GMOs AND FRANKENFOODS: GOD MOVE OVER! · GREEK MEDICINE'S BLOG

This article introduces my readers to the health and safety risks that GMO foods, or Genetically Modified Organisms, pose for the food consumer, the natural ecosystem and for the whole planet. It also advocates for a return to natural, organic foods as the best way to protect one’s health.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Biggest Philosophical Problem of All

In my previous blog posting, I covered various perplexing philosophical problems posed by modern agribusiness and factory farming in connection with our food. I thought I would have the space to devote to the problem of GMOs, or Genetically Modified Organisms, in the last blog posting, but it soon became clear to me that GMOs pose such a huge problem, in so many different ways, for the health, safety and integrity of our food supply, and of our whole planet, that it really deserved a blog posting of its own. Indeed, the potential ramifications of modern GMO or gene splicing technology are many and varied, and affect not only one’s personal health and wellbeing, but also the health and sustainability of modern agriculture and the very natural environment itself. To put things in a nutshell, the core philosophical problem posed by GMOs and genetic engineering technology is:

Do big agribusiness and biotech corporations have the right to play God with the food we eat?

Of course, the corporations themselves would answer that question in the affirmative, but really – do they have the requisite wisdom and unlimited creative intelligence to do so?

The Creation Account of Genesis Revisited

An old friend of mine who is also the owner of a health food store once told me a joke: What does GMO stand for? Although the usual answer is Genetically Modified Organism, the joke’s answer is “God Move Over”. And this is quite revealing about the motives and psychology of the big agribusiness and biotech corporations who are into genetic engineering – basically, they want to play God, and replace the natural foods that God created with their own artificial concoctions.

If one reads the creation account in Genesis, at the end of each day of creation, God looks upon what He has just created and sees that it is good. This simple, unadorned use of the word “good”, without any other caveats, qualifications or modifiers, carries the implicit meaning that what God created was for the best and highest good of all concerned, or the whole world. The big question is: Do the giant biotech corporations who create genetically modified foods really have the wisdom, creative intelligence and moral stature of God? I don’t think so. While God has created the foods we eat to serve the whole of Creation or the natural order, genetic engineering corporations like Monsanto create their GMO wonders for much more base and self-serving motives – to boost crop and livestock yields and production in order to maximize the profit bottom line in their marketing of their GMO foods to you, the consumer. And once those foods wind up on your dinner plate, these same corporations couldn’t care less about the finer qualitative issues and problems they pose for your personal health and safety, or that of the natural environment or ecosystem either.

If you happen to be an atheist or one who doesn’t believe in God, you could substitute the phrase “the Natural Order” for God. In other words, over the course of millions of years, the Natural Order gradually evolved into a state of marvelous balance, harmony and equilibrium – so much so that believers in God have attributed this Natural Order to divine creative intelligence. But whether you happen to believe in God or not, you gotta admit that these big GMO giants have quite a God complex. To give you some concrete illustration of just how insidious and perverse this God complex is, GMO seeds can’t reproduce by themselves, because the corporations that created them have spliced a special “suicide gene” into their DNA; in other words, the seeds produced by GMO crops are sterile. The biotech corporations that produce GMO seeds call this “terminator technology” – apologies to Arnold Schwarzenegger! – 1. In some kind of twisted Jesus number, the GMO plant grown from the GMO seed winds up sacrificing itself to the Great Corporation in the Sky. No offense to you Christians out there, but the Jesus metaphor was the best one I could find! Poor family farmers in India who assumed that they would be able to plant the next year’s crop from the seeds of the first year’s crop find out, to their great chagrin, that they have to go back to the seed producing GMO corporation to buy some more seeds – which aren’t cheap.

What Is Genetic Engineering, and What Are Genetically Modified Organisms, or GMOs?

