The Health Risks of GM Foods: Summary and Debate
This section summarizes the health risks of genetically modified foods and serves as a forum for a global discussion and debate. It is organized around the 65 main point summaries presented on the left side of the two-page spreads in Part 1 of Genetic Roulette. Each section linked below offers the opportunity for people to submit updates, corrections, challenges and responses. Before making a submittal, please review the full content in that section of the book.
Non Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) Shopping Guide
“Why are GMOs a problem? First of all, they have only been around for 20ish years. That’s not much time to find out what they will do. Second, testing hasn’t been extensive or rigorous due to a revolving door of personnel between government regulatory agencies and companies like Monsanto that are heavily invested in GMOs (read here for more details on this problem). These huge and powerful agribusinesses successfully lobbied for the introduction of GM foods before proper testing had been completed. Because of this, we don’t know what will happen to human health and the environment in the long run. Many countries around the world, including Australia, Japan, and all the countries in the European Union, have banned GMOs because they have not been proven safe. The book, “Seeds of Deception” details the many studies and effects that have raised serious concerns about GMOs. Here’s my condensed version of a few health risks discussed on the Seeds of Deception website:
full article from Sustainable Table
By Sharon Begley | NEWSWEEKPublished Sep 11, 2009
“It’s easy enough to find culprits in the nation’s epidemic of obesity, starting with tubs of buttered popcorn at the multiplex and McDonald’s 1,220-calorie deluxe breakfasts, and moving on to the couch potatofication of America. Potent as they are, however, these causes cannot explain the ballooning of one particular segment of the population, a segment that doesn’t go to movies, can’t chew, and was never that much into exercise: babies. In 2006 scientists at the Harvard School of Public Health reported that the prevalence of obesity in infants under 6 months had risen 73 percent since 1980. “This epidemic of obese 6-month-olds,” as endocrinologist Robert Lustig of the University of California, San Francisco, calls it, poses a problem for conventional explanations of the fattening of America. “Since they’re eating only formula or breast milk, and never exactly got a lot of exercise, the obvious explanations for obesity don’t work for babies,” he points out. “You have to look beyond the obvious.”“
Scientists in Japan, whose work Heindel focused on, were also finding that low levels of certain compounds, such as bisphenol A (the building block of hard, polycarbonate plastic, including that in baby bottles), had surprising effects on cells growing in lab dishes. Usually the cells become fibroblasts, which make up the body’s connective tissue. These prefibroblasts, however, are like the kid who isn’t sure what he wants to be when he grows up. With a little nudge, they can take an entirely different road. They can become adipocytes—fat cells. And that’s what the Japanese team found: bisphenol A, and some other industrial compounds, pushed prefibroblasts to become fat cells. The compounds also stimulated the proliferation of existing fat cells. “The fact that an environmental chemical has the potential to stimulate growth of ‘preadipocytes’ has enormous implications,” Heindel wrote. If this happened in living animals as it did in cells in lab dishes, “the result would be an animal [with] the tendency to become obese.”
…”It took less than two years for Heindel’s “if” to become reality. For 30 years his colleague Newbold had been studying the effects of estrogens, but she had never specifically looked for links to obesity. Now she did. Newbold gave low doses (equivalent to what people are exposed to in the environment) of hormone-mimicking compounds to newborn mice. In six months, the mice were 20 percent heavier and had 36 percent more body fat than unexposed mice. Strangely, these results seemed to contradict the first law of thermodynamics, which implies that weight gain equals calories consumed minus calories burned. “What was so odd was that the overweight mice were not eating more or moving less than the normal mice,” Newbold says. “We meas-ured that very carefully, and there was no statistical difference.”“
NEW MICHAEL POLLAN FILM
PBS Description:
“Botany of Desire tells the utterly original story of four everyday plants and the way they have domesticated humankind. In 1983 Michael Pollan and his wife left New York City to make a new home on an abandoned dairy farm. Pursuing a childhood fascination with gardening and an old-fashioned hubris about his ability to control nature, Pollan set about creating a garden. He had no way of knowing that it would eventually lead him to an original and provocative re-interpretation of the relationship between plants and people. This two-hour documentary, based on Pollan’s best selling book The Botany of Desire, takes viewers from the potato fields of Peru and Idaho to the apple forests of Kazakhstan, from the tulip markets of Amsterdam to the medical marijuana grow rooms of the United States. Along the way, the program will explore the natural history of the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato– and the human desires that link their destinies to our own.”
