GM issues | The road to disease is paved with GM
THE ROAD TO DISEASE IS PAVED WITH GM
In every major developed country, health services are buckling under the strain of spiraling chronic disease in the population and the huge cost of our modern high-tech approach to dealing with it.
Hippocrates taught “Let thy food by thy medicine”. Food is, and always has been, the guardian of our health.
Yet, our “orthodox” physicians have scant training in nutrition beyond the
symptoms of deficiencies for which the treatment is a pill of synthetic
supplements. Doctors of the developed world have become errand-boys for the
pharmaceutical industry and mechanics applying high-tech patches to failing
bodies.
Our ‘health’ practitioners are now little more than managers of disease. And the diseases modern doctors are trying to manage are degeneration caused by long-standing debasement of our food.
In the early part of the 20th century, degenerative diseases were rarely seen.
Since then, the incidence of cardiovascular disease, hypertension, inflammatory
bowel disease, Type II diabetes, asthma and most cancers have been rising decade
by decade to epidemic proportions. Several careful studies have documented the
excellent levels of health in peoples who have retained their native diets:
fresh, seasonal, local produce prepared in their own traditional way (see Note).
A decline of health on exposure to modern foodstuffs has been universally
observed. In the developed world, degenerative diseases are emerging in younger
and younger sectors of the population.
THE GM CONNECTION
Against this backdrop of chronic ill-health, increases in disease caused by deficiencies in GM food quality will never be revealed by the monitoring of the populaton which is currently the sole safety precaution planned by our regulators.
Any ill-effects of GM food quality will be magnified when super-imposed on top of our existing weakened state of health.
How have we got into this mess?
First of all, whole-grains became unfashionable. We started eating grains from which most of nutritional value could, and had, been removed (white flour, white rice, fancy instant breakfast cereals etc.). Added to this was the use of chemicals and high-tech processing to enable us to eat very old food which had been transported very long distances.
Then our food didn’t look or taste or feel very nice anymore and the micro-nutrients had somehow disappeared, so we started pouring in chemicals: synthetic micronutrient “replacements”, synthetic taste and colour and texture, a few others to disguise the taste of the processing, and a few to make us want to eat more.
Food and its preparation have changed beyond all recognition. Fresh, locally produced ingredients carefully chosen and combined in the kitchen have given way to instant meals constructed in a factory. The main ingredient is commonly water with some thickeners and bulking agents added in case dining on a plate of water doesn’t appeal.
THE GM CONNECTION
The major GM food crops, maize and soya, provide most of the raw materials for the burgeoning industry in additives and man-made sweeteners, such as fructose, which have become ubiquitous and indispensable in pre-prepared packaged foods.
Felicity Lawrence summed up our whole situation nicely: “Our industrialized diet is now known to be a major contributor to disease. We are being fed junk and it is making us sick.” GM foods are designed to add to the junk.
Modern agriculture has had a devastating effect on the quality of our food.
Crop varieties are now commonly subject to mutation by chemicals or radiation
and then intensively selected for ‘useful’ characteristics: heavy cropping, fast
growth, early ripening, disease resistance, pesticide resistance, ease of
handling, uniformity, long shelf-life, response to chemical fertilizers, and a
host of other non-traditional commercial benefits. But not for their nutritional
value. Quality food has been sidelined in the race for productivity.
Unfortunately, the higher the yield the greater the water content and the lower
the protein content. Over the last 50 years, the levels of trace minerals such
as copper, magnesium, calcium and iron have fallen significantly.
Phytonutrients, and their importance to health, are a more recent discovery and so their changes with time have not been studied, but recent evidence points to 10-50% higher levels in organic compared to conventional produce which may give some worrying indications.
Livestock production has suffered a similar fate. Animals which naturally graze
or forage are now pumped full of growth promoters and artificial grain-based
feed. The result is that the fat content in beef has increased from 9% to 28%
and in chicken has increased by 1000%. The nature of the fat in all produce from
grain-fed animals has changed from a healthy balance of polyunsaturated fat to
an unhealthy predominance of saturated fat, and from a healthy ratio of
omega-3:omega-6 fats to an unhealthy predominance of omega-6 fats.
