The Natural Solutions Foundation, the leading Global Health Freedom organization, is proud to present this information to you. We protect your right to know about – and to use – natural ways to maintain and regain your health, no matter where in the world you live. Among your freedoms is the right to clean, unadulterated food free of genetic manipulation, pesticides, heavy metals or other contaminants and access to herbs, supplements, frequency devices and other means as therapies that may benefit or to protect your well-being without drugs and other dangerous interventions, if you choose.
For more information on our global programs, including the International Decade of Nutrition, and our US based ones, please visit us at www.HealthFreedomUSA.org and www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org and join the free email list for the Health Freedom eAlerts to keep you in the loop, informed and active defending your right to make your own decisions about your health and wellbeing!
Our activities are supported 100% by your tax deductible donations. Please give generously (http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=189) to the Natural Solutions Foundation. Thank you for your support.
Feel free to disseminate this information as widely as possible with full attribution.
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
The funny thing about Truth is that it has a way of getting out, escaping confinement, growing like a seed sprout towards the sunlight. And, like a sprout, it pokes first one tender shoot up towards the light, and then another, gaining strength and finding its direction from the sunlight it is reaching for. Sometimes, however, the obstacles overhead (for example, concrete paving, tramping jack boots, broad leaf herbicides) are just too much for the tender sprout and it fails while its twins try reaching for the light elsewhere. As long as there is light, there will be some seed that makes it. Unless, of course, the seed has been genetically altered and has contaminated its brothers and cousins and distant relations so that there are no more of its kind.
That, of course, is part of the threat from genetically engineered (called variously “GM” or (“GMO” or “GE” )foods: their modifications wander, not only inside the nucleus of the cell coding for novel effects never before seen (like cancer-producing proteins, for example) but that DNA wanders into the wind through pollen and pollinators changing crops and weeds forever since currently there is no way known to reverse the genetic changes which “volunteer” pollen produces in the same and different species.
Animals (that means birds and bees and wasps and horses and pigs and chickens and you and me and our children) are impacted in ways which we know and ways which we do not know yet. Using the “Precautionary Principle” of Codex, GM foods would all be illegal because they have not been proven to be safe. Indeed, the US, which forbids indicating a food has GM ingredients because they know that consumers would reject it, approves all GM foods once a patent is obtained because then-President George H. W. Bush declared GM foods to be identical to normal foods. Since then, the FDA follows the same principle: a voluntary
Certificate of Equivalence (CE)” may be applied for and obtained by the owners of a patent on a GM food, but it is only a frill. Whether there is, or is not, a CE on file somewhere, GM crops and animals are allowed in the food supply by the US Government without a shred of safety testing on their impact on animals, plants, the environment or humans. Astonishingly, the FDA and other agencies assert, without having examined the data, that these genetically manipulated foods are safe. All independent science with which I am familiar makes it clear that not only are these foods not safe, they are downright dangerous to your health and that of the environment.
Romania, unlike most of the rest of the European Community, had bought into the GM story lock, stock and agricultural barrel. Read the report below to see how things are a’changin!
Then consider that, as we told you in our eye-witness reports from Oslo in February, 2007 and Accra in February, 2008, other countries, including an emerging African coalition, are not so happy with the FDA’s bland friendliness to GM crops and animals. These days, because of this turning tide, the Biotech Industry (think, for example, Monsanto) is often described as “beleaguered”. So may it be! Beleaguered to the point of legal and economic barriers to the manufacture, planting and selling of ANY genetically modified food or food anywhere in the world. Beleaguered to the point of a total ban on pharmaceutical GM crops and animals like the drug producing rice that contaminated much of Louisiana’s rice country for 5 years before Bayer, a major player in GM and GM drugs bothered to inform either the noq-contaminated neighboring rice growers or the end users, the consuemr who got this stuff in their rice bowls.
Beleagured to the point that the drug-producing cows in New Zealand, a once pristine pesticide and GM free island contaminated by 3 years of “accidental” shipement of GM seeds by the US, no longer have a market for their milk and cattle can return to being cattle, not dangerous factories of dangerous drugs.
The Natural Solutions Foundation will be at the next Codex meeting dealing with GM foods to participate with, and help lead, the coalition of African pro-health countries from April 26-May 2, 2008 in Ottawa Canada. At the last meting, Africa’s newly emerging coalition (which we have spent the last 3 years supporting and building in Africa and at Codex meetings) led Switzerland, Norway, Russia and Japan, among others, in opposing the US assertion that foods on the market are regarded as safe.
Good for them. Now the next (and much larger) task is for this pro-health coalition is to hold the line on this issue (which is really a set up by the US for tanking any country which keeps our GM foods to the World Trade Organization and socking them with huge trade sanctions until they cave in). We’ll be there to give you daily eye witness reports if you send us there!
Your tax deductible donations are urgently needed. Click here (http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=189) to help assure your voice and your interests will be at Codex and you will hear what actually happens there! Thanks for your support.
Remember, freedom is not free!
Romania reconsiders its welcome of biotech corn
By James Kanter
Published: March 26, 2008
PARIS: Romania, which has been one of the most receptive markets on a skeptical Continent for genetically modified crops, is moving toward a reversal of its stance, in what would be another setback for the beleaguered biotechnology industry in Europe.
Attila Korodi, Romania’s environment minister, said he would ask a committee of experts Thursday to revaluate a gene-altered version of corn, MON810, the only modified crop that has been approved for commercial planting in the European Union.
During an interview, Korodi said not enough studies had been done to gauge the effects of the corn on ecological systems in Romania, including in the Black Sea area.
In addition, he said, banning biotech crops could increase rural prosperity by allowing farmers to take advantage of a growing global demand for organic feed and foodstuffs, which, in addition to being unaltered, are grown without chemical pesticides or fertilizers.
Such products can command higher prices – although experts question whether farming practices in much of Eastern Europe are developed enough for such a specialized market.
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“I think becoming an organic country is a good thing,” Korodi said. “We have to analyze the true costs of growing GMOs,” he added, since the technology was potentially harmful to the environment and had become widely unpopular in Romania.
An actual ban would still be some ways off and could require parliamentary support, he said.
But its consideration, coming a month after France imposed a similar ban on the corn variety, would be another obstacle for the industry in Europe, where there is widespread skepticism about biotech foods. Specifically, it would hurt the U.S. seed company Monsanto, which produces MON810.
Romania, the biggest corn grower in the 27-member EU by hectares under cultivation, represents a vast potential market for Monsanto and other biotechnology companies. MON810 is designed to combat pests and enhance yields.
“We would be very disappointed to see Romania following France even in attempting to ban such a product, which has proved its benefits to farmers in Romania,” said Cristina Cionga, the manager for public and government affairs for Monsanto Romania. “Our products are completely safe for planting and consumption.”
EU authorities approved MON810 for cultivation a decade ago, but since then four EU countries – Austria, Greece, Hungary and, most recently, France – have imposed bans. Poland operates restrictions on the sale and import of gene-altered seeds, and very little cultivation takes place there.
Most of these countries, including France and Hungary, which are the second- and third-biggest corn growers in Europe, justified the bans on the grounds that the crops potentially could harm soils and reduce biodiversity.
Even in countries that do not operate formal bans, there are impediments.
Italy, which grows roughly the same amount of corn as Hungary, has delegated decisions on biotech crops to its regions, many of which operate de facto bans. In Tuscany, for example, the supply of gene-altered produce is prohibited in catering for schools, hospitals, convalescent homes and in local and regional government offices.
Romania planted only about 325 hectares, or 800 acres, of MON810 in 2007 and this year is expected to plant about 10,000 hectares. That still represents just a fraction of the roughly 2 million to 3 million hectares of corn planted each year in Romania.