Prior to the advent of GMO or gene splicing technology, new varieties of the fruits and vegetables we eat were produced via selective cross-breeding, or hybridization – that is, pre-existing species, strains and varieties that were closely related botanically were selectively cross bred for the various desirable traits they possessed until a final hybrid was produced that manifested all the traits the breeders sought. In order to be selectively cross-bred, the pre-existing varieties that were selected to be cross-bred had to be closely related enough to be genetically compatible, or to share a sufficient amount of genetic material in common – like within the same genus, or within the same phylum, or larger family at the most distant. Nevertheless, this traditional method of selective cross-breeding was quite successful at producing an amazing variety of fruits and vegetables for man’s consumption, as well as an amazing variety of cats, dogs, horses, cattle and other domesticated animals to be man’s companions and helpers.

Gene splicing, or genetic engineering, is something that is totally different. Genetic engineers aren’t limited by considerations of genetic closeness when they splice genes from one living organism into another. A gene from a bacterium can be spliced into corn, or a gene from a fish, like a salmon, can be spliced into a tomato, for example. And the traits that are deemed most desirable to the gene splicers aren’t necessarily those that are sought by the end consumer; they can be ones that benefit the profit incentive of the growers, or the GMO producing corporation itself at the expense of, or to the detriment of, the farmer, who also has his own balance sheet of profit and loss, and the end consumer, who not only has economic factors but also health and wellness factors to consider as well. And GMO traits that benefit the GMO corporation at the expense of, or to the detriment of, the natural environment or ecosystem put the whole human race, and the whole planet, at risk. And the difficult, thorny and perplexing moral and ethical problems posed by GMO technology are dark and disturbing indeed.

Drawing an allusion to Mary Shelley’s horror novel about Dr. Frankenstein and the patchwork monster he created, GMO foods are often called Frankenfoods. This pretty much sums up the basic plot of horror stories involving the typical mad scientist and his monstrous creation, like the giant blob that ate a whole city before it could finally be stopped, and so on. As long as the monster is contained within the lab, everything is OK, and there is a lid on the situation, but once the monster escapes and is let loose on the world at large, watch out! I believe that the first message that was sent over telegraph wires was, “What hath God wrought?” Perhaps the word “man” could be substituted for “God” as we ponder the huge health and environmental implications and consequences of GMO foods. On a somewhat lighter and more academic note, can someone who regularly eats genetically engineered tomatoes that have had a salmon gene spliced into them really call himself a vegetarian, even if he eats no meat? I’ll leave that to you to ponder.

Genetic Engineering and GMO foods, Pro and Con

As with other morally or ethically questionable forms of modern technology, genetic engineering, or GMO technology, is highly controversial, with its ardent proponents as well as its vocal critics or detractors. Perhaps the greatest argument put forth by genetic engineering proponents in favor of GMO products and foods is that, by boosting the yields of crops and livestock, they alone can solve the growing problem of world hunger and feeding a hungry planet. But the root cause of world hunger is unbridled or unchecked population growth, which could be called uncontrolled genes escaping from the jeans, I suppose – gotta put a lid on the human genetic impulse to procreate, or practice more birth control and family planning, it seems. Come to think of it, this argument of conquering world hunger and feeding a hungry planet may be the only argument in favor of GMOs; on the negative side of the ledger, there are all kinds of health, economic and environmental problems created by genetic engineering technology; at any rate, I can think of no other argument for GMOs that is more positive. And of course, GMO proponents are putting forth GMO technology as the only viable solution to the looming problem of world hunger.

Even the argument of conquering world hunger via increased food production has its flaws, or its inevitable down side, it seems. As we saw in the previous installment with Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone, or rBGH, injected into dairy cows to boost their milk production by twenty percent, the down side was that the frequency of udder infections, with increased pus in the milk and increased antibiotic use as well to treat those infections goes up, which can be seen as undesirable side effects. This suggests that Mother Nature designed the dairy cow to only be able to operate and produce milk within certain comfortable limits, and when those natural or comfortable limits are exceeded, the risk of problems and pathology increases as well. The benefits of higher crop yields are also alluring, and here the GMO corporations have sought to create crops that either have their own endogenous herbicides and/or pesticides contained within them, or crops that can tolerate vastly increased amounts of these chemicals – which are also produced by the same GMO corporations that produce the crops and their seeds.

