Frankenstein foods

Political and commercial pressure ensures that we are guided or persuaded to buy, eat and use many products and medicines we may never even be exposed to under normal circumstances.

A good example of this are the stealth laws which have ensured we are no longer given a choice of vitamins, supplements and minerals. This commercial choice is to support the pharmaceutical organisations.

Another choice which has been taken out of our hands is whether or not we eat genetically modified food, or genetically modified organisms (GMOs). I remember over a decade ago when I first came across the name Monsanto, the US agricultural products group.

At the time I was convinced they would never succeed in their aim to introduce foods that had been genetically modified. However, because of political and major commercial support on a worldwide scale, it is becoming very difficult to avoid eating foods which have been genetically modified.

Nowadays, clandestine support of GM products within the EU bureaucracy is unlikely to be echoed in the UK. The two current government scientists are far more sceptical about GM than their predecessors, and Prime Minister David Cameron is the least GM-friendly UK leader in a long time.

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair, together with his US counterpart George W. Bush, were both avid GM supporters, with Blair fully believing that the UK’s future scientific growth would be based on GM technology.

Blair’s government was also a great supporter of vitamin elimination, which spearheaded the demonstrations against the banning of certain B vitamins in the 1990s.

A new study has discovered that GM pesticides are already in our bodies and could pass into a foetus, thereby affecting an unborn child. Canadian researchers recently found pesticide residues from GM foods in the blood and foetuses of 30 pregnant women as well as 39 who were not pregnant, in Quebec.

The researchers fear that the discovery opens up a whole new area of toxicity in reproduction. This particular research is surfacing at a bad time for the GMO industry, which now includes European organisations such as Nestlé and Unilever.

The US and Spanish governments have been working behind the scenes in a joint initiative to obtain EU official ‘zero tolerance’ of GM crops and foods overturned to ensure their own organisations can introduce these GMOs into the food chain with ease.

Therefore, GMOs may soon be available in meat throughout Europe following ‘back door’, or stealth, pressure from the US. This move is occurring despite leading biologists revealing that this could be the cause of kidney and liver poisoning.

The biologists, led by Gilles-Eric Seralini, found pesticide residues in GM crops and feeds that were 1,000 times above safe levels. In humans the pesticide can affect the endocrine system which regulates normal physical functioning.

Some of the data revealed that the maize caused chronic damage to the laboratory rats’ kidneys. When presented with these findings, Monsanto insisted that the condition was common in older types of rats, especially the type used in the tests. However, the rats used in the tests were only five months old.

Biologists from institutions in France, who were working with Greenpeace, obtained a court order to force Monsanto to hand over the findings from several animal studies that had concluded its GM crops were safe.

However, safety controls are not strict or compulsory; therefore, they are not independently reviewed and so do not have to be published.

The biologists managed to get hold of the data, and after analysis discovered ‘statistically significant’ evidence that the crops were far from safe, and could cause liver and kidney poisoning. The Monsanto group and the food regulators made it clear they considered the threat was irrelevant.

The problem is that GM crops and animal feeds have never had to pass any safety trials because the US Food and Drug Administration has always maintained that GM crops are ‘substantially equivalent’ to non-GM crops.

Unfortunately, this view has also been accepted by the EU regulators, such as the European Food Safety Authority. They have maintained that any pesticides would break down during food processing, while those in animal feeds would be destroyed in the gut.

According to the Wikileaks website, the first stage of the strategy is to have animal feeds containing GM crops approved. If this is successful, we could all be consuming GMOs from the meat we eat, despite what the Canadian study has demonstrated as detailed above.

The EU, however, is refusing to confirm or deny that this is about to happen. This is the attitude of the early days of GM foods. Peter Melchett of the Soil Association says GM was introduced into food in North America and theEU “without any public debate – effectively by stealth”.

By the time the anti-GM campaign had gained momentum towards the end of the 1990s, about 60 per cent of processed foods contained GM soya and derivatives.

As a result of this campaign, eventually all UK supermarkets stopped selling GM foods.

Much has been written by the European Commission regarding this subject; there are quotes on the Europa website relating to GMOs by Malta’s very own John Dalli, who holds the post of Health and Consumer Policy Commissioner.

For more information, visit http://ec.europa.eu/food/food/biotechnology/index_en.htm .

kathryn@maltanet.net