Even so, Korodi’s strategy would mark a major change for Romania.
Over the past decade, Romania became the largest producer of gene-altered crops in Europe because of large amounts of modified soy, mostly produced by Monsanto and Pioneer, a unit of DuPont. That crop was approved for use by farmers in Romania but not in the EU, and the government had to pledge to stop growing the crop when Romania joined the bloc in 2007.
In the future, Korodi said, farmers – particularly those with small plots in mountainous areas – could prosper from selling smaller quantities of unmodified produce, as it would command higher prices on local and international markets.
“GMOs mean crops are cheaper to produce,” Korodi said. “But if we look at the market price that GMO-free crops earn, and we look at the costs to biodiversity of using GMOs, then non-GMO crops are better,” he said.
Early this month the Hungarian agriculture minister, Joszef Graf, said his country’s seed industry earned 25 percent more by selling seeds that had not been cross-pollinated with altered crops.
But Nathalie Moll, a spokeswoman for Europabio, a group representing the biotechnology industry, said seed companies had disputed the minister’s statement.
Klaus Reinsberg, a senior researcher at the Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Central and Eastern Europe, said growing nonbiotech crops was often more expensive, requiring more manual labor to remove weeds and to control pests. But labor costs in Romania remain low compared to other parts of the EU, potentially giving the country a competitive advantage.Even so, Romania would still have to prove it could grow produce to high standards for specialized markets and finicky consumers, and deliver those goods to markets on time.
“Countries like Romania and Ukraine are dreaming of producing organic products and to export them for the profits they can bring,” Reinsberg said. “But organic products can have diseases and fungus.” He also said that a big problem for countries like Romania was a “lack of logistics.”
Despite such hurdles, environmental groups welcomed signs of a change of heart in Romania.
“It marks a seismic change,” said Geert Ritsema, who campaigns against genetic engineering for Greenpeace International in Amsterdam.
The Natural Solutions Foundation, the leading Global Health Freedom organization, is proud to present this information to you. We protect your right to know about – and to use – natural ways to maintain and regain your health, no matter where in the world you live. Among your freedoms is the right to clean, unadulterated food free of genetic manipulation, pesticides, heavy metals or other contaminants and access to herbs, supplements, frequency devices and other means as therapies that may benefit or to protect your well-being without drugs and other dangerous interventions, if you choose.
Genetically Modified (GM) foods, crops and animals are one of those items you must be able to chose to put in your body (and your environment) or not. Because the US refuses to label GM knowing that consumers will refuse to eat it, they FORBID the labeling of such “FrankenFoods”. But it is not just food. Cotton is a GM crop mutated to kill a major pest. Supposedly, GM plants will never have their pests become immune to their changes because…. well, because the Biotech Industry says so.
But Mother Nature says differently. Read the article below and then recall that the biotech pollen blows wild and we are seeing super pests and super weeds evolve because of them. Now what? More pesticides? More mutated DNA? More mutated bacteria and genes to serve the short term, and very short sighted, biotech transformation of Nature into commodity for the benefit of global corporations and the detriment of us all? Remember, these products undergo NO safety testing before they are put into the food supply, your bodies and the environment.
Remember, too, that although cotton is a non-food crop, cotton seed oil is a cheap food oil which is heavily used in our food supply. There is no limit to the amount of pesticide which can be used on cotton. There is no assurance that the mutated proteins and other products (including viruses and drug-resistant genes as well as proteins that have never, NEVER, been produced on earth before) are not present in that cheap oil. There is also every assurance that horrific pesticides ARE at fantastic levels can be, may be, are present in that oil and hence in you and everyone else who eats the food made with the oil treated with the pesticides and mutated for profit.
Organic is not perfect, but it is the only assurance that you have that the food that you are eating does not contain more than 10% of these contaminants. “10 %?”, you may ask. “Isn’t that an awful lot of contamination by GM foods in organic food, for which I am paying a hefty premium?” You bet it is. That is what the US Government allows for organic food to still be called “Organic”. Most other countries in the developed world set a limit of 0.09%. Quite a difference.
Do we need reform in this area? You bet. But “Organic” is still a great deal better than conventional, pesticided, GM ridden, trans fat laden, pesticide laced “food”. This investment in health is cheap at twice the price. After all, how expensive is cancer?
Recall that Codex Alimentarius allows a wide range of fearsome pesticides at horrifyingly high levels. And then recall that many of these biological disasters are permitted with no upper limits. Recall, too, that Codex, following the guiding hand of the US, with a Monsanto representative sitting on the delegation, is trying to force the rest of the world to agree that any fodd already on the market (i.e., GM food) is “safe” and does not require labeling.
There will be a meeting in April, 2008, of the Codex Committee on Food Labeling at which the friends of declaratory GM labeling with face down the US as they successfully began to do at the meeting on this topic in Africa last month. The battle continues.
If you want to know what happens from a source you can trust, the Natural Solutions Foundation needs to raise the money to get there so we need your tax deductible donations (http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=189) for that purpose. Since the Natural Solutions Foundation is much more than just talk, we’ll be there for you IF we have the money to get there and cover our costs. That is up to you. We are about 5 weeks away from the start of that meeting. Now would be a good time to show your enthusiastic support for our being there with a recurring donation.
For more information on our global programs, including the International Decade of Nutrition, and our US based ones, please visit us at www.HealthFreedomUSA.org and www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org and join the free email list for the Health Freedom eAlerts to keep you in the loop, informed and active defending your right to make your own decisions about your health and wellbeing!
Our activities are supported 100% by your tax deductible donations. Please give generously (http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=189) to the Natural Solutions Foundation. Thank you for your support.
Feel free to disseminate this information as widely as possible with full attribution.
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
PEST RESISTANCE TO GM COTTON AND MAIZE
An insect that is supposed to be killed by a genetically modified (GM)
cotton crop with an in-built poison gene (the plant is the insecticide) has
developed resistance and is beginning to spread in parts of the United
States of America, a scientific study has found. A study by the Agricultural
Research Council (ARC) has found similar results for Bt GM maize in South
Africa.
Bt GM plants are developed by inserting a gene into the plant that is
normally found in a bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). The
bacterial gene produces a protein poison that kills certain insects but is
normally harmless to others.
In South Africa the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) has published trial
results that indicate stalk-borer larvae have developed the ability to
survive the Bt poison contained in GM maize plants.
Researchers in the ARC study collected larvae from Bt maize fields in
Christiana in the North West and Ventersdorp, about 320 km away, where Bt
maize was not being grown.
Their field and greenhouse trials showed the same results. Most of the
bollworm larvae collected from non-Bt crops survived only to the eighth day
of the trial (which involved being exposed to Bt maize). But a substantial
number of larvae collected from Bt maize survived over the whole trial
period.
In the USA, a study from the University of Arizona, to be published in
Nature Biotechnology, focused on Bt cotton. This study found that the
bollworm insect developed resistance because of the huge area of land in the
USA – and elsewhere – under Bt GM crop cultivation.
According to the study, the land area under Bt GM cultivation has generated
one of the largest forces of natural selection for insect resistance that
the world has ever known.
The resistant form of bollworm larvae was found in fields in the southern
states of Mississippi and Arkansas between 2003 and 2006, when the surveys
were conducted.
Other major pests attacking Bt crops had not evolved resistance, the
researchers said. The bollworm is a major pest in south-eastern USA and
Texas.