So – the GMO corporations are able to entice farmers into buying their seeds, and growing their crops, by promising them higher crop yields via the drastic reduction of their natural pests, like insects and weeds. To achieve this end, the crop varieties they have created either contain their own endogenous pesticides and/or herbicides, or they are designed to be virtually immune, even to huge amounts of pesticides and herbicides that are sprayed on them – which are usually made by the GMO companies themselves. So, the farmer wins, and his profits and crop yields are increased, but the GMO corporation that produces the seeds, and the pesticides and herbicides that go with them, profit and benefit a lot more – and this is the real “God” that the GMO corporations serve. And when it comes to the end consumer, or those who actually eat the GMO foods, the GMO corporations, who are really running the show, couldn’t care less. As a concrete example, Bt corn has been spliced with a gene from a bacteria, known as Bacillus Thuringensis, that kills insect pests by provoking massive gastrointestinal bleeding within their tiny bodies. – 2. Now – if Bt corn can do this to an insect pest, then maybe – just maybe – it might be able to poke a few holes in your gut as well, leading to leaky gut syndrome and a whole host of food allergies and sensitivities that go along with it. In the face of such callous disregard for the health and wellbeing of the end consumer, the only advice that can be given is: Caveat emptor – buyer beware! You are the only one who can protect your health and wellbeing.

GMO Foods and Your Health: The Epidemiological Evidence

Since Glyphosate (Roundup) and GMOs were first introduced in the early ‘90s, there has been a marked, almost exponential, increase in the incidence of many modern diseases that were not very frequent prior to their introduction. Animal studies have been done on the effects of Glyphosate and GMOs, and the pathologies they can cause, but what is probably the most revealing and convincing is the epidemiological evidence showing the rise of these modern diseases paralleling increases in the use of GMOs and Glyphosate quite closely. Of course, the ability of Glyphosate to cause various kinds of tumors in mice and other lab animals has been documented (see article cited below), but beyond cancer and tumors, the increase in GMO agriculture has closely paralleled the rise of many modern diseases that are now causing widespread concern – diseases like celiac disease and gluten intolerance, autism, disruptions in the gut biome and intestinal infections, type 2 diabetes, obesity, hormonal abnormalities and kidney failure. Another disorder that has become very frequent and widespread in recent years, whose rise seems to parallel the rise in GMO agriculture, is infertility. When I graduated from acupuncture school back in the 1980’s, before the introduction of GMOs, infertility cases were very rare; now they are so common that many acupuncturists devote their whole practice to treating infertility alone.

After a little google searching on the internet, I was finally able to find an article, a research paper, that correlated the rising frequency of many of these modern diseases with the rise in GMOs and Glyphosate use, showing many graphs. I think you will find this article / research paper to be very eye opening:

The Science-based Evidence to Ban Glyphosate and GMOs

GMO crops and foods are very, very controversial, and the debate and polemic rages back and forth about them, both pro and con. In addition, the big biotech corporations that produce the GMOs have virtually unlimited sums of money, and are able to hire the best lawyers and PR people, many of whom Socrates would have called sophists, to make their case not only to the public and the concerned consumer, but also to the regulatory agencies that are charged with reviewing, testing and approving their GMO products. And of course, these same corporations have been very successful at corrupting and buying off these regulatory agencies and their officials, as the book Seeds of Deception chronicles and reveals so well. But at the end of the day, regardless of which side wins the polemical battles, there is quite solid epidemiological evidence linking the rise of GMO foods and agriculture quite closely with the astounding rise in the chronic and degenerative modern diseases I have enumerated above. In other words, Mother Nature doesn’t lie, or even twist or distort the truth, and the bodies of those who have regularly consumed GMO foods tell the true story in the diseases and pathologies they develop and manifest over time.

