The are numerous ways GMO’s made in the lab; including Direct Genetic Engineering, Gene Editing (CRISPR), and Mutation Breeding, which uses toxic chemicals and radiation.
Direct Genetic Engineering:
This is the most famous type of GMO. Direct Genetic Engineering is the process of genetically modifying an organism that involves taking a gene from one species and inserting it into the DNA of another.
The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) urges doctors to prescribe non-GMO diets for all patients. They cite animal studies showing organ damage, gastrointestinal and immune system disorders, accelerated aging, and infertility. Human studies show how genetically modified (GM) food can leave material behind inside us, possibly causing long-term problems. Genes inserted into GM soy, for example, can transfer into the DNA of bacteria living inside us, and that the toxic insecticide produced by GM corn was found in the blood of pregnant women and their unborn fetuses.
Monsanto and other corporations like DuPont and Syngenta also create GMO’s genetically engineered to withstand higher levels of toxic pesticides (which they also manufacture). Monsanto’s RoundUp Ready corn is designed to handle being hosed down by RoundUp, an extremely toxic herbicide that causes countless illnesses in farm workers every year, pollutes the environment, and kills off pollinators.
Since the mid nineties, people have been consuming a genetic structure through direct genetic engineering that doesn’t exist in nature. The damages GMOs cause to human health in the form of obesity, inflammation, and other serious illnesses are not secrets. There are literally thousands of peer reviewed scientific studies from respected universities and medical bodies showing the dangerous side effects of consuming of GMO’s.
Health risks for farm workers
Using pesticides (and GMO crops were specifically bred to withstand huge amounts of pesticides) is also very toxic to our farm workers. Among farmworkers, 10,000–20,000 pesticide poisonings occur every year. Beyond the acute poisonings, there are long-term, chronic health effects such as cancer, Parkinsons’ Disease, asthma, birth defects and neurological harms, including developmental delays and learning disabilities.
Children of farmworkers are particularly at risk. Pesticides cling to workers’ skin and clothing long after they return home, putting their children at risk.
GMO’s also wreak havoc on the environment.
For example, Roundup is an herbicide, a weed killer manufacture day Monsanto. It was originally made by Monsanto but is now also sold by others under the generic name glyphosate. Sales took off in the late 1990s, after Monsanto created its brand of Roundup Ready crops that were genetically modified to tolerate the chemical, allowing farmers to spray their fields to kill the weeds while leaving the crop unharmed. Today, Roundup Ready crops account for about 90 percent of the soybeans and 70 percent of the corn and cotton grown in the United States.
Just as the heavy use of antibiotics contributed to the rise of drug-resistant supergerms, American farmers’ near-ubiquitous use of the weedkiller Roundup has led to the rapid growth of tenacious new superweeds. Now that the weeds have evolved to tolerate the Roundup- they are now super weeds. “What we’re talking about here is Darwinian evolution in fast-forward,” Mike Owen, a weed scientist at Iowa State University, said. And many farmers are now having to employ people to hand pick the weeds.
Glyphosate is one of the major killers of our pollinators (90% of butterfly populations were destroyed during the years that glyphosate has been used). It is also implicated in the deaths of the honey bees, weakening their immune systems and causing them to contract various fatal diseases, often that kill off the entire hive. This is just one of thousand of toxic chemicals that are sprayed on our crops each year.
These are very conservative estimates: Herbicide-resistant crop technology has led to a 239 million kilogram (527 million pound) increase in herbicide use in the United States between 1996 and 2011. Overall, pesticide use increased by an estimated 183 million kgs (404 million pounds), or about 7%.
Pesticides are found in America’s rivers, lakes, and groundwater supply all over the country, many of these chemicals are in the water at unsafe levels.
source: http://responsibletechnology.org/10-reasons-to-avoid-gmos/
source: http://enveurope.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/2190-4715-24-24
source: http://earthjustice.org/advocacy-campaigns/pesticides?gclid=CJTxi4CuzcwCFU9cfgodhsAH5Q#
Gene Editing (CRISPR)
This is another form of GMO. Gene editing or CRISPR, which stands for (Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats). Direct genetic engineering involves inserting genes from other species. But CRISPR is a technique where the genes inside an organism are altered, without introducing foreign genetic material. The DNA is “edited” where pieces of the genetic or otherwise manipulated. But even making “tiny” edits to an organism’s DNA can have major consequences. CRISPR can affect genes that are not its intended targets. “The technology may be precise,” said Melchett of the Soil Association, “but they’re precisely altering something which they only vaguely understand and barely see.”
