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Say NO to GMOs in Your Food
Townhall.com ^ | June 4, 2013 | Chuck Norris

Posted on 06/04/2013 4:55:53 AM PDT by Kaslin

On Memorial Day weekend, 2 million people marched in protests 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 are not listed on food or ingredient labels, few Americans realize they're eating GMO foods every day. Genetically modified crops constitute 93 percent of soy, 86 percent of corn and 93 percent of canola seeds planted in the U.S., and are used in about 70 percent of 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 USA added that the U.S. Department 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 last 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 this last Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture found the rogue Monsanto wheat sprouts in the Beaver State, when a 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 9 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 USA cited the late George Wald, a Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine 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 in order 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 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 -- author of the study, by 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."

Eat local and organic, period. And fight GMOs invading U.S. food industries and American homes.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; Extended News
KEYWORDS: activists; agenda21; agriculture; anticapitalism; antiscience; bilderberg; billgates; boxeragenda; bt; btinjectedtoxin; cartel; dnadamage; emptynutrition; farming; fascism; fda; foodsupply; foolingthepublic; friendsofearth; getrees; gmo; greenpeace; greens; greenspropaganda; health; hiddenagenda; infertility; intestinehealth; leftists; liberty; luddites; monopolyonfood; monsanto; monsantoevil; no; nogmo; nosafetystudies; nwo; organicdrivel; pelosiagenda; populationcontrol; progressives; propaganda; roundup; sicknessincreasing; sierraclub; stealthsterilization; sterilization; unethicalmonsanto; unpopulationcontrol; wellness; zerohumanstudies
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1 posted on 06/04/2013 4:55:53 AM PDT by Kaslin
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To: Kaslin

Good article. Thank you for posting it.


2 posted on 06/04/2013 5:01:10 AM PDT by foxfield
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To: foxfield

you are welcome


3 posted on 06/04/2013 5:03:42 AM PDT by Kaslin (He needed the ignorant to reelect him, and he got them. Now we all have to pay the consequenses)
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To: Kaslin

We can feed the world or we can go “all natural” whatever the means. Wheat rust is natural, rye ergot is natural, locusts, flies, worms and other vermin are natural. I have absolutely no concerns or worries about GMO’s. in one sense or another every food is genetically modified either in a lab or by selective breeding.


4 posted on 06/04/2013 5:06:00 AM PDT by muir_redwoods (Don't fire until you see the blue of their helmets)
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To: Kaslin

“Eat local and organic, period. And fight GMOs invading U.S. food industries and American homes.”

Local? That would really limit your diet if you live in the desert. I knew a guy who worked for an international meat company. They “harvested” 12 million chickens a day, except for holidays and weekends. That’s why chicken is dirt cheap and universally available. Their chickens come from farms that have one million chickens each in cages containing 100k chickens. So are we supposed to eat only free range chicken? How long does it take to come to market on organic feed? How much does it cost?

The same is true for everything. If we go to all local all “natural” (what is that? EVERYTHING we eat is the product of hundreds of years of selection) how much food will we grow?

The result these activists are looking for is eliminating a large swath of the population through starvation.


5 posted on 06/04/2013 5:06:48 AM PDT by Gen.Blather
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To: Kaslin

People who want to eat organic are perfectly free to do so, and pay the premium. I just wish the organic fetishists would leave the rest of us alone.

The current argument, at least in the U.S., is largely about labelling. We label mostly for risk. The organic lobby wants GM products labelled to suggest to low-information consumers that there is a risk — or they wouldn’t be labelled, right? But GM crops are tested before they are commercialized, so the imputation of risk is just part of a big scare campaign by organic producers who have difficulty competing on price.

In a rational world, it would make much more sense to label organically for consumer fraud.


6 posted on 06/04/2013 5:11:44 AM PDT by sphinx
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To: muir_redwoods

Ditto to that.


7 posted on 06/04/2013 5:16:39 AM PDT by John Valentine (Deep in the Heart of Texas)
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To: Kaslin

Why is the title at odds with the content?

Folks protest GMOs are the typical population control crowd.

“People bad, Dirt good”


8 posted on 06/04/2013 5:24:31 AM PDT by G Larry (Let his days be few; and let another take his office. Psalms 109:8)
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To: Kaslin
Former Monsanto employee put in charge of GMO papers at journal

Just months after a study was published showing that two Monsanto products, a genetically modified (GM) maize and Roundup herbicide, damaged the health of rats, the journal that published the study appointed a former Monsanto scientist to decide which papers on GM foods and crops should be published, a new article reveals.[1]

Monsanto and GM foods suffered a storm of bad publicity after a study published in the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT) in September 2012 reported that a GM corn and Roundup caused organ damage and increased rates of tumors and premature death in rats.[2]

But in early 2013 Richard E. Goodman, a former Monsanto researcher with close ties to the biotech industry, joined the senior editorial staff of FCT. Goodman was given the specially created position of associate editor for biotechnology.