As a case in point, take the case of Bt corn, which I discussed above – OK, from reading my discussion of it, you can probably guess that I am in the anti-GMO camp, and that’s true. In their efforts to convince and assure potential consumers of their product, the producers of Bt corn state that the toxic protein produced by Bt corn as a result of the Bacillus Thuringensis gene that has been spliced into it only targets a very specific family of insects of the family Lepidopterae, which includes corn’s chief insect adversary, the European Corn Borer. – 3. The producers assure us that this same toxic crystalline protein, which has such a devastating effect on this family of insects, passes through the GI tracts of humans who eat the corn without causing any damage, since humans do not have the receptor sites for this particular toxic protein. But the astounding rise in leaky gut syndrome and all the intestinal disorders and food allergies / sensitivities that arise from it, since the introduction of GMO crops, of which Bt corn is probably the most common, strongly contradicts this assertion of the producers, indicating that the GI tracts of humans do not emerge from their encounter with Bt corn totally unscathed.

GMOs and the Need for Food Transparency

If you go online and google up the extent to which crops today are genetically engineered, you will find that some crops, like corn, soybeans and cotton, are around 90 percent genetically engineered, or GMO. Yet you go into the supermarkets and the health food stores and you find just about all the corn chips and soy products, like tofu, labeled either “organic” or “non-GMO”; it seems like the phrase “non-GMO” is probably the most popular phrase in food labeling today, after the word, “organic”. This clearly shows that, when it comes to the food they eat, the consumer has caught on to the fact that GMOs are not that good for one’s health – and that may be putting things mildly. I don’t think I have ever been in a supermarket, much less a health food store, where I encountered a food product that was proudly labeled “GMO” – if you should ever run across such a label, please tell me! From this situation, two things are clear: First, that the advent of GMO technology has placed the GMO and agribusiness corporations that produce GMO crops and foods into an adversarial relationship with the food consumer; and secondly, that the GMO and agribusiness corporations don’t want you to know that you’re eating GMO foods and food ingredients.

This situation also pinpoints a very urgent need to do one’s own research and homework if one truly wants to eat organic and natural, and avoid consuming GMO foods. In all probability, if you read the statistics online and realize the sheer prevalence of GMO foods today, and you see all the “organic” and “non-GMO” labels on the foods in the supermarkets and health food stores, then somebody, somewhere, must be lying, or misrepresenting what they’re selling. Some good investigative reporter needs to go under cover and find out what the CEOs of the GMO corporations themselves are eating, and if it turns out that they’re avoiding their own “Frankenfood” creations like the plague, then that’s a flagrant violation of the Golden Rule on their part. Understandably, in recent years, there have been political movements among food consumers to get GMO foods labeled, but this has been fought tooth and nail by the GMO corporations, and to date, as far as I know, the GMO corporations have been successful in their fight against GMO labeling and food transparency. Talk and lip service are cheap, and it seems like any food producer can slap an “organic” or “non-GMO” label on their food products as a marketing ploy – and so, you really need to do your homework to find food producers who are really committed to organic or non-GMO agriculture – ones who really “walk the walk”, and not just “talk the talk”, as they say.

GMOs and the Environment

One of the most disturbing things about GMO foods, crops and GMO technology in general is the sheer complexity of the many problems posed by it, and the sheer number of forces and factors in our natural world that are thrown out of whack by our tampering with the genetic code of Life. Because all of these forces and factors are intertwined and inter-related, it seems like whatever approach we take to the problem of genetically modified foods must be holistic and broad in scope. To return to the creation account in Genesis, the solutions we should adopt must be good for the entire Natural Order – in other words, for the whole natural environment or ecosystem. Although this blog posting focuses mainly on the health problems posed by GMO foods, there are many ramifications of GMO technology indeed, and the environmental effects and consequences it engenders are a large and significant part of the problem.