(sources: Farmer’s Weekly 7 March 2008, GMWatch 4 Februa
The Natural Solutions Foundation, the leading Global Health Freedom organization, is proud to present this information to you. We protect your right to know about – and to use – natural ways to maintain and regain your health, no matter where in the world you live. Among your freedoms is the right to clean, unadulterated food free of genetic manipulation, pesticides, heavy metals or other contaminants and access to herbs, supplements, frequency devices and other means as therapies that may benefit or to protect your well-being without drugs and other dangerous interventions, if you choose.
For more information on our global programs, including the International Decade of Nutrition, and our US based ones, please visit us at www.HealthFreedomUSA.org and www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org and join the free email list for the Health Freedom eAlerts to keep you in the loop, informed and active defending your right to make your own decisions about your health and wellbeing!
Our activities are supported 100% by your tax deductible donations. Please give generously (http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=189) to the Natural Solutions Foundation. Thank you for your support.
Feel free to disseminate this information as widely as possible with full attribution.
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
I have been telling people for decades that if no self respecting bug, bacterium or mold would eat something, it was not food. As a physician helping people to move from deadly diets to life-preserving ones, and adding supplements, herbs, etc. while helping people to detoxify, rather than die, this was a conversation I had over and over with people in both my consulting offices and in public fora like radio shows and lectures.
The “Bigs” — Big Pharma, Big Agra, Big Govt. — who currently control Codex Alimentarius (the World Food Code) want you to have no choice but to eat food that is so laden with preservatives, pesticides, herbicides and other chemical contaminants, to say nothing of hormones and antibiotics in your meats, vaccines in the animals you eat (and all of it irradiated) that it may never rot, but you will never be healthy. After all, Codex was the creation of the German pharmaceutical industry after World War II. That’s a fascinating story all by itself which you can watch in my lecture “Nutricide“, also available as a DVD(http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=156).
For the sake of profit (both the profits from the illnesses you WILL get from eating unhealthy foods and the profits from the industrialization of the food industry (including the genetic modification of what used to be food), your food is on the chopping block: the multinationals want to control every bite you eat for their best outcome. But what’s in that food? Mostly, if it’s prepared food, what’s in it is not food at all.
We have become so used to believing that if it is available for us to eat in a food context, it must be food, that we are literally blind and deaf to our own best instincts about what is, and what is not, food. Michael Pollan is the author of an exceptional book which I urge every food loving, freedom loving or food AND freedom loving person within the range of my computer to read. The Omnivore’s Dilemna, published in paperback by Penguin Books, is a book that will change your relationship to food and its meaning in your life and in your death… no matter how well informed you are.
I believe I know a good deal about food and food purity and preparation. It knocked my socks off.
Read it, but first, read this interview by Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now” and Mr. Pollan.
Don’t Eat Anything That Doesn’t Rot
—————————————————-
Michael Pollan with Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
Posted March 8, 2008.
Consumers are getting duped by the food industry, paying the price with their health.
Acclaimed author and journalist Michael Pollan argues that what most Americans are consuming today is not food but “edible foodlike substances.” His previous book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, was named one of 2006’s ten best books by the New York Times and the Washington Post. His latest book is called In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.
Amy Goodman:†You are what to eat.” Or so the saying goes. In American culture, healthy food is a national preoccupation. But then, why are Americans becoming less healthy and more overweight?
Michael Pollan joined me for a wide-ranging conversation about nutrition, food science and the current American diet. I began by asking him why he feels he has to defend food.
Michael Pollan: Food’s under attack from two quarters. It’s under attack from the food industry, which is taking, you know, perfectly good whole foods and tricking them up into highly processed edible foodlike substances, and from nutritional science, which has over the years convinced us that we shouldn’t be paying attention to food, it’s really the nutrients that matter. And they’re trying to replace foods with antioxidants, you know, cholesterol, saturated fat, omega-3s, and that whole way of looking at food as a collection of nutrients, I think, is very destructive.
Goodman: Shouldn’t people be concerned, for example, about cholesterol?
Pollan: No. Cholesterol in the diet is actually only very mildly related to cholesterol in the blood. It was a — that was a scientific error, basically. We were sold a bill of goods that we should really worry about the cholesterol in our food, basically because cholesterol is one of the few things we could measure that was linked to heart disease, so there was this kind of obsessive focus on cholesterol. But, you know, the egg has been rehabilitated. You know, the egg is very high in cholesterol, and now we’re told it’s actually a perfectly good, healthy food. So there’s only a very tangential relationship between the cholesterol you eat and the cholesterol levels in your blood.
Goodman: How is it that the food we eat now, it takes time to read the ingredients?
Pollan: Yeah.
Goodman: You actually have to stop and spend time and perhaps put on glasses or figure out how to pronounce words you have never heard of.
Pollan: Yeah, it’s a literary scientific experience now going shopping in the supermarket, because basically the food has gotten more complex. It’s — for the food industry — see, to understand the economics of the food industry, you can’t really make money selling things like, oh, oatmeal, you know, plain rolled oats. And if you go to the store, you can buy a pound of oats, organic oats, for 79 cents. There’s no money in that, because it doesn’t have any brand identification. It’s a commodity, and the prices of commodity are constantly falling over time.
So you make money by processing it, adding value to it. So you take those oats, and you turn them into Cheerios, and then you can charge four bucks for that 79 cents — and actually even less than that, a few pennies of oats. And then after a few years, Cheerios become a commodity. You know, everyone’s ripping off your little circles. And so, you have to move to the next thing, which are like cereal bars. And now there’s cereal straws, you know, that your kids are supposed to suck milk through, and then they eat the straw. It’s made out of the cereal material. It’s extruded.
So, you see, every level of further complication gives you some intellectual property, a product no one else has, and the ability to charge a whole lot more for these very cheap raw ingredients. And as you make the food more complicated, you need all these chemicals to make it last, to make it taste good, to make — and because, you know, food really isn’t designed to last a year on the shelf in a supermarket. And so, it takes a lot of chemistry to make that happen.
Goodman: I was a whole grain baker in Maine, and I would consider the coup to be to get our whole grain organic breads in the schools of Maine for the kids, but we just couldn’t compete with Wonder Bread which could stay on the shelf — I don’t know if it was a year.
Pollan: That’s amazing.
Goodman: Ours, after a few days, of course, would get moldy, because it was alive.
Pollan: Right. And, in fact, one of my tips is, don’t eat any food that’s incapable of rotting. If the food can’t rot eventually, there’s something wrong.
Goodman: What is nutritionism?
Pollan: Nutritionism is the prevailing ideology in the whole world of food. And it’s not a science. It is an ideology. And like most ideologies, it is a set of assumptions about how the world works that we’re totally unaware of. And nutritionism, there’s a few fundamental tenets to it. One is that food is collections of nutrients, that basically the sum of — you know, food is the sum of the nutrients it contains. The other is that since the nutrient is the key unit and, as ordinary people, we can’t see or taste or feel nutrients, we need experts to help us design our foods and tell us how to eat.
Another assumption of nutritionism is that you can measure these nutrients and you know what they’re doing, that we know what cholesterol is and what it does in our body or what an antioxidant is. And that’s a dubious proposition.
And the last premise of nutritionism is that the whole point of eating is to advance your physical health and that that’s what we go to the store for, that’s what we’re buying. And that’s also a very dubious idea. If you go around the world, people eat for a great many reasons besides, you know, the medicinal reason. I mean, they eat for pleasure, they eat for community and family and identity and all these things. But we’ve put that aside with this obsession with nutrition.
And I basically think it’s a pernicious ideology. I mean, I don’t think it’s really helping us. If there was a trade-off, if looking at food this way made us so much healthier, great. But in fact, since we’ve been looking at food this way, our health has gotten worse and worse.