“If you release something into the environment, you’re losing control of it,” stated Peter Melchett, policy director of the Soil Association, one of the largest organic lobbying groups in the U.K. Last month, the U.S. gave the green light to the first CRISPR-edited crop, a non-browning mushroom, which can be grown and sold without further regulatory oversight.
CRISPR is not a natural form of plant breeding. The European Commission’s 2001 rule defines GMOs as those altered in a way that does not occur through mating or some other natural means. Do you want to eat a mushroom whose genes are edited in such a way it can’t turn brown in a natural manner? That means it can’t break down and biodegrade like a normal mushroom would. Or be processed in your body the way a normal mushroom would. Sounds like a Twinkie mushroom.
source: https://www.soilassociation.org
Here is a recent article about a large study on the safety of CRISPR. Big Agro has touted plant gene editing via CRISPR as precise, predictable, and controllable. This study shows the opposite – that the CRISPR process, taken as a whole, causes large numbers of off-target mutations: https://sustainablepulse.com/2019/01/30/new-study-claimed-to-show-safety-of-crispr-shows-the-opposite/
Recent cell studies link CRISPR to DNA damage: https://www.statnews.com/2018/07/16/crispr-potential-dna-damage-underestimated/
Recent studies linked CRISPR to cancer concerns: https://www.statnews.com/2018/06/11/crispr-hurdle-edited-cells-might-cause-cancer/
Mutation Breeding: A type of GMO using toxic chemicals and radiation
This is the third type of genetic modification. It may not be as dangerous as Direct Genetic Engineering or CRISPR but it’s not good and it’s not healthy. Mutation Breeding involves injecting toxic chemicals that cause DNA mutation into the seeds and then irradiating them to produce mutations. Mutation Breeding is currently NOT LEGALLY RECOGNIZED as genetic modification which is wrong. Modern wheat, canola oil, and some seedless fruits are examples of this toxic GMO Mutation Breeding (note this is not the same as grafting a tree branch onto another or naturally selecting the biggest strongest plants. Mutation breeding occurs when a toxic chemical that causes mutations is injected into a seed and then the seeds are treated with radioactivity).
This part of the article is going to focus on three foods (wheat, seedless fruits, and canola oil) which are now GMOs due to genetic mutation breeding and irradiation.
Mutation Breeding: Wheat
Modern wheat is an example of mutation breeding. Norman Borlaug, a scientist in the 1950’s, wanted to solve the world hunger problem so his team exposed wheat kernels to toxic chemicals and then irradiated them, producing a genetically mutated form of wheat that was higher in sugar and the most allergenic type of gluten. He won the Nobel Prize for it. And now 99% of the wheat produced in the world- including organic wheat- is this mutated irradiated wheat. It is making people sick.
The negative effects of this wheat were almost instantaneous:
“The incidence of celiac disease has increased more than fourfold in the past sixty years. Researchers initially attributed the growing number of cases to greater public awareness and better diagnoses. But neither can fully account for the leap since 1950. Murray (a professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic and the president of the North American Society for the Study of Celiac Disease) and his colleagues at the Mayo Clinic discovered the increase almost by accident. Murray wanted to examine the long-term effects of undiagnosed celiac disease. To do that, he analyzed blood samples that had been taken from nine thousand Air Force recruits between 1948 and 1954. The researchers looked for antibodies to an enzyme called transglutaminase; they are a reliable marker for celiac disease. Murray assumed that one per cent of the soldiers would test positive, matching the current celiac rate. Instead, the team found the antibodies in the blood of just two-tenths of one per cent of the soldiers. Then they compared the results with samples taken recently from demographically similar groups of twenty- and seventy-year-old men. In both groups, the biochemical markers were present in about one per cent of the samples.
“That suggested that whatever has happened with celiac disease has happened since 1950,’’ Murray said. “The increase affected young and old people equally.” These results imply that the cause is environmental.”
The early fifties is when Norman Borlaug introduced his mutated irradiated wheat strain. And since then wheat has been subjected to further irradiation and toxic mutation.
Here is another study regarding celiac disease and active personnel. Celiac disease is dramatically on the rise according to this study.
“Using electronic medical encounter data (1999–2008) on active duty US military (over 13.7 million person-years), a matched, nested case–control study describing the epidemiology and risk determinants of CD (based on ≥2 ICD-9 medical encounters) was conducted. Incidence and duration of CD-related medical care were estimated, and conditional logistic regression was utilized to evaluate CD risk following infectious gastroenteritis (IGE) occurring within 3 years before CD diagnosis while controlling for other risk factors.