Take the case of Bt corn, once again. Most of the articles regarding the health and safety aspects of Bt corn for human consumption were generally positive and reassuring – and I wondered whether or not those who wrote the articles were in the pockets of the GMO and biotech corporations. But another common type of article that came up repeatedly in the results of my google search on “the case against Bt corn” focused on the problem of the European Corn Borer, which is the chief target of the spliced Bt gene, and its increasing resistance to the Bt toxin. – 4. Since insects reproduce much more quickly than humans, they can develop resistance or immunity to various toxic or noxious substances in their environment much more quickly than humans can. It’s the old adage, “What does not kill me will make me stronger”. The emergence of new “superbugs” or resistant insect pests seems to parallel the rise of microbial “superbugs” in response to the increased use of antibiotics in factory farming.

Another unintended consequence of the creation of Bt corn was the unexpected vulnerability of the Monarch Butterfly to the effects of the Bt toxin, which is detailed in the book Seeds of Deception. Oh no – not the beautiful and beloved Monarch Butterfly! This was terrible news for the producers of Bt corn, and in a jiffy, all the PR experts on the corporation’s payroll were scrambling around in damage control mode. And of course, the Monarch Butterfly is a member of the same Lepidopterae family of insects that the Bt toxin targets. New resistant “superbugs” arise, while other beautiful and beloved members of the insect kingdom are unexpectedly harmed. All the while, the pesticides and herbicides that are such a large part of GMO agriculture are having the net effect of greatly reducing the biodiversity of insect and plant life, say the environmentalists that are fighting against the large biotech corporations and their GMO crops and foods – 5. . The moral of this story is that, to really play God, we must be able to take a broad, integral and holistic view of all Life, and I don’t think that the GMO corporations are really up to the task. As Chief Seattle said, we did not weave the web of life – we are merely strands within it. As the source / cited article above states, natural ecosystems are incredibly complex, and the introduction, or re-introduction of certain species, which also includes new GMO crop varieties, can have far reaching and often unforeseen consequences. Considering this environmental truth, are the GMO producers, with their narrow, profit driven motives, really up to the task of playing God?

Foods, Medicines and the Natural Order

Way back in ancient times, Hippocrates could tell us to let our food be our medicine, and our medicine be our food with absolute confidence because the natural foods he recommended were the same ones that God created; in other words, they were the same natural foods and substances that mankind had been co-evolving with for millions of years as part of the Natural Order. In other words, our bodies had become naturally acclimatized to these natural substances, some of which were used for food and others which were used for medicine, for hundreds, thousands, even millions of years of our shared evolutionary history. But over the last century or two of human history, especially the last century, man has created a whole host of new substances and chemicals that are not found in Nature, and these have provoked unnatural or pathological reactions in many sensitive or vulnerable individuals. Many have multiple chemical sensitivities. Many, if not most, of the pharmaceutical drugs we take have serious negative side effects. And now, GMO foods, which have altered or tampered with the very genetic code of Life itself, may be provoking abnormalities and pathological changes in we, the consumers, that are becoming more and more apparent as time goes on.

Another great thing about the herbs and other natural medicinal substances that are used in the world’s great traditional healing systems is that traditional healers have had centuries, even millennia, of clinical experience using them, and everything about these natural substances and their effects on the human body is thoroughly known. The same can’t be said of the new medicines that are being created by the pharmaceutical companies that are not found in Nature. New pharmaceutical drugs have to go through an intensive and extremely expensive testing and approval process, but even so, in far too many cases, significant and even debilitating negative long term effects manage to slip through the testing and approval process unnoticed. However, these more subtle and insidious negative effects usually show up later, after the drug has been on the market for a decade or two in most cases. And so, if you are to use or take a pharmaceutical drug, it is best to take one that has been on the market for at least twenty years or so. I remember our professor of Western Medicine in acupuncture school, who was a Naturopathic Doctor, tell us that 80 percent of the pharmaceutical drugs then in use were not in use twenty years previously, and this is due to these subtle or insidious negative side effects that aren’t initially discovered in the testing and approval process.