Goodman: Let’s talk about the diseases of Western civilization.
Pollan: The Western diseases, which — they were named that about a hundred years ago by a medical doctor named Denis Burkett, an Englishman, who noted that there — after the Western diet comes to these countries where he had spent a lot of time in Africa and Asia, a series of Western diseases followed, very predictably: obesity, diabetes, heart disease and a specific set of cancers. And he said, well, they must have this common origin, because we keep seeing this pattern.
And we’ve known this for a hundred years, that if you eat this Western diet, which is defined basically as — I mean, we all know what the Western diet is, but to reiterate it, it’s lots of processed food, lots of refined grain and pure sugar, lots of red meat and processed meats, very little whole grains, very little fresh fruits and vegetables. That’s the Western diet — it’s the fast-food diet — that we know it leads to those diseases. About 80 percent of heart disease, at least as much Type II diabetes, 33 to 40 percent cancers all come out of eating that way, and we know this. And the odd thing is that it doesn’t seem to discomfort us that much.
Goodman: Talk about coming from another culture and coming here. When you specifically talk about sugar, refined wheat, what actually happens in the body?
Pollan: Well, that’s where you see it most directly. When populations that have not been exposed to this kind of food for a long time — we’ve seen it with Pacific Islanders, if you go to Hawaii, we’ve seen it with Mexican immigrants coming to America — these are the people who have the most trouble with this diet, and they get fat very quickly and get diabetes very quickly. You know, we hear about this epidemic of diabetes, but it’s very much of a class and ethnically based phenomenon, and Hispanics have much more trouble with it. And the reason or the hypothesis is that, culturally and physically, they haven’t been dealing with a lot of refined grain, whereas in Europe, we’ve been dealing with refined grain for a couple hundred years.
Goodman: And what does refined wheat do?
Pollan: Well, what happens is, when you — there was a key invention around the 1860s, which is we developed these steel rollers and porcelain rollers that could grind wheat and corn and other grains really fine and eliminate the germ and the bran. And the reason we wanted to do that was we loved it as white as possible. It would last longer. The rats had less interest in it, because it had less nutrients in it. And also you get a kind of a real strong hit of glucose. I mean, basically it digests much quicker, as soon as it hits the tongue. I mean, everyone has — you know, if you’ve ever tasted Wonder Bread, you know how sweet it is. The reason it’s sweet is it’s so highly refined that as soon as your saliva hits it, it turns to sugar.
Whole grains have a whole lot of other nutrients. You know, it once was possible to live by bread alone, because a whole grain loaf of bread has all sorts of other nutrients. It has omega-3s, it has, you know, lots of B vitamins. And we remove those when we refine grain. And it’s kind of odd and maladaptive that refined grain should be so prestigious since it’s so unhealthy. But we’ve always liked it, and one of the reasons is it stores longer.
Goodman: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Talk about the funding of nutrition science.
Pollan: Well, nutrition science is very compromised by industry. Organizations like the American Dietetic Association take sponsorship from companies who are eager to find — you know, be able to make health claims. Not all nutrition science. And there are very large, important studies that are, you know, published — that are supported by the government and are as good as any other medical studies in terms of their cleanness. But there is a lot of corporate nutrition science that’s done for the express purpose of developing health claims. This science reliably finds health benefits for whatever is being studied. You take a pomegranate to one of these scientists, and they will tell you that it will cure cancer and erectile dysfunction. You take, you know, any kind of food that you want. And now, it’s not surprising, because food is good for you, and that all plants have antioxidants.
Goodman: Explain what an antioxidant is.
Pollan: Well, an antioxidant is a chemical compound that plants produce, really to protect themselves from free radicals of oxygen that are generated during photosynthesis. They absorb these kind of mischievous oxygen radicals, molecules, atoms, and disarm them. And as we age, we produce a lot of these oxygen radicals, and they’re implicated in aging and cancer. So antioxidants are a way to kind of quiet that response, and they have health benefits. They also help you detoxify your body.
So — but my point is kind of, you don’t need to know what an antioxidant is to have the benefit of an antioxidant. You know, we’ve been benefiting from them for thousands of years without really having to worry what they are. They’re in whole foods, and it’s one of the reasons whole foods are good for you. And there are not that much in processed foods.
Goodman: Isn’t it odd that the more you put into foods — so that’s processing fruits — the less expensive is? The simpler you keep it, getting whole foods in this day and age in this country, it’s extremely expensive.
Pollan: Yeah. Well, there are reasons of policy that that is the case. You’re absolutely right. Most processed foods are made from these very cheap raw ingredients. I mean, they’re basically corn, soy and wheat. And if you look at all those very-hard-to-pronounce ingredients on the back of that processed food, those are fractions of corn, and some petroleum, but a lot of corn, soy and wheat. And the industry’s preferred mode of doing business is to take the cheapest raw materials and create complicated foodstuffs from them.
The reason those raw ingredients are so cheap, though, is because these are precisely the ones that the government chooses to support, the subsidies — you know, the big $26 billion for corn and soy and wheat and rice. So it’s no accident that these should be the ones, you know, grown abundantly and cheap, and that’s one of the reasons the industry moved down this path. There was such a surfeit of cheap corn and soy that the food scientists got to work turning it into —
Goodman: In fact, getting away totally from sugar to corn syrup.
Pollan: Yeah, that’s right. And we don’t — yeah, there’s very little sugar in our processed food. It’s all high-fructose corn syrup, which, in effect, the government is subsidizing.
Goodman: Cottonseed oil, is it regulated by the FDA? Is it considered a food, even though it’s in so many of the processed foods we eat? I was wondering, because — to do with the pesticide that is in it that if it’s considered — if it’s done for cotton, it doesn’t matter how much pesticide there is. But if it’s for food, it does matter. And it’s in so much to keep it right, stable for so long on the shelf.
Pollan: That’s right. And it’s a food I would avoid. I mean, you know, humans have not been eating cotton for most of their history. They’ve been wearing it. And now we’re eating it. And you’re right, it receives an enormous amount of pesticide as a crop. How many residues are in the oil? I don’t really know the answer, but it has been approved by the FDA as a foodstuff. And — but it’s one of these novel oils that I’m inclined to stay away with. I mean, my basic philosophy of eating is, you know, if your great-grandmother wasn’t familiar with it, you probably want to stay away from it.
Goodman: Talk about — well, you started with a New York Times piece called “Unhappy Meals,” and in it — and you expand on this in In Defense of Food — you talk about the McGovern report, 1977, what, 20 years ago.
Pollan: Well, that’s really, I think, one of the red letter days in the rise of nutritionism as a way of thinking about food. It was a very interesting moment. McGovern convened this set of hearings to look at the American diet, and there was a great deal of concern about heart disease at the time. We had — we were having — you know, after a falloff during the war in heart disease, there was a big spike in the ’50s and ’60s, and scientists were busy trying to figure out what was going on and very worried about it. McGovern convened these hearings, took a lot of testimony, and then came out with a set of guidelines. And he said — he implicated red meat, basically, in this problem. And he said we’re getting — we’re eating too much red meat, and the advice of the government became — the official advice — eat less red meat. And he said as much. Now, that was a very controversial message. The meat industry, in fact the whole food industry, went crazy, and they came down on him like a ton of bricks. You can’t tell people to eat less of anything.
Goodman: As Oprah learned when she said she won’t eat hamburgers.
