the host organism or their neighbors. … For going ahead in this direction may not only be unwise but dangerous. Potentially, it could breed new animal and plant diseases, new sources of cancer, novel epidemics."
So instead of eradicating the need for insecticides and herbicides, genetically modified plants eventually could warrant stronger and more intense pesticides to outwit and overcome superbugs and greater strains of diseases.
And who's to say what GMOs will do – now or in generations – inside our bodies as we consume them on a greater scale and they become a part of the bacteria in our digestive tracts? With more and more U.S. foods being grown, manufactured and imported from places like South America and Eastern Europe – the precise areas outside the U.S. where Monsanto's biotech seeds are gaining their greatest foothold, food imports are quickly becoming a recipe for disaster. Remember, too, much of the GM crop grown around the world is used for livestock feed, so there's more than one way for GMOs to be ingested in your diet, such as from meat and dairy products.
Equally alarming is a brand new study that was just published in the journal Neurology. According to Medical Daily, a review of 104 studies conducted around the world revealed that exposure to pesticides, insecticides, weed killers, fungicides, solvents, etc., increased the risk of developing Parkinson's disease by 30 to 80 percent.
Dr. Emanuele Cereda, lead author among the team of researchers from the IRCCS University Hospital San Matteo Foundation in Pavia, Italy, told the British newspaper Daily Mail, "We didn't study whether the type of exposure, such as whether the compound was inhaled or absorbed through the skin and the method of application, such as spraying or mixing, affected Parkinson's risk. However, our study suggests that the risk increases in a dose response manner as the length of exposure to these chemicals increases."
According to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research, "Parkinson's disease is a chronic, degenerative neurological disorder that affects one in 100 people over age 60. While the average age at onset is 60, some people are diagnosed at 40 or younger. … Estimates of the number of people living with the disease therefore vary, but recent research indicates that at least one million people in the United States, and more than five million worldwide, have Parkinson's disease."
Eat local and organic, period. And fight GMOs invading U.S. food industries and American homes.
(Next week in my C-Force health and fitness column, published Saturday at WND, I will separate the truths and myths about GMOs as told by marketers and health professionals and then tell you exact steps that you and your loved ones can take to avoid GMOs in your local grocers and beyond.)Â
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