The same thing could be said about GMO foods as another artificial or unnatural product that is created in the laboratory. GMOs were first introduced in the early 1990s, and at that time, they appeared to be safe – and by that I mean that nobody who ate them was immediately falling sick, developing any symptoms or obvious negative reactions to them, or keeling over. But as time has gone on, the subtler, long term negative effects of GMO foods on our health have become more and more evident, and the food consumer has caught on. As I mentioned earlier, certain bacterial genes spliced into staple crops to serve as endogenous pesticides are probably poking holes in our guts, leading to leaky gut syndrome and a whole host of food allergies and inflammatory reactions. Glyphosate or Roundup, an herbicide and biocide used in great quantities to spray on GMO crops, does not harm or kill any cell inside out bodies, but it has been shown to have very destructive effects on the beneficial probiotic bacteria in our gut microbiome. – 6. Although, strictly speaking, these beneficial bacteria are not “us”, or part of our own bodies, scientists estimate that these beneficial probiotic bacteria comprise about 80 percent of our immune systems. Is it any wonder that many digestive and intestinal disorders have gotten far more common since GMO agriculture was first introduced?

And on a deeper, systemic level, it now appears, as the above article / research paper has shown, that various neurological disorders like autism, as well as hormonal and endocrine disorders like diabetes and obesity, and even reproductive disorders like infertility, have been epidemiologically linked to the rise in GMO foods and agriculture. These systems – the nervous, endocrine and reproductive systems – can be seen as meta-systems that link or weave the whole organism together. And regarding infertility, it seems like, if we tamper with or denature the genetic code of the food we eat, we wind up getting our own genetic code tampered with as well; in other words, through eating GMO foods, the karmic boomerang has come around to bite us in the butt. I know this sounds rather vague, nebulous and unscientific, but the sad truth is that much more scientific research needs to be done to elucidate the direct, physical cause and effect relationships between the consumption of GMO foods and what they are doing to our bodies. Since the big agribusiness and biotech companies have virtually unlimited funding, and there is tremendous financial pressure and incentive directed towards getting their GMO foods and products approved, the lion’s share of scientific research has been directed mainly towards this end. This is the agribusiness version of the Golden Rule – he who has the gold makes the rules. The consumer, unfortunately, winds up at the bottom of the totem pole.

Organic Agriculture versus GMOs: Power to the People!

Another troubling thing about the rise of GMO agriculture is that it is being used as a tool for corporate dominance and hegemony over our lives. The old ways of natural and organic agriculture are slated for extinction, argue the big agribusiness and biotech giants who are aggressively promoting GMO foods as the solution to world hunger, and the agricultural way of the future. They are making it seem as if there is no viable alternative to the GMO “solutions” they are proposing, but certain activists have arisen who are countering these corporate claims and championing a return to more traditional and natural forms of agriculture. Perhaps the most famous and controversial of these is Dr. Vandana Shiva in India, who seems to be styling herself after the much beloved Mahatma Gandhi, the father of Indian independence as the champion of the poor family farmers of India. Indeed, all over the world, people are returning to organic agriculture as the insidious health risks of GMO foods become increasingly clearer. I leave you with this short video clip of Dr. Vandana Shiva:

Seeds of Deception: Exposing the Health Risks and Dangers of GMO Foods

I will leave you with the link to the Amazon.com page for the book, Seeds of Deception: Exposing the Industry and Government Lies about the Safety of the Genetically Engineered Foods You’re Eating by Jeffrey M. Smith. It reads like a murder mystery or detective novel and exposes massive corruption and collusion between the GMO corporations and government agencies that are charged with regulating them. I have personally read this book, and give it glowing recommendations for those who want to educate themselves on what is really going on with GMO foods.

https://www.amazon.com/Seeds-Deception-Government-Genetically-Engineered/dp/0972966587

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