High Fructose Corn Syrup- first article in the series “If This Doesn’t Convince You, Nothing Will” from Sustainable Table
I started this series, “If This Doesn’t Convince You, Nothing Will,” to help you make the connection between personal health and sustainable food (read the introduction post here). I’m starting with High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) which is widely known to have some obvious health issues and also some very obvious sustainability issues too. Easy, right? But the more I dig, the more complicated it is – an even more compelling reason to take a look!
Let’s start at the beginning – what is HFCS? Sugar as we know it traditionally came from sugar cane and later from sugar beets. HFCS was developed from corn in the late 1950s, refined for industrial production in the 1970s, and introduced into many processed foods from 1975-1985 – a big dietary and nutritional change that went largely unnoticed over the past 35 years.
One clue into what HFCS is – it was developed in a lab, not grown and milled. There is a long process that corn goes through to become HFCS, you can read a good description here. A simple (ha, I just read it again, it’s not simple) explanation is that corn is milled into corn starch, then processed to yield corn syrup (which is almost entirely glucose), then enzymes are added to change the glucose into fructose. The fructose, which is very sweet, is mixed with the first round of corn syrup to make it the strength that is needed, most often 42 or 55 percent fructose. It is highly refined, extremely sweet and has preservative properties.
Why is HFCS bad for our health? There are many theories about HFCS and its connection to personal health. You can find studies stating that it is no worse for a person than regular sugar, and studies saying that HFCS leads to obesity, diabetes, cancer – because of its synthetic makeup. HFCS is in thousands of processed foods including, but not limited to: bread, peanut butter, ketchup, tomato sauce, soda, fast food, cereal, salad dressing, yogurt, sauces, jam/jelly, ice cream… you get the idea.
If we compare HFCS to sugar with the theory that the two are no different, they are still both problematic for our health. Sugar, which for hundreds of years was eaten only in very small quantities, is today consumed in enormous amounts in the U.S. (some estimates range up to 150 pounds per person per year), contributing greatly to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer and many other health problems – many of them preventable. Moderation is the key for the healthy inclusion of sweeteners in our diets, whether sugar or HFCS.
If we look at HFCS as a synthetic creation that is different from plain old white sugar, some of the concerns that arise are:
With all of these problems, why would we continue to ingest this supposed “food”? In fact, many companies are now moving away from HFCS, replacing it with “real sugar.” That’s enough for me to believe something is wrong with it. A few of the companies that have started to make a switch in some of their products are Pepsi, Coke, Pizza Hut, Kraft, and ConAgra – big names! Sweet Surprise – the Corn Refiners Association’s website defending HFCS – pops up on any website I consulted for this blog post that had Google advertising (paid ads come onto the site matching the topic of the site). They are trying hard to dispel the truth – HFCS is not a positive nutritional addition to anyone’s diet.
Sustainability Issues Related to High Fructose Corn Syrup
How does HFCS relate to sustainable food and agriculture?
How to Avoid HFCS?
It’s not new news to most people that HFCS isn’t good for you, but it’s still confusing. Because it’s so confusing, my gut instinct is to just eliminate HFCS from my diet. HFCS is most likely damaging to my health, so I don’t want to ingest it.
How to avoid HFCS:
Ease into this! If you start reading your labels and realize that you are buying many products with HFCS, pick one to eliminate, and see how it goes. Find a good replacement for the product, and soon you will be ready to tackle the next.
I’m sure this has brought up questions, please feel free to comment below.
This series “Sustainable Food: If This Doesn’t Convince You, Nothing Will” is by Dawn Brighid, marketing manager for Sustainable Table, a program of GRACE.
