AM: How prevalent are genetically engineered (GMO) crops in the food we eat?
Jeffrey: Soy, corn, cotton and canola are used in vegetable oil and soy and corn and their derivatives are prevalent in processed food. My guess is that 90 percent of processed foods contain derivatives of one of these four, which may translate to about 70 percent of all foods sold in the supermarket. There are also dairy products from cows injected with bovine growth hormone. There’s Hawaiian papaya, a little bit of zucchini and crookneck squash. There are also enzymes, additives, processing agents that are not even listed on the label but are created from genetically modified microorganisms and used in the preparation of a lot of foods. One that is listed on the label is aspartame. And finally there are milk and meat products from animals that have been feed genetically engineered foods.
AM: In your new book Genetic Roulette you quote Erik Millstone, Professor of Science at the University of Sussex in England. He said, “The fundamental problem of the way in which genetically modified (GM) foods have been approved is that they haven’t really been tested properly at all. All that has happened is something which I would characterize
as an exercise in wishful thinking.” So my question is why can’t we depend on the federal regulatory agencies like USDA and FDA to protect the public interest?
Jeffrey: In 1992 the FDA policy on GMOs was created. It stated that the agency was not aware of any information showing that foods created from these new methods differed in any meaningful or uniform way. On the basis of this statement, the policy allowed biotech companies to determine if their own foods were safe, and to introduce it into the market without any testing requirements, and without even requiring them to notify the FDA of its introduction. Years later, documents were made public from a lawsuit showing that this statement in the policy was a lie, a total deception.
In reality, the overwhelming consensus among the FDA’s own scientists as revealed in memo after memo was that they believe that these foods not only were different, but were inherently unsafe. They had urged their superiors to require long-term safety studies to detect, to identify hard to detect allergies, toxins, new diseases or nutritional problems, however the White House had directed the Food & Drug Administration to promote the biotechnology industry. Furthermore the person in charge of policy at the FDA was Michael Taylor, Monsanto’s former attorney and later Monsanto’s Vice President. Monsanto of course, is the largest biotech company.
We had seen a clear disregard for science and a disregard for the safety risks of these products from the federal government, not only from the FDA but from other branches. Dan Glickman revealed the attitude that he saw when he was Secretary of Agriculture under Clinton. He said, “What I saw generically from the pro-biotech side was the attitude that the technology was good and that it was almost immoral to say it wasn’t good because it was going to solve the problems of the human waste, and feed the hungry, and clothe the naked. And if you’re against it, you are a Luddite, you’re stupid.” He said, “You felt like you’re an alien, disloyal, by trying to present an open-minded view.” This attitude, which persists today, was a result of hundreds of millions of dollars spent in lobbying Washington. Not only does it give a false impression that genetically engineered foods are safe and necessary—they have succeeded in marginalizing critical voices so that those of us who are demanding more science are considered anti-science.
AM: And this all started under the Clinton administration?
Jeffrey: No actually the 1992 policy came out under the first Bush Administration.
AM: But the Clinton Administration certainly supported it.
Jeffrey: Yes. This has had bipartisan support. Dan Quayle chaired the Council of Competitiveness and was charged with increasing U.S. exports. And they identified genetically engineered crops as a promising sector to do just that. So they fast tracked the approval in hopes that it would increase the dominance of American corporate interests. It backfired. We lost our corn market in Europe. Our soy markets have shrunk. And we now spend 3 to 5 billion dollars per year extra to prop up the prices of these GM crops that no one wants.
AM: I believe the original GMO product was Flavr Savr tomato. The producer, Calgene, actually did some studies that showed health problems.
Jeffrey: In the trial feeding of Flavr Savr tomatoes to rats, seven of twenty females had stomach lesions. Seven of forty total died.
AM: This was the first genetically engineered crop out of the gate and when Calgene actually presented this material to FDA due to political pressure, they just ignored the troubling data.
Jeffrey: Exactly. Calgene had two different Flavr Savr tomatoes they were testing, one that was related more to these deaths and lesions. They chose voluntarily not to commercialize that particular line. But there was no indication that the FDA was forcing them to stop the line that was associated with lesions and death. In fact, that was the only time that a company, in this purely voluntary consultation process with the FDA, turned over raw feeding study data. Now companies typically hand over meaningless summaries with conclusions. And if the FDA ever asked for more information, they’re often ignored. The information that has been received from the Freedom of Information Act demonstrates that these consultations are a façade and not adequate to protect the citizens’ health.
AM: When I was involved with the Santa Cruz county process to ban GMOs, one issue I pushed was the fact that when the California Department of Food and Agriculture wants information on a trial planting, the biotech company can withhold information like location, crop variety etc. on the application, by merely filling in CBI (Confidential Business Information).
