The Real Dangers of Genetically Engineered Food

Former Pro-GMO Scientist Speaks Out On The Real Dangers of Genetically Engineered Food

I retired 10 years ago after a long career as a research
scientist for Agriculture Canada. When I was on the payroll, I was the
designated scientist of my institute to address public groups and
reassure them that genetically engineered crops and foods were safe.
There is, however, a growing body of scientific research - done mostly
in Europe, Russia, and other countries - showing that diets
containing engineered corn or soya cause serious health problems in
laboratory mice and rats.

I don't know if I was passionate about it but I was
knowledgeable. I defended the side of technological advance, of
science and progress.

I have in the last 10 years changed my position. I started
paying attention to the flow of published studies coming from Europe,
some from prestigious labs and published in prestigious scientific
journals, that questioned the impact and safety of engineered food.

I refute the claims of the biotechnology companies that
their engineered crops yield more, that they require less pesticide
applications, that they have no impact on the environment and of
course that they are safe to eat.

There are a number of scientific studies that have been
done for Monsanto by universities in the U.S., Canada, and abroad.
Most of these studies are concerned with the field performance of the
engineered crops, and of course they find GMOs safe for the
environment and therefore safe to eat.


Individuals should be encouraged to make
their decisions on food safety based on scientific evidence and
personal choice, not on emotion or the personal opinions of others.


We should all take these studies seriously and demand that
government agencies replicate them rather than rely on studies paid
for by the biotech companies.

The Bt corn and soya plants that are now everywhere in our
environment are registered as insecticides. But are these insecticidal
plants regulated and have their proteins been tested for safety? Not
by the federal departments in charge of food safety, not in Canada and
not in the U.S.

There are no long-term feeding studies performed in these
countries to demonstrate the claims that engineered corn and soya are
safe. All we have are scientific studies out of Europe and Russia,
showing that rats fed engineered food die prematurely.

These studies show that proteins produced by engineered
plants are different than what they should be. Inserting a gene in a
genome using this technology can and does result in damaged proteins.
The scientific literature is full of studies showing that engineered
corn and soya contain toxic or allergenic proteins.

Genetic engineering is 40 years old. It is based on the
naive understanding of the genome based on the One Gene - one protein
hypothesis of 70 years ago, that each gene codes for a single protein.
The Human Genome project completed in 2002 showed that this
hypothesis is wrong.

The whole paradigm of the genetic engineering technology is
based on a misunderstanding. Every scientist now learns that any gene
can give more than one protein and that inserting a gene anywhere in a
plant eventually creates rogue proteins. Some of these proteins are
obviously allergenic or toxic.


I have drafted a reply to Paul
Horgen's letter to the Comox Valley Environmental Council. It is my
wish that it goes viral as to educate as many people as possible
rapidly. Any and all social media is fine by me. This can also be
used as a briefing note for the councilors of AVICC or anywhere else.
Thank you for your help.
[Original source with replies from Dr. Paul Horgen]

Thierry Vrain
Innisfree Farm


I am turning you towards a recent
compilation (June 2012) of over 500 government reports and scientific
articles published in peer reviewed Journals, some of them with the
highest recognition in the world. Like The Lancet in the medical
field, or Advances in Food and Nutrition Research, or Biotechnology,
or Scandinavian Journal of Immunology, European Journal of
Histochemistry, Journal of Proteome Research, etc … This
compilation was made by a genetic engineer in London, and an
investigative journalist who summarized the gist of the publications for
the lay public.

GMO Myths and Truths - an evidence based examination of
the claims made for the safety and efficacy of genetically modified
crops. A report of 120 pages, it can be downloaded for free from
Earth Open Source. "GMO Myths and Truths" disputes the claims of the
Biotech industry that GM crops yield better and more nutritious food,
that they save on the use of pesticides, have no environmental impact
whatsoever and are perfectly safe to eat. Genetic
pollution is so prevalent in North and South America where GM crops
are grown that the fields of conventional and organic grower are
regularly contaminated with engineered pollen and losing
certification. The canola and flax export market from Canada to
Europe (a few hundreds of millions of dollars) were recently lost
because of genetic pollution. Did I mention superweeds, when RoundUp
crops pass their genes on to RoundUp Resistant weeds. Apparently
over 50% of fields in the USA are now infested and the growers have to
go back to use other toxic herbicides such as 2-4 D. Many areas of
Ontario and Alberta are also infested. The transgenes are also
transferred to soil bacteria. A chinese study published last year
shows that an ampicillin resistance transgene was transferred from
local engineered crops to soil bacteria, that eventually found their
way into the rivers. The transgenes are also transferred to humans.
Volunteers who ate engineered soybeans had undigested DNA in their
intestine and their bacterial flora was expressing the soybean
transgenes in the form of antibiotic resistance. This is genetic
pollution to the extreme, particularly when antibiotic resistance is
fast becoming a serious global health risk. I can only assume the
American Medical Association will soon recognize its poorly informed
judgement.

In 2009 the American Academy of Environmental Medicine
called for a moratorium of GM foods, safety testing and labeling.
Their review of the available literature at the time noted that
animals show serious health risks associated with GM food consumption
including infertility, immune dysregulation, accelerated aging,
dysregulation of genes associated with cholesterol synthesis, insulin
regulation, cell signaling, and protein formation, and changes in the
liver, kidney, spleen and gastrointestinal system. Monsanto
writes “There is no need to test the safety of GM foods”. So long as
the engineered protein is safe, foods from GM crops are substantially
equivalent and they cannot pose any health risks.” The US Food and
Drug Administration waived all levels of safety testing in 1996
before approving the commercialization of these crops. Nothing more
than voluntary research is necessary, and the FDA does not even want
to see the results. And there is certainly no need to publish any of
it. If you remember 1996, the year that the first crops were
commercialized, the research scientists of the US FDA all predicted
that transgenic crops would have unpredictable hard to detect side
effects, allergens, toxins, nutritional effects, new diseases. That
was published in 2004 in Biotechnology if you recall seeing it.

I know well that Canada does not perform long term
feeding studies as they do in Europe. The only study I am aware of
from Canada is from the Sherbrooke Hospital in 2011, when doctors
found that 93% of pregnant women and 82% of the fetuses tested had the
protein pesticide in their blood. This is a protein recognized in
its many forms as mildly to severely allergenic. There is no
information on the role played by rogue proteins created by the
process of inserting transgenes in the middle of a genome. But there
is a lot of long term feeding studies reporting serious health
problems in mice and rats. The
results of the first long term feeding studies of lab rats reported
last year in Food and Chemical Toxicology show that they developed
breast cancer in mid life and showed kidney and liver damage. The
current statistic I read is that North Americans are eating 193 lbs of
GMO food on average annually. That includes the children I assume, not
that I would use that as a scare tactic. But obviously I wrote at
length because I think there is cause for alarm and it is my duty to
educate the public.

One argument I hear repeatedly is that nobody has
been sick or died after a meal (or a trillion meals since 1996) of GM
food. Nobody gets ill from smoking a pack of cigarette either. But
it sure adds up, and we did not know that in the 1950s before we
started our wave of epidemics of cancer. Except this time it is not
about a bit of smoke, it’s the whole food system that is of concern.
The corporate interest must be subordinated to the public interest,
and the policy of substantial equivalence must be scrapped as it is
clearly untrue.


source:-
http://preventdisease.com/news/13/050613_Former-Pro-GMO-Scientist-Speaks-Out-On-The-Real-Dangers-of-Genetically-Engineered-Food.shtml