RESULTS
A total of 455 incident cases of CD were identified and age, gender, and time matched to 1,820 controls. The incidence of CD increased five-fold from 1.3 per 100,000 in 1999 to 6.5 per 100,000 in 2008, with the highest rates of increase among those over 34 years of age (average annual increase of 0.8 cases per 100,000).”
source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3493152/
More info on modern wheat:
“FrankenWheat — a scientifically engineered food product developed in the last 50 years. This new modern wheat may look like wheat, but it is different in three important ways that all drive obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, dementia and more.
We eat dwarf wheat, the product of genetic manipulation and hybridization that created short, stubby, hardy, high-yielding wheat plants with much higher amounts of starch and gluten and many more chromosomes coding for all sorts of new odd proteins. The man who engineered this modern wheat won the Nobel Prize — it promised to feed millions of starving around the world. Well, it has, and it has made them fat and sick.
The first major difference of this dwarf wheat is that it contains very high levels of a super starch called amylopectin A. This is how we get big fluffy Wonder Bread and Cinnabons.
Here’s the downside. Two slices of whole wheat bread now raise your blood sugar more than two tablespoons of table sugar.
It also has a more toxic type of gluten. Gluten is that sticky protein in wheat that holds bread together and makes it rise. The old fourteen-chromosome-containing wheat codes for the small number of gluten proteins, and those that it does produce are the least likely to trigger celiac disease and inflammation. The new dwarf wheat contains twenty-eight or twice as many chromosomes and produces a large variety of gluten proteins, including the ones most likely to cause celiac disease [and inflammation].”
The solution is to curtail or eliminate wheat consumption, and eat as much organic food as possible.
sources:
Against the Grain” by Michael Spector, The New Yorker
“Three Hidden Ways Wheat Makes You Fat” By Dr. Mark Hyman
Mutation Breeding: Canola Oil
Canola Oil is also genetically modified through Mutation Breeding: They did not selectively breed the plant the old fashioned way. They IRRADIATED IT. And it causes health problems. Here are the scientific facts:
This Frankenstein plant may be even worse than its parent rapeseed (Serious problems were discovered with the erucic acid in rapeseed, like the fact that it caused degenerative lesions in the heart muscles). Canola oil was invented in a biotechnology laboratory in 1976, using radiation bombardment techniques to destroy parts of the rapeseed plant’s DNA. This produced the first canola plant that has ever existed in the world.
The following quotes come from the research paper, “Genetic Control of Fatty Acid Biosynthesis in Rapeseed”, which was published in The Journal Of The American Oil Chemists’ Society when work on modifying rapeseed began. Here’s a couple of snippets from that report explaining exactly how canola oil (L.E.A.R.) began life:
“Self-pollinated seed harvested from each plant was oven-dried, weighed and crushed with a glass rod in a 50-ml Erlenmeyer flask containing 10 ml solution of methanol, acetyl chloride and benzene in the ratio of 20:1:4. The mixture was refluxed under an air condenser for 1 hr to extract and esterify the seed oil. A known wt of internal standard (dibutyl sebacate dissolved in carbon tetrachloride) was added and 0.2-0.4 ~1 of the sample injected into an F and M model 500 gas chromatograph operated at 208c with a helium flow rate of 75 ml / min and using an 8 ft • 3/16 in… At the base of each pod, 10 ~1 aqueous solution of radioactive sodium acetate (0.2 ,c methyl labelled) was injected with a Hamilton micro-syringe. A branch from a rapeseed plant bearing 15 pods was excised below the lowest pod, the pods were similarly injected… ”
This is seriously how they engineered the “canola”plant- with benzene and radioactivity.
Solution: Eat and cook with olive oil. Avoid canola.
source: “The Bomb Shell Truth About Canola Oil” by Sarah Corriher
Mutation Breeding: Seedless Fruits
“Seedless” fruits are often genetically modified through Mutation Breeding. Remember, Mutation Breeding involves injecting toxic chemicals that cause DNA mutation into the seeds and then irradiating them to produce mutations. The “foods” created out of this mutations is not natural or safe to eat. Here’s how for example, the seedless watermelon is created:
Seedless watermelons cannot reproduce on their own, they are treated with DNA altering chemicals and then genetically irradiated in order to be produced.
Natural watermelons are “diploid,” meaning they have two sets of 11 chromosomes, the structures that contain an organism’s genetic material. They get one set of chromosomes from each parent, for a total of 22. Producing a seedless watermelon involves three steps. First, a plant is treated with colchicine, a substance that allows chromosomes to duplicate, but prevents the copies from being distributed properly to dividing cells. As a result, a plant with four sets of chromosomes is created, a “tetraploid.” In the second step, a tetraploid plant is crossed with a diploid to produce offspring that are triploid, with three sets. They get half the number of chromosomes from each parent.