Jeffrey: No one can understand why the impact of feeding genetically engineered corn to rats is confidential business information. Of course it would be confidential business information if the rats got sick because they don’t want people to know it because it would be bad for business. We know about the Calgene Flavr Savr tomato studies because of a lawsuit. We also know from a Green Peach lawsuit filed in Germany of another study that had been kept secret in which rats were fed Monsanto’s Mon863 corn. And when it was made public, it was reanalyzed by a group of scientists; and was published this year that the rats had clear indications of toxicity in the liver and kidneys. It was also clear from the release of documents that Monsanto had worked hard to rig their research to avoid finding problems using irrelevant control groups, irrelevant cross study comparisons, improper unscientific conclusions, poor statistics, etc. And yet even still they showed statistically significant damage in their own research, which was only amplified when it was re-evaluated independently.
AM: You really have to wonder at what point does this kind of activity become criminal, either on the part of the biotech industry or the federal regulatory agency.
Jeffrey: There are certainly aspects of criminal behavior. Monsanto was fined $1.5 million for bribing up to 140 Indonesian officials trying to get their cotton approved. There was evidence of tampering of yield results and other items in India associated with Monsanto’s products. Six Canadian government scientists claimed that Monsanto offered them a bribe of $1 to 2 million to approve rBGH (Bovine Growth Hormone) without further study. In my book Genetic Roulette, I have 43 pages of detailed revelations of how these biotech companies have rigged their research and cooked the books in order to give the false impression that their foods are safe.
AM: Going back to the California Department of Food and Agriculture—if they do get an application with CBI on it, they can call the biotech company and request the information. The biotech company can voluntarily provide that information, which they generally do. If, however, the state official makes that information public, then the state official is criminally liable. At that point you have to ask, who is regulating whom?
In the book you say that genetic engineering creates widespread and unpredictable changes. What kind of changes are we talking about and why aren’t they predictable?
Jeffrey: The process of inserting a gene into DNA is violent and causes massive collateral damage. Typically scientists use a gene gun and blast millions of genes into millions of cells hoping that some of those genes make it into the DNA of some of those cells. They then grow the cell through cloning, also called tissue culture. Between the process of insertion and cloning, there are massive numbers of mutations, hundreds or thousands throughout the DNA. One study showed that when a single gene was inserted into the DNA, up to 5 percent of the active genes that were measured changed their levels of protein expression, which means hundreds or thousands of genes might be altered in expression due to a single insertion.
We are scrambling the basic functioning and output of the DNA in such a way that we may create new allergens, toxins, carcinogens, anti-nutrients, and positive nutrients. We don’t know. It’s a genetic roulette. We do know that when European laboratories actually sequenced the inserted gene, called the transgene, of five popular genetically engineered crops, they found that the sequence was different than what had been registered by the companies. This suggests that the transgenes are unstable and may rearrange over time, which means that they may be producing proteins that were never intended and never tested.
Here’s another unpredicted consequence. When another laboratory tested the same varieties, they found in some cases that they were also different. They were also different than what had been registered with the company, but in some cases they were different than what the Paris lab had found, indicating that they changed, that they’re not only unstable but they’re non-uniform in their changes. So we may have real surprises in store.
In the Philippines, we saw that a certain variety of genetically modified corn, when it was pollinating, appeared to cause serious symptoms—allergic responses, intestinal problems, etc.—in the population living next to the cornfield. When the same seeds were planted the following year in four other villages, the same thing happened during the time of pollination. So it may be that this particular brand was either unstable in its genetic structure or in the toxin that it was producing.
About 20 percent of the genetically engineered crops are designed to produce their own pesticide in every cell and of course in every bite. The biotech companies and the EPA, which is responsible for regulating pesticide producing crops, assures us that this toxin called Bt, for Bacillus thuringiensis, is safe because it has a history of safe use. It’s destroyed during digestion, and does not interact with humans or mammals that don’t have receptor cells for the toxins. I testified at the EPA two weeks ago and urged them to abandon this obsolete and dangerous set of assumptions. We know that hundreds of people in the Pacific Northwest complained of allergic symptoms when they were sprayed with Bt, which was being applied for Gypsy Moth infestation. And we know that the Bt toxin has expressed in the plants is thousands of times more concentrated and in a more toxic form than that which is created in the spray. In fact hundreds of Indian farm workers who are harvesting, loading, or cleaning Bt cotton complained of the identical symptoms that were described by those in the Pacific Northwest after being sprayed. And when those fields of post-harvest Bt cotton were being grazed by sheep, within five to seven days of eating these Bt cotton plants, 25 percent of the sheep died, an estimated 10,000 total. Similarly Bt corn was linked by farmers to thousands of sterile pigs and cows as well as dead cows, chickens, horses and water buffalos in Germany and the Philippines.
We know from the only human feeding study ever conducted and published on genetically engineered foods that genes can and do transfer to human gut bacteria from genetically engineered crops. If the Bt producing gene transfers from genetically modified corn chips, for example, it might turn our intestinal flora into living pesticide factories possibly for the rest of our lives. We don’t know. But it is clear the transfer does occur in soybeans, may occur in corn, and could be long-term and stable.
AM: What a nightmare.
Jeffrey: Totally
Read part two of this interview.
Jeffrey Smith is a leading spokesperson on the health dangers of genetically modified foods and the author Seeds of Deception: Exposing Industry and Government Lies about the Safety of the Genetically Engineered Foods You’re Eating; his latest book is Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Modified Foods
