Renewable Farming

Healthy crops, healthy food: Who can your family really trust?

For years you’ve read in the farm media, university releases and regulatory agencies that genetically modified foods are completely safe and healthy. But here’s a challenge: I dare you to carefully and thoughtfully read Steven Druker’s 511-page book, Altered Genes, Twisted Truth.

Dec. 9, 2016  By Jerry Carlson — You will find the facts revealed by Drucker deeply disturbing. I did. 

Druker’s facts troubled me so much that I had to analyze the book a few pages at a time, over two months. I cross-examined each scrap of evidence Druker documented. He’s an attorney, and anchors his facts in sources documented to stand up in court. 

I concluded that Druker had thoroughly researched the history of genetically engineered crops, and fully backed his indictment on the cover:

“How the Venture to Genetically Engineer Our Food Has Subverted Science, Corrupted Government, and Systematically Deceived the Public.”

I’ve trusted ag scientists my entire career, which spans a half-century in agricultural research and writing. My father-in-law was Associate Administrator of USDA’s Agricultural Research Service in the 1950s. I worked awhile at USDA; that’s where I met my wife, Jill. She read Druker’s book in April 2015 and published a brief synopsis at this link. But I realized that the full significance of Druker’s case can’t be captured in a summary.  You have to examine the details and see how Druker’s legally trained mind unravels a web of deliberate misinformation. He follows the money.

I still want to believe most ag scientists are sincerely searching for facts — wherever the trail of evidence leads. It was painful to learn that today, many courageous researchers face bureaucratic, political and financial obstruction if the truth endangers research grants or corporate profit. Drucker documents such distortions multiple times. He dedicates his book:

“To the courageous scientists who have endeavored to uphold truth and scientific integrity regarding the risks of genetic engineering, especially those whose clarity of vision and power of expression inspired a wave of remedial action.”

However, I have yet to see much “remedial action” from administrators of EPA, FDA, USDA and the universities which have close relationships with the major biotech firms — or from the U.S. federal agencies and the research foundations which subsist on their funding.

Probably the most straightforward way to bring you a terse summary of Druker’s main points is to publish here his own “Executive Summary” lifted from his website,  http://alteredgenestwistedtruth.com

Altered Genes, Twisted Truth

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY BY STEVEN DRUKER

NOTE: All these points are solidly documented within the book. 

Steven Druker

Key Points

• Numerous scientists (including those on the US Food and Drug Administration’s Biotechnology Task Force) have concluded that the process of creating genetically engineered (GE) foods radically differs from conventional breeding and entails greater risk.

• Consequently, not only has there never been a consensus within the scientific community that GE foods are safe, many eminent experts have issued cautions, as have respected scientific organizations like the Royal Society of Canada and the Public Health Association of Australia.

• In contrast to the experts who counsel caution, many of the scientists and scientific institutions that promote GE foods have systematically suppressed evidence and distorted the truth in order to advance them.

• In fact, the GE food venture has been chronically and crucially reliant on such deceptions and could not have survived without them.

• For instance, GE foods first achieved commercialization only because the US Food and Drug Administration covered up the extensive warnings of its own scientists about their abnormal risks, lied about the facts, and deliberately violated federal food safety law by allowing them onto the market without having been proven safe through standard testing.

• Yet, the FDA and other GE proponents have