A few articles and websites for further reading:
The Corn Refiners Associations website to promote HFCS
The Murky World of High-Fructose Corn Syrup
The Fat of the Land: Do Agricultural Subsidies Foster Poor Health?
Not so Sweet: Missing Mercury and High Fructose Corn Syrup
Dark Sugar: The decline and fall of high fructose corn syrup
It’s never a good sign when only four companies control a major commodity – it’s called a monopoly, and we need to get muckraking. Read Tom Philpott’s report on the recent acquisition of U.S. chicken giant Pilgrim by Brazilian beef giant JBS.
There are still many people of the mindset that genetically modified seeds can save the world – and they met, on Tuesday, to hash that out. The Global Harvest Initiative, which was founded by chemical and agriculture giants DuPont, John Deere, Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland, is trying to make a buck on developing nations even though the method has failed miserably in the past. Paul Crossfield at Civil Eats has more.
People look so happy in Dannon yogurt commercials; they’re all “it’s got extra bacteria” and “I’m so happy”. But don’t be fooled by their over-enthusiastic marketing! In Activia yogurt, you’ll find just as much pro-biotic bacteria as any other yogurt along with four teaspoons of sugar. If you’re like me, you’ll stick with your goat yogurt. Check it out on Fooducate.
There are lots of problems with tuna. It may be delicious, but it’s filled with mercury, the endless demand for it is driving it to extinction and thousands of dolphins are killed in the process. As a solution, some companies try to solve the latter problem and offer dolphin-safe Tuna, but the blog Southern Fried Science now informs us that it’s a hoax as well!
Continuing on with seafood, La Vida Locavore gives us a good rundown on how shrimp is farmed. Some of the chemicals used in shrimp farming are urea, superphosphate and Diesel oil. Sounds appetizing, doesn’t it?
If all this talk of terrible seafood makes you sad, don’t you worry! McDonalds is never more than 107 miles away!
Undermined biodiversity. Chemical-intensive agriculture has wreaked havoc on the life in the soil — killing off the earthworms and other organisms that play a vital role in agriculture. It has also marginalized species of animals by destroying their habitat and poisoning their food and water. Furthermore, in the quest for one species of plant at the expense of all others, diverse sources of food have also been eliminated from local diets.
Created a less nutritious diet. Big Ag claims they seek to ‘feed the world,’ but what are they feeding the world, in fact? Destroying many of the varied plants we have historically eaten means local populations (like Americans do now, too) come to rely intensively on just a few grain crops for food. Western afflictions — diabetes, heart disease, obesity — are now also prevalent in these populations.
Exacerbated climate change. Agriculture has the potential to store carbon in the soil in the roots of cover crops and managed grasslands. Yet industrial agriculture continues to undermine anything beyond the yearly planting cycle through invasive tilling, and when using ‘no-till’ methods, requires the pouring of chemicals over the land that exclude all other species. In addition, more energy is now burned up to produce much of the world’s food than is achieved by eating it.
Increased inequity. The Green Revolution didn’t spread the wealth accrued through monocropping. In fact, many corporations have profited from agricultural speculation in the billions of dollars — meaning they have specifically profited on the risks that exacerbated hunger.
Functioned as a modern form of colonialism. Local, effective alternatives to the Green Revolution’s imposed technologies are being ignored in favor of corporate solutions that change the self-sufficiency and power structure in those countries.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paula-crossfield/evaluating-the-legacy-of_b_287192.html
By Nanci Hellmich, USA TODAY
How to reduce sodium in your diet:
*Buy fresh, frozen or canned “with no salt added” vegetables.
*Use fresh poultry, fish and lean meat rather than canned or processed foods.
*Use herbs, spices and salt-free seasoning blends in cooking and at the table.
*Cook rice, pasta and hot cereals without salt. Cut back on instant or flavored rice, pasta and cereal mixes, which usually have added salt.
*Choose convenience foods that are lower in salt. Cut back on frozen dinners, pizza, packaged mixes, canned soups or broths and salad dressings, all of which often have a lot of salt.
*Rinse canned foods, such as tuna, to remove some of the salt.
*Whenever possible, choose low- or reduced-sodium products.