Finally, the triploid seeds are grown into plants. These triploids produce flowers and the female flowers can produce fruit, but they cannot reproduce sexually because they have a laboratory induced odd number of chromosome pairs. Since the triploids have three sets of chromosome pairs, their ability to sexually reproduce is destroyed the eggs inside the watermelon are never formed. Without eggs, the seeds do not grow.
Pollen is still needed to trigger the female flowers to make the watermelons and since triploid plants cannot produce pollen, farmers grow diploid or natural “pollenizer” plants near the triploids. The diploids produce the necessary pollen, bees carry it to the female laboratory-irradiated mutant triploid flowers, and the seedless watermelons grow. Sometimes a few stillbirth seeds develop partially, so you can find some white, empty seed coats in the red flesh.
Is this something that sounds at all organic to you?
Solution: I know it can be difficult to avoid eating seedless fruits. Make sure to tell you grocer you want raisins, oranges, watermelons, and other fruits to have seeds in them!
source: https://news.ncsu.edu/2012/07/wms-seedless-watermelons/
Why seedless is wrong
Some seedless fruits are created using cloning and this is wrong. Cloning is taking cells from the plant (for growers that means cuttings) and promoting its growth to become a plant all its own. For example, seedless grapes are grown this way. At some point, a grapevine grew with a genetic deformity making it unable to create viable seeds. Humans cut off a piece of a vine or branch, dipped it in rooting hormone and then placed in moist dirt so that roots and leaves formed. Because they come from cuttings, new grapevines are essentially clones of the vine they were cut from. But these clones plants lack hybrid vigor and are less disease and pest resistant. The definition of Hybrid vigor: the improved or increased function of any biological quality in a hybrid offspring. Hybrid vigor is important because an offspring’s traits are enhanced (made healthier, stronger, better functioning) as a result of mixing the genetic contributions of its parents. These Plant Clones don’t grow as quickly and are more sickly than plants grown naturally with seeds. Cloning plants is morally wrong.
Some seedless fruits are created by grafting a genetically damaged cutting onto a healthy plant or tree. Grafting one plant or tree onto another is usually ok provided the tree still produces seeds. For example, that’s how farmers over many hundreds of years came up with so many different tasty apple varieties (Grafting is when a farmer amputates a blossoming bud from an existing tree and unites it with another compatible fruit tree’s trunk or root). But when a genetically damaged tree that can’t produce is own seeds is grafted onto a heathy tree this is not healthy or right.
For example, Navel orange trees are all exact clones of one another and all originate from a single tree in Brazil.
In 1820, a mutation occurred in a group of sweet orange trees growing on the grounds of a monastery in Bahia, Brazil. The mutation created a seedless orange that had an underdeveloped twin orange growing within the same skin of each fully developed orange. From the outside, this growth looked like a human belly button, which resulted in the naming of the newly grown citrus variety: navel oranges.
Since navel oranges are seedless, farmers couldn’t simply grow another tree from the seeds to get more of the fruit. The only way to grow more navel oranges is to amputate a blossoming bud from an existing navel orange tree and unite it with another compatible fruit tree’s trunk or root. This process is called grafting and is only successful if the grafted fruit trees are compatible with one another. Since navel oranges belong to the same species as grapefruits, lemons, and limes, they are compatible with these.
Two years after the discovery of the navel orange tree, Brazil sent a dozen navel orange seedlings to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) in Washington DC. Five years later, a woman named Eliza Tibbets planted one of these seedlings at her home in Riverside, California and it started producing fruit. Mrs. Tibbets success growing this fruit spread, and other California orange growers decided to take buds from her tree to grow as well, since the California climate proved perfect for navel oranges. This variety of navel orange became known as the Riverside Orange, but its name was later changed to the Washington Navel Orange and is unfortunately one the most popular types of navel orange in the world. http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2012/01/navel-orange-trees-are-all-clones-of-each-other/
So what people did was graft this deformed navel orange cutting onto other citrus trees and they spread. But these trees don’t get to reproduce and they don’t get to improve their genetic makeup through natural selection and hybrid vigor. This is immoral and unhealthy for the plant and the people eating it. Plants do have a consciousness and they are capable of suffering. This documentary proves it: http://6ks.564.myftpupload.com/environment/the-intelligence-of-plants/
OTHER GMO METHODS
“New plant breeding techniques” or “NPBs” is just another term for GMO techniques such as gene editing and in-vitro mutagenesis. They were recently ruled by French court to also be considered GMOs.
More info on GMOs