Agriculture is, of course, subservient to the customer. The supermarket (and EU) definition of food “quality” stops short at appearance: size, shape, colour, and lack of outer blemishes. To achieve these standards, farmers find themselves limited to the very few varieties of crop which are suitable, and are forced to use chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Strains of fruit and vegetables known for their high nutrient value have been sacrificed to uniformity.
THE GM CONNECTION
GM crops are designed to increase ALL the commercial benefits which are already damaging our health. They are not designed for any nutritional value. The next generation of GM crops planned may have individual trace nutrients added in. These biologically active substances, being out of their natural context, will be little better for us than our current futile attempts to‘add’ quality back into old, processed food, and could be much worse if metabolic side-effects in the genetically transformed plant produce harmful substances.
The purpose of all major GM food crops so far (soya, maize and oilseed rape) is to feed intensively reared livestock, and enable us to get that daily dose of fats to speed on that first heart-attack.
In view of the progressive debasement of our food from field to plate, why is nothing being done?
Our current concept of food as a “mixture” of chemicals which can be evaluated in terms of crude tests for broad chemical categories (protein and amino acids, carbohydrates and fats, plus a few trace essentials) and can be assumed to be subject to a mechanically efficient digestive process with a sieve-like absorption is badly out of date. As we learn more about digestibility, bioavailability and the interactions between individual foods, plus the extent of differing individual nutritional needs and the role of some 10,000 highly active phytonutrients in plants, the complexity of establishing what constitutes ‘healthy’ food is inescapable.
It is becoming increasingly obvious that we haven’t even devised an adequate and practical definition of what our foods’ ‘nutritional value’ really is, far less devised any meaningful ways to measure it. Nothing can be done until we make this first step.
THE GM CONNECTION
Genetic transformation may represent the ultimate threat to food safety. Distortions of genome stability and function caused by the insertion of artificial DNA will impact on the synthesis of ALL nutrients in the plant, not only to change their quantity but also to change their quality. These changes may be harmful to health, especially after long-term consumption. GM food make it even more urgent that tests for human and animal physiological reactions to food quality be developed.
The Food Standards Agency, which is the UK body responsible for food safety and which could organise the development of the necessary tests of nutrient value, spent less than 1% of its budget on nutrition and the quality of diet in 2003. This is, sadly, in line with the current political ideology which sees food safety only in terms of hygiene and infectious agents, consumer choice and labelling, and, more new technologies.
The regulators’ excuse for blinkered vision is that people need cheap food.
Since the poorest in the population must spend a much greater proportion of
their income on food, regulators are fixated on a mis-placed obligation to
ensure that food prices be kept down, despite any other costs attached. Felicity
Laurence has a two fold answer to their dilemma: “First, it is precisely those
on low incomes that the current ‘cheap food’ policy hits hardest: it is the
low-paid who lose their jobs when global ‘just-in-time’ sourcing finds cheaper
labour elsewhere; it the poorest who suffer the most from diet-related diseases;
it is the least affluent who have least access to good shops; it is the
recipients of gangmasters’ semi-slave wages who are most marginalized and go
hungry; and it is the smaller farmers who are struggling most to earn a living.
Secondly, if what we are really saying is that people on low incomes cannot
afford good food, the answer is not that food needs to be cheaper, but that
political action is necessary to make sure they can afford it.”
THE GM CONNECTION
The “cheapness” of GM food is the usual trump-card played to ward off opposition. The real issue is that GM foods are designed to bolster everything which is wrong with our food and which is causing ill-health. The real issue is that the cost of ill-health will cripple us.
Note. Reports on health in primitive communities:
Weston A. Price, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, 1939
Sir Robert McCarrison, Studies in Deficiency Diseases, 1921
Nutrition and national health, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 1936
Viljhalmur Stefansson, The Fat of the Land, 1956
Food and food habits in Alaska and Northern Canada, Human Nutrition, Historic
and Scientific, 1958
SOURCES:
Professor Henry Becker writing in Science in Society 23 Autumn 2004
Not on the Label, 2004, Felicity Lawrence, ISBN 0-141-0577-7
Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser, ISBN 0-06-093845-5
Soil Association Report, Organic farming, food quality and human health, a
review of the evidence to 2001
Food Magazine, 40 February 1998, 42 July/September 1998, 66 July/September
2004
http://www.mercola.com/ on grass-fed animal products and Dr. Weston Price
Metro 25.08.04