Pollan: Exactly. This is just a taboo topic in America. So McGovern had to beat this hasty retreat, and he rewrote the guidelines to say, choose meats that will lessen your saturated fat intake, something nobody understood at all and was much to the — and that was acceptable. But you see the transition. It’s very interesting. We’ve been talking about whole food — eat less red meat, which probably was good advice — to this very complicated construct — eat meats that have less of this nutrient. It’s still an affirmative message — eat more, which is fine with industry, just eat a little differently. And suddenly, the focus was on saturated fat, as if we knew that that was the nutrient in the red meat that was the problem. And in fact, it may not be. I mean, there are other things going on in red meat, we’re learning, that may be the problem.
Goodman: Like?
Pollan: Well, some people think it’s the protein in red meat. Some people think it’s the nitrosamines, these various compounds that are produced when you cook red meat. We see a correlation between high red meat consumption and higher rates of cancer and heart disease. But, again, we don’t know exactly what the cause is, but it may not be saturated fat.
Goodman: And then the political economy of, for example, eating meat?
Pollan: Well, that — because of that — I mean, that’s why McGovern lost in 1980. I mean, the beef lobby went after him, and they tossed him out. And so — but from then on, anyone who would pronounce on the American diet understood you had to speak in this very obscure language of nutrients. You could talk about saturated fat, you could talk about antioxidants, but you cannot talk about whole foods. So that is the kind of official language in which we discuss nutrition.
Conveniently, it’s very confusing to the average consumer. Conveniently to the industry, they love talk about nutrients, because they can always — with processed foods, unlike whole foods, you can redesign it. You can just reduce the saturated fat, you know, up the antioxidants. You can jigger it in a way you can’t change broccoli. You know, broccoli is going to be broccoli. But a processed food can always have more of the good stuff and less of the bad stuff. So the industry loves nutritionism for that reason.
Goodman: So, for people who don’t have much money, how do they eat? I mean, when you’re talking about whole foods, they have to be prepared, and if you don’t have much time, as well, processed foods are cheaper and they’re faster.
Pollan: Well, processed foods — you know, fast food seems cheap. I mean, if you have the time and the inclination to cook, you can eat more cheaply. But you do — as you say, you do need the time, and you do need the skills to cook. There is no way around the fact that given the way our food policies are set up, such that whole foods are expensive and getting more expensive and processed foods tend to be cheaper — I mean, if you go into the supermarket, the cheapest calories are added fat and added sugar from processed food, and the more expensive calories are over in the produce section. And we have to change policy in order to adjust that.
Goodman: How do you do that?
Pollan: You need a farm bill that basically evens the playing field and is not driving down the price of high-fructose corn syrup, so that, you know, real fruit juice can compete with it. You need a farm bill that makes carrots competitive with Wonder Bread. And we don’t have that, and we didn’t get it this time around.
Goodman: Do you feel like any candidates are addressing this issue?
Pollan: No, because they all pass through Iowa, and they all bow down before conventional agricultural policy. In office, I think that, you know, there have been — Hillary Clinton has had some very positive food policies, basically because she has this big farm constituency upstate, and she’s very interested in school lunch and farm-to-school programs and things like that. John Edwards has said some progressive things about feedlot agriculture and what’s wrong with that, while he was in Iowa.
Goodman: Explain feedlots.
Pollan: Feedlots are where we grow our meat, in these huge factory farms that have become really the scourge of landscapes in places like Iowa and Missouri, I mean these giant pig confinement operations that basically collect manure in huge lagoons that leak when it rains and smell for miles around. I mean, they’re just, you know, miserable places. And they’re becoming a political issue in the Midwest. And I think they will become a political issue nationally, because people are very concerned about the status of the animals in these places. My worry is, though, that when we start regulating these feedlots, they’ll move to Mexico.
Goodman: [What is the] “Omnivore’s Dilemma?”
Pollan: “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” is, if you’re a creature like us that can eat almost anything — I mean, unlike cows that only eat grass or koala bears that only eat eucalyptus leaves — we can eat a great many different things, and meat and vegetables, but it’s complicated. We don’t have instincts to tell us exactly what to eat, so we have — we need a lot of other cognitive equipment to navigate what is a very treacherous food landscape, because there — as there was in the jungle and in nature, there are poisons out there that could kill us. So we had to learn what was safe and what wasn’t, and we had this thing called culture that told us, like that mushroom there, somebody ate it last week and they died, so let’s call it the “death cap,” and that way we’ll remember that that’s one to stay away from. And, you know, so culture is how we navigate this.
We are once again in a treacherous food landscape, when there are many things in the supermarket that are not good for you. How do we learn now to navigate that landscape? And that’s what this book was an effort to do, was come up with some rules of thumb. And so, you know, I say eat food, which sounds really simple, but of course there’s a lot of edible food-like substances in the supermarket that aren’t really food. So how do you tell them apart?
Goodman: You talk about shopping the periphery of the supermarket?
Pollan: Yeah. Well, that was one rule that I found really helpful. And if you look at the layout of the average supermarket, the fresh whole foods are always on the edge. So you get produce and meat and fish and dairy products. And those are the foods that, you know, your grandmother would recognize as foods. They haven’t changed that much. All the processed foods, the really bad stuff that is going to get you in trouble with all the refined grain and the additives and the high-fructose corn syrup, those are all in the middle. And so, if you stay out of the middle and get most of your food on the edges, you’re going to do a lot better.
Goodman: What is the localvore movement?
Pollan: The localvore movement is a real new emphasis on eating locally, eating food from what’s called your foodshed. It’s a metaphor based on a watershed. You know, a certain — draw a circle of a hundred miles around your community and try to eat everything from there. It’s an interesting movement, and I’m very supportive of local food. I think that it’s verging on the ridiculous right now — I mean, you know, because, frankly, there’s no wheat produced in a hundred miles of New York. You know, do you want to give up bread? I’m not willing to give up bread. So people get a little extremist about it.
But the basic idea of when products are available locally, eating them and eating food in season, is a very powerful and important idea. It supports a great many values. The fact is that food that’s produced locally is going to be fresher. It’s going to be more nutritious because it’s fresher. You’re going to support the farmers in your community. You’re going to check sprawl. I mean, you’ll keep that farmland in business. You are going to keep basically, you know, some autonomy in our food system. I mean, make no mistake: The basic trend of food in this country is to globalize it, and there will come a day when America doesn’t produce its own food. In California, the Central Valley is losing, you know, hundreds of acres of farmland every day, and the projections there are that we will no longer produce produce in California by the end of the century. I don’t want to live in that world. I — you know, we lost control over our energy destiny, and we don’t want to lose control over our food destiny.
Goodman: What are the environmental effects of transporting food across the globe?
Pollan: Well, the biggest is energy. I mean, it’s a — people don’t really think about food in terms of climate change, but in fact the food system contributes about a fifth of greenhouse gases. It is as important as the transportation sector, in terms of contributing to greenhouse gas. It’s a very energy-intensive situation. What we did with the industrialization of food, essentially, is take food off of a solar system — it was basically based on photosynthesis and the sun — and put it on a fossil fuel system. We learned how to grow food with lots of synthetic fertilizers made from natural gas, pesticides made from petroleum, and then started moving it around the world. So now we take about ten calories of fossil fuel to produce one calorie of food energy. Very unsustainable system.
Goodman: And what about the argument of efficiency, and if you want to feed the planet? You have sugar growing in Cuba. You have grapes and meat in Argentina and Uruguay and Chile.
Pollan: Well, that’s the argument. There are a lot of problems with it. First, it does depend on cheap fossil fuel, and we are not going to have cheap
fossil fuel, so that if Uruguay loses its ability to produce anything else, they’re going to be hungry. It’s very important that you have local self-sufficiency in food — some self-sufficiency, not complete — before you start exporting. If you put all your eggs in the basket of, say, coffee, when the international market shifts, as it inevitably does, because it will always go to whatever country is willing to produce it a little more cheaply, you will decimate your industry.