9 posted on 06/04/2013 5:27:45 AM PDT by opentalk
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To: Gen.Blather
Every day lebenteengazillion tons of bird poop waft down from on high ~ infesting everything beneath them with insect parts, viruses, bacteria, and every other substance you can imagine birds manage to swallow, produce, or otherwise stick in their beaks!

Free range chickens, surrounded by miles of tasty bird food snacks, acquire many times more than their fair share of wild bird poop.

Give me GMO every time there's a choice ~ I want to live!!!!

10 posted on 06/04/2013 5:27:56 AM PDT by muawiyah
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To: Kaslin

People with full stomachs have a lot of time to complain...................


11 posted on 06/04/2013 5:32:24 AM PDT by PeterPrinciple
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To: Kaslin

Thanks, I read Natural News by Mike Adams. I’m glad this is gaining ground.


12 posted on 06/04/2013 5:34:11 AM PDT by gattaca ("Empty heads are fond of long titles" Old German Proverb.)
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To: Kaslin
Um ... wheat is the mother of all GMO foods, it did not exist in nature and was created by man via selective breeding.

Just sayin' ...

13 posted on 06/04/2013 5:34:24 AM PDT by SecondAmendment (Restoring our Republic at 9.8357x10^8 FPS)
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To: gattaca
I’m glad this is gaining ground.

I'm embarrassed this is gaining ground.

The deadliest substances known to man are "natural."

People need to get over this emotional view of "natural" and "artificial."

14 posted on 06/04/2013 5:35:55 AM PDT by Strategerist
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To: muawiyah

All crops are genetically modified. The original strains have changed over the years naturally. The only difference is that companies make the seeds they distribute unable to be used for the next year’s crop, requiring the farmer to keep going back to the company for new seeds. This has been a big gripe and underlies many of the protests


15 posted on 06/04/2013 5:36:10 AM PDT by rstrahan
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To: Kaslin
Ben& Jerry's Will Stop Using Genetically-Modified Ingredients,Company Says

… … Ben & Jerry's announcement comeslessthan a year after California residents voted down Proposition 37,a California ballot initiative that would haverequired genetically-modified food to be labeled as such. Ben & Jerry's parent company,Unilever donated almost half a million dollarsto defeat the measure,accordingto Underground Health.

In total,companies like Monsanto and The Hershey Co. gave a combined $44 million to defeat the ballot initiative.

16 posted on 06/04/2013 5:42:19 AM PDT by opentalk
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To: rstrahan; Kaslin
All crops are genetically modified.

There is a world of difference between what Mendel did and what Monsanto does. Genetic engineering is basicly an ungodly process. God created things to reproduce after their own kind. Genetic engineering violates that order just as much as homosexual unions violate marriage.

17 posted on 06/04/2013 5:46:08 AM PDT by tbpiper
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To: Kaslin

Excellent article.

I’m shocked at the FReepers on here who are a-ok with laboratory created foods & seem to be in denial about the endemic medical problems that have arisen since our diets changed to one that’s more highly-processed & less natural.

And for those who want to claim that GMOs exist in nature through hundreds of years of selective & cross-breeding, they really ought to get a clue. Something happening like that naturally in nature is far different from some mad scientist in a lab splicing viral DNA into a crop.


18 posted on 06/04/2013 5:48:23 AM PDT by surroundedbyblue (Why am I both pro-life & pro-gun? Because both positions defend the innocent and protect the weak.)
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To: Kaslin

The article raises fears about GMOs but doesn’t provide a single documented example of an injury from GMOs.

Lots of baseless “probably” and “could”. Several examples of prior Monsanto products that were not food related (Agent Orange and PCBs) and others that are criticized because of highly flawed studies (DDT and sacharine).

Fearmongering now passes for information.


19 posted on 06/04/2013 5:49:56 AM PDT by kidd
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To: muawiyah; Gen.Blather; Kaslin

Your argument is complete BS. How much monospeciated chicken poop do you think chickens get in a CAFO chicken house? Free range or pasterued chickens are demonstrably better, and cleaner. GMO’s are bad news. Do some research.


20 posted on 06/04/2013 5:50:44 AM PDT by tbpiper
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