Monday, November 03, 2014

Scientist Snitches on GMOs

A former research scientist for Agriculture Canada, Thierry Vrain, says there is a growing body of research in Europe and Russia showing diets containing engineered corn or soya causes serious health problems leading to premature death in laboratory animals. Inserting genes into a plant's genome causes it to generate proteins that are defective or worse, toxic. Bt corn's Cry proteins have been found to be absolutely toxic for mammalian blood. Another study linked them to higher rates of leukemia. Engineered grains are already in most processed foods. That is why labeling is so important. It's the only way consumers have of to avoid consuming "frankenfood".

GMOs are mostly engineered to increase their tolerance of herbicides and pesticides used in increasingly large amounts by industrial agriculture. These poisons are not good for the planet, its wildlife, or humans.  Monsanto's herbicide "RoundUp" is a magnesium chelator (glyphosate) that deprives plants and organisims, some of them beneficial, of necessary minerals in the soil. New evidence shows that it also chelates maganesium from humans that eat RoundUp tolerant GMOs. Why is consuming plants able to withstand a witches' brew of toxic chemicals considered progress? Because huge international companies like Monsanto make huge profits from selling the chemicals to global argiculture. Given that profit motive it is easy to understand why corporations are willing to spend millions fighting labeling initiatives in state after state--truth labels are bad for business.