Goodman: What if you only consume coffee and nothing else?
Pollan: Oh, you have all sorts of problems we don’t even want to get into. You cannot live on coffee alone. It’s not like bread.
So globalizing food has certain advantages of efficiency, but it also has very high risks. And, you know, efficiency is an important value, but resilience is even more important, and we know this from biology, that the resilience of natural systems and economic systems is something we have to focus more on. This globalized food system is very brittle. When you have a breakdown anywhere, when the prices of fuel escalates, people lose the ability to feed themselves.
What’s happening with Mexico and NAFTA and corn, you know, they opened their borders to our corn, and it put one-and-a-half million farmers there out of business. They all came to the cities, where you would think, OK, now the price of tortillas should go down, but it didn’t go down, even with the cheap corn, because there was an oligopoly controlling tortillas. Tortilla prices didn’t go down. And so, a lot of these former Mexican farmers became serfs on California farms, and this was the effect of dumping lots of cheap corn.
Goodman: And now they’re the target of main politicians all over the country to — “We send our food down, and you send immigrants back who are coming here.”
Pollan: Yeah, “And we don’t want your immigrants.” And, you know, we don’t understand that these things are connected, that we make a decision in Washington and that this is what leads to an immigration problem. And — but the dumping of our corn on Mexico is a big part of the immigration problem.
Goodman: Do you know anything about cloned livestock? The Wall Street Journal says cloned livestock are poised to receive FDA clearance.
Pollan: Yeah, well, the FDA has been looking at this. There are techniques now to clone livestock, usually for breeding purposes. If you have a really champion bull, the semen of that bull is very valuable. So, gee, if you could turn that bull into five bulls, wouldn’t that be great? Actually, it won’t be great. It’s the rareness that makes the semen so valuable.
Goodman: What do you mean?
Pollan: Well, if you — you know, if you multiply your champion bull, the supply will go up and the demand will go down. So — but, anyway, so the FDA needs approval so that once they’re done using these animals for breeding purposes, they can just drop them into the food system as hamburger. And there is some controversy over whether we should be eating cloned livestock. I’m not, you know, familiar with the risks. I’m a skeptic on genetically modifying food. But the specific risk of cloning livestock, I don’t know. I don’t want to be eating them.
Goodman: You have the French farmer, Jose Bove, who has just gone on a hunger strike to promote a ban on genetically modified crops in France.
Pollan: Yeah, I hadn’t known that. The Europeans have reacted much more strongly to genetically modified crops than we have.
Goodman: Why do you think it’s so different?
Pollan: A couple reasons. We have a misplaced faith in our FDA, that they’ve vetted everything and they’ve taken care of it and they know what’s in the food and that they know the genetically modified crops have been fully tested, which, in fact, they have not, whereas the Europeans, after mad cow disease, are very skeptical of their regulators. And when their regulators tell them, “Oh, this stuff is fine,” they’re like, “Oh, wait. You said that about the beef.” So they’re much more skeptical. They also perceive it as an American imposition, as part of a cultural imperialism. Even though a lot of the GMO companies are European, the perception is it’s Monsanto. And for some reason, the European countries have managed to get under the radar on this issue.
Goodman: Does it also have something to do with our media sponsored by food companies?
Pollan: Yeah, it does. And we — and the fact that our — we have not labeled it, so nobody knows whether you’re eating it or not. I mean, that’s been a huge fight. You know, Dennis Kucinich has tried to get labeling. Very simple. You know, he’s not saying ban the stuff; he’s saying just tell us if we’re eating it, which seems like a very reasonable position.
Goodman: And Monsanto fought this.
Pollan: Viciously.
Goodman: They said that if you say it does not have GMO genetically modified organisms in it that that suggests there’s something wrong with it, so when Ben & Jerry’s tried to do that they weren’t allowed.
Pollan: That’s right. There’s a lot of litigation over that still in Vermont and other states, in California, as well. Now, why is the industry so intent on not having this product regulated — labeled? Well, they think, rightly, that people wouldn’t buy it. And the reason they wouldn’t buy it is it offers the consumer nothing, no benefit. Now, if you could — Americans will eat all sorts of strange things, if there was a benefit. If you could say, well, this genetically modified soy oil will make you skinny, we would buy it, we would eat it. But so far, the traits that they’ve managed to get into these crops benefit farmers, arguably, and not consumers.
The other reason, I understand, that they resist labeling is that if there were labels, there would be ways to trace outbreaks of allergy. Any kind of health problems associated with GMOs you could tie to a particular food. Right now, if there are any allergies that are tied to a GMO food, you can’t prove it. And so, one of the reasons the industry has fought it is that they’re vulnerable to that.
When the GMO industry was starting transgenic crops, they made a decision not to seek any limits on liability from the Congress, as the nuclear industry did, and they decided that would not look good to ask for that, so they just took a chance. And this is, in the view of many activists, their great vulnerability, is product liability. And so, labeling is a way to help prevent that eventuality. So they fought it, you know, ferociously and successfully.
Goodman: What were you most surprised by in writing this book, In Defense of Food?
Pollan: I was most surprised by two things. One was that the science on nutrition that we all traffic in every day — we read these articles on the front page, we talk about antioxidants and cholesterol and all this kind of stuff — it’s really sketchy that nutritional science is still a very young science. And food is very complicated, as is the human digestive system. There’s a great mystery on both ends of the food chain, and science has not yet sorted it out. Nutrition science is where surgery was in about 1650, you know, really interesting and promising, but would you want to have them operate on you yet? I don’t think so. I don’t think we want to change our eating decisions based on nutritional science.
But what I also was surprised at is how many opportunities we now have. If we have — if we’re willing to put the money and the time into it to get off the Western diet and find another way of eating without actually having to leave civilization or, you know, grow all your own food or anything — although I do think we should grow whatever food we can — that it is such a hopeful time and that there’s some very simple things we can all do to eat well without being cowed by the scientists.
Goodman: The healthiest cuisines, what do you feel they are?
Pollan: Well, the interesting thing is that most traditional cuisines are very healthy, that people — that the human body has done very well on the Mediterranean diet, on the Japanese diet, on the peasant South American diet. It’s really interesting how many different foods we can do well on. The one diet we seem poorly adapted to happens to be the one we’re eating, the Western diet. So whatever traditional diet suits you — you like eating that way — you know, follow it. And that — you know, that’s a good rule of thumb.
There’s an enormous amount of wisdom contained in a cuisine. And, you know, we privilege scientific information and authority in this country, but, of course, there’s cultural authority and information, too. And whoever figured out that olive oil and tomatoes was a really great combination was actually, we’re now learning, onto something scientifically. If you want to use that nutrient vocabulary, the lycopene in the tomato, which we think is the good thing, is basically made available to your body through the olive oil. So there was a wisdom in those combinations. And you see it throughout.
Goodman: The whole push for hydrogenated oils? I grew up on margarine. “You should never eat butter! Only margarine!”
Pollan: Yeah, I know. I did, too. And that was a huge mistake. That was a mistake.
Goodman: Can we go back in time?
Pollan: Yeah, we can. Yeah, the butter, fortunately, is still here.
Goodman: Where did it come from?
