GENETICALLY MODIFIED ORGANISMS (GMOs) ARE ONE OF THE MOST DANGEROUS AND RADICAL CHANGES TO OUR FOOD SUPPLY.

The Health Risks of Eating GMOs

In 1999, Dr. Arpad Pusztai, the world’s top GMO safety researcher at the prestigious Rowett Institute in Scotland was working on a UK government grant to design long-term testing protocols intended to become part of the official European GM food safety assessment process. When Pusztai fed supposedly harmless GMOs to rats, they developed potentially pre-cancerous cell growth, smaller brains, livers and testicles, partially atrophied livers, and showed signs of a damaged immune system. Moreover, the results clearly indicated that the cause of the problem was due to the unpredictable side effects arising from the process of genetic engineering itself. In other words, his study suggested that the GM foods already on the market, which were created from the same process, might also create such effects. When Dr Pusztai expressed his concern he was fired from his job of 35 years and silenced with threats of a lawsuit. His 20-member research team was disbanded, all testing protocols were abandoned, and the pro-GM establishment embarked on an extensive disinformation campaign to discredit the study’s results to protect the reputation of GM foods already in the marketplace.

When an invitation to testify before Parliament allowed Pusztai to finally tell his alarming story, all hell broke loose. The outpouring of news coverage, said to one columnist, “divided society into two warring blocs” over the GM food issue. An industry wide rejection of GMOs was reached quickly thanks to the buying power of consumers who convinced manufacturers to keep GMOs out of the European Union, in spite of official approvals by the pro-GM European Commission.

Americans are Uninformed AND Misinformed on GMOs

In the US, not only was the Pusztai story barely mentioned by the media, but Project Censored (which compiles an annual list of news stories of social significance that have been overlooked by the country’s major national news media) described it as one of the ten most underreported events of the year. Indeed, the US mainstream media has been consistently close-lipped about the enormous health risks of GM foods. The US media failed to cover the preliminary study from the Russian National Academy of Sciences, for example, that showed that more than half the offspring of mother rats fed GM soy died within three weeks (compared to 9% from mothers fed natural soy). They also neglected to report that the only human GM feeding study ever published showed that the foreign genes inserted into GM food crops can transfer into the DNA of our gut bacteria. This means that long after we stop eating GM corn chips, our intestinal flora might continue to manufacture the “Bt” pesticide that the GM corn plants are engineered to produce. Americans were also not told about the estimated 10,000 sheep that died within 5-7 days of grazing on GM cotton plants—also designed to produce this Bt-toxin.

For more details, see our complete Health Risks brochure.