Pollan: Well, margarine was cheaper. Again, take a cheap raw material, which was to say they had developed these technologies for getting oil out of cottonseed and soy and all this kind of stuff, and there then was this health concern about saturated fat, the great evil. I mean, one of the — another hallmark of nutritionism is that there’s always the evil nutrient and the blessed nutrient, but it’s always changing. So the evil nutrient for a long time has been saturated fat, and the good nutrient was polyunsaturated fat. So people thought, well, let’s take the polyunsaturated fats, and we’ll figure out a way to make them hard at room temperature, which involved the hydrogenation process. You basically fire hydrogen at it. And then you had something that looked like butter.
It was very controversial, though. People — actually, in the late 1900s, several states passed laws saying you had to dye your butter pink so people wouldn’t be confused and would know that that’s an imitation food. And then the Supreme Court — the industry got the Supreme Court to throw this out. So butter was elevated as the more modern, more healthy food. And it turned out that we replaced this possibly mildly unhealthy fat called saturated fat with now a demonstrably lethal one called hydrogenated oil.
Goodman: How is it demonstrably lethal?
Pollan: Well, they have since proven to, you know, pretty high standard that trans fats are implicated both in heart disease and cancer.
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The Natural Solutions Foundation, the leading Global Health Freedom organization, is proud to present this information to you. We protect your right to know about – and to use – natural ways to maintain and regain your health, no matter where in the world you live. Among your freedoms is the right to clean, unadulterated food free of genetic manipulation, pesticides, heavy metals or other contaminants and access to herbs, supplements, frequency devices and other means as therapies that may benefit or to protect your well-being without drugs and other dangerous interventions, if you choose.
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When reading the following article, bear in mind that under Codex, all cows are to be treated with Monsanto’s recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone and there are no upper limits. Since peasant farmers who cannot read or write have neither the money nor the skills necessary to manage chronically ill cows who require antibiotics, etc., to control their constant infections (including mastitis which creates continual production of pus in milk), they will be driven out of the milk business which means, in all too many cases, off their farms.
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Monsanto doesn’t want consumers to know the truth about the milk they’re drinking. The corporation’s monopoly is at stake.
‘Frankenfoods’ Giant Monsanto Plays Bully Over Consumer Labeling
By Scott Thill, AlterNet. Posted March 6, 2008.
“There are some corporations that clearly are operating at a level that are disastrous for the general public … And in fact I suppose one could argue that in many respects a corporation of that sort is the prototypical psychopath, at the corporate level instead of the individual level.”
–Dr. Robert Hare, The Corporation
Since 1901, Monsanto has brought us Agent Orange, PCBs, Terminator seeds and recombined milk, among other infamous products. But it’s currently obsessed with the milk, or, more importantly, the milk labels, particularly those that read “rBST-free” or “rBGH-free.” It’s not the “BST” or “BGH” that bothers them so much; after all, bovine somatrophin, also known as bovine growth hormone, isn’t exactly what the company is known for. Which is to say, it’s naturally occurring. No, the problem is the “r” denoting “recombined.” There’s nothing natural about it. In fact, the science is increasingly pointing to the possibility that recombined milk is — surprise! — not as good for you as the real thing.
“Consumption of dairy products from cows treated with rbGH raise a number of health issues,” explained Michael Hansen, a senior scientist for Consumers Union. “That includes increased antibiotic resistance, due to use of antibiotics to treat mastitis and other health problems, as well as increased levels of IGF-1, which has been linked to a range of cancers.”
For its part, Monsanto is leaning on the crutch of terminology to derail the mounting threat to its bottom line: The consumer-driven revolution against recombined food. And so the St. Louis-based agri-chem giant has launched a war of words in the form of a full-court press to suppress the “rBGH-free” label at the state level. And it’s sticking to its guns by obfuscating and indulging in cheap semantics.
“RBST is a supplement that helps the cow produce more milk,” Monsanto spokesperson Lori Hoag explained to me via email. “It is injected into the cow, not into the milk. There is no way to test because the milk is absolutely the same. Neither the public nor a scientist can tell the difference in the milk because there is not a difference. Consumers absolutely have a right to know if there is a difference in foods they are buying. In this case, there simply is not a difference.”
“Monsanto has an unfortunate habit of mixing some things together that confuse the issue,” counters Rick North, director of Campaign for Safe Food from Physicians for Social Responsibility’s Oregon chapter. “It’s true that all cows have natural bovine growth hormone. But only cows injected with recombinant, genetically engineered bovine growth hormone have rBGH. And this isn’t a ‘supplement.’ This is a drug that revs up cow metabolism so high that they’re typically burned out after two lactation cycles and slaughtered. Non-rBGH cows typically live four, seven, ten or more years.”
The threat of rBGH to cows and humans alike encouraged Canada, Australia and parts of the European Union to ban Monsanto’s recombined milk outright. As for the corporation’s native United States, it has predictably signed off on another unproven growth opportunity with possibly lethal environmental side effects. They’re in it for the money. And so the battle lines on the threat have been drawn, as North takes pains to point out, between “the FDA and those who follow them,” and those who don’t. “These proposed state bans or restrictions on rBGH-free type of labeling have nothing to do with protecting consumers,” he asserts. “They have everything to do with protecting Monsanto’s profits.”
But that battle over labels and profits hasn’t stopped Monsanto from creating its own press at home in the United States, where it infamously got two Fox News journos fired in 1997 for refusing to bend the truth about rBGH on the air. Yet, over the long term, the multinational’s attention to press relations hasn’t paid off so well. Medical authorities like Samuel Epstein and Robert Hare, quoted above, have targeted them from both the physical and psychological health perspective. Meanwhile, farmers and consumers across the world have demanded labels that differentiate the recombined milk from its naturally occurring counterparts on the store shelves. And they don’t think it’s too much to ask, given the facts.
Hoag is “accurate” when she argued “that there is no commercial test for this drug,” North concedes. “But that’s entirely different than saying there is no difference. Monsanto and its front groups have tried to equate the lack of a verifying lab test with the label being false or misleading. This is a non sequitur. There are all kinds of legitimate labels that aren’t verified by lab tests, such as state or country of origin labeling, fair trade labeling, bottled water that is labeled as originating from a spring, and so on.”
Monsanto, meanwhile, is bedeviling the details to distort the big picture. “Sure, the label can make a claim one way or the other,” Hoag admitted, “but there is no way to verify that the claim is true. This is precisely why the labels are misleading. They make consumers believe there is a difference, when in fact there is none.”
That sounds simple enough, but consumers don’t seem to need or want Monsanto’s mothering. In 2007, its efforts at an outright ban on rBGH-free labels in Pennsylvania were almost cleared for takeoff, until the state invited its citizens to publicly comment, which eventually doomed the move. That scenario has replayed itself across the United States in accelerated fashion with success.
“The issue looks pretty dead in Indiana and Ohio, and there are solid victories in Pennsylvania and New Jersey,” explains Recipe for America’s Jill Richardson, author of the forthcoming book Vegetables of Mass Destruction. “Utah and Kansas are probably going to revise their bills after their hearings, because of opposition.”
This opposition comes in spite of Monsanto’s funding of so-called grass-roots farming coalitions like the American Farmers for Advancement and Conservation of Technology — also known as, cleverly enough, AFACT. Monsanto’s public relations firm Osborn & Barr built a site for AFACT pro bono, knitting the two organizations together in a way that may not sit well in states currently pondering their own label bans. AFACT’s attacks have virally replicated across the nation, as farmers on Monsanto’s payroll have taken to harassing their state legislatures in concert with the multinational’s usual tactics at the federal level, such as forcing skeptical scientists off advisory panels, intimidating critics and so on.
But the assault has only met equally powerful resistance, as environmental awareness has driven the market into a recombinant-free zone. In the end, this might be Monsanto’s last gasp in the fight.
“Monsanto has seen the writing on the wall in terms of consumer rejection of artificial growth hormones,” claims National Family Farm Coalition policy analyst Irene Lin. “Consumers are becoming more aware and educated about what goes into their bodies and what their kids are drinking. And this is Monsanto’s last-ditch, desperate attempt to maintain its profit. And they are hiding behind dairy farmers to do it.”
But for every farmer who toes Monsanto’s line, there are as many if not more, and not just in the United States, who are amassing in opposition to the multinational’s attempt to change, and then patent, how America grows (and describes) its food. And behind them, in ever larger numbers, are consumers and stores themselves, who are demanding more, not less, information from those who produce the food.
“In the last year or so, some really big names have announced that they will only buy rBGH-free milk,” explains Food and Water Watch’s assistant director Patty Lovera, “including Chipotle, Starbucks, Tillamook and lots of supermarket house brands, like Kroger, Meiers and Publix. Even Kraft is going to do an rBGH-free line of cheese.”
In the end, Monsanto’s quibbling over labels has added up — ironically enough, given all the text it has generated — to censorship, pure and simple. And, as with past debacles like the aforementioned Agent Orange, PCBs and Terminator seed, they’ve established a pattern of stopping at nothing to increase not your health but their profits. At your expense.
“Absolutely nothing good could come from a ban on rBGH-free labeling,” concludes Hansen. “More information is a good thing, and all these state actions are anti-consumer, restrict free speech and interfere with the smooth functioning of free markets.”
Learn more about the ban on rBGH-free labeling and take action.
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/78660/
Posted on January 11, 2008
The West Australian, January 4, 2008
Here is a helpful and cheery little article sent to me by a friend and correspondent in Western Australia. He knows, as you do, that Genetically Modified (GM) crops are dangerous and that, once mixed with native crops, the foreign, dangerous and untested DNA it inserts into neighboring plants can never be removed from the food supply. Never. Take a look at what the new book “Seeds of Destruction” has to say on the topic. Then please come back here and take a look at this article.
He knows, as do you, that GM crops which “volunteer” (that’s commercial-eze for “invade” or “trespass”) into a farmer’s crop then force the farmer to pay “intellectual property” rights to the owner of the GM DNA (which is patented by the US Patent Office, but not safety tested by the FDA or USDA, or the EPA, for that matter!) He knows, like you, that crops and animals are modified with marker genes which confer resistance to antibiotics and that resistance transfers to the animals and people that eat the crop. He knows that the foreign DNA is not stable in the nucleus: it jumps around from place to place causing totally unexpected and unanticipated impacts. Even when it is stable, it is often indigestible so that instead of being broken down in the GI tract, it passes through cell walls intact causing auto immune problems and being literally woven into the DNA of cells, most especially rapidly dividing ones like your stomach lining, or a fetus’ brain, for example. That DNA is then woven into the genome of its consumer and no one we know has any idea what it does then or 40 years later. DNA, of course, generally causes proteins to be produced. If the proteins have never before been produced, no one knows what they will do now or in the future.
He knows that independent research, which the FDA does not review (but, to be fair, it does not review company safety data, either, before it approves a food for human use) shows that GM foods cause infertility, holes in the GI tract, fetal death and still birth in rats, smaller kidneys and depressed immune function in rat pups which survived (most did not) and a host of other serious problems. He also knows that scientists who dare speak out to even so much as question this technology and the wisdom of using it before it has been shown to be safe are exposed to a vast and well orchestrated disinformation campaign against them and their careers are, literally, not figuratively, over. Their tenure vanishes, so do their job prospects. In fact, I was sitting at the Tiburon CA Health Freedom Leaders meeting which produced the Tiburon Declaration against Forced Vaccination which you and your organization can sign here (http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?p=460) when our hostess got a call from an academic who had published an article merely raising questions about GM foods. His academic appointment at a prestigious university was abruptly terminated and he found that he was blackballed. This professor of Organic and Environmental Agriculture whose specialty is rebuilding damaged ecosystems in the cleanest way possible was out of a job and apparently out of luck. You would think, of course, that such a skill base would be huge demand. Not if Monsanto and the others have anything to say. And they do, they do!
It is by now a truism that Big Pharma runs the FDA. You do know, as does our friend in Australia, that Big Agribiz and Big Biotechna are also massively big players on the food scene (and therefore in Codex Alimentarius – the World Food Code). Recall that Monsanto, a pharmaceutical, chemical and GM giant in its own right, but by no means the biggest in the field, has said that it would own the world’s food supply by 2010. Well, it looks like it is about to own Australia’s wheat.
How to stop this? One good way is to shift to a diet comprised TOTALLY of organic food. Protect yourself and the environment. Protect farmers and their ability to stay on their land. Now get active. Disseminate what you learn in these posts to everyone you know. And ask them to join the Health Freedom eAlerts and become informed, activated and disseminators!
And, of course, don’t forget to donate to the Natural Solutions Foundation. Our friend in Australia knows, and you know, too, that the other side has more money than God but that the Natural Solutions Foundation is raising awareness all over the world about these dangerous foods. For example, we will be at the Codex Working Group in Ghana on January 28-30, 2008 in which dozens of countries will try – again – to prevent the US from shipping, and selling, food with any sort of GM food in it they want with absolutely zero identification on the label. That is US policy in the US and, working for the Biotech industry (who actually have a seat on the US delegation at this meeting and others), if the US has anything to say about it, in the whole world.
Other countries are not so sure they like this. Australia is, however, a bone in the tale of the US dog at Codex and happily endorses anything the US wants at Codex. So here is Australia endorsing potentially deadly food.
Then International Decade of Nutrition, a program of the Natural Solutions Foundation, is designed to give farmers the power to stay on their land, grow their crops without chemicals and then feed themselves and their families with enough economic advantage so that they can stay on the land. We will be in several African countries following the Codex meeting to start projects for the International Decade of Nutrition. Not, I can assure you, with GM crops or animals.
Now for the article. Don’t forget to let others know what you already know: they need to know it!
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
Drought-tolerant GM crop trials welcome in WA, says Chance
by Jodie Thomson
Development of genetically modified crops with drought-tolerant properties would be welcomed in WA in order to attract a share of Federal assistance to help farmers copewith climate change, Agricultural Minister Kim Chance said yesterday.
He also signalled that the WA Government’s drought assistance package, which included grants of up to $8000 to affected farmers, could be overhauled and the money poured into development of other plant varieties or farming methods to manage drought.
“We are talking with farmers here in terms of converting the State’s drought assistance to one which actually deals with the longer-term issues,” he said. “I think the cash component of last year’s package was some $7.3 million- you could do an enormous amount of work.”
It follows a revamp in drought-relief payments by the Rudd Government, which would include funding ways to help farmers deal with global warming through using GM crops,changing ploughing methods and specific water management strategies.Mr. Chance said the State Government was supporting drought research progrms such as trials of mustard biofuels crops in the north-eastern Wheatbelt and ploughing techniques.
But research into genetically modified crops, in particularwheat, would be a “nice addition” to those programs already under way and to a joint plant breeding project recently struck with Zhejiang University, the headquarters of the China National Barley Research Centre.
WA was in the last year of its moratorium on coommercial GM crops,due for review at the end of 2008. But Mr. Chance has previously signalled it is unlikely to be lifted until concerns about GM safety and labelling were allayed. GM issues willbe on the agenda when he expects to meet Agriculture Minister Tony Burke this month.
Nationals leader Warren Truss said yesterday farmers had serious concerns about the Federal Government’s drought relief reform.
“the new Rudd Government has confirmed the fears of regional and rural communities around Australia that it will embark on a new bout of slash and burn,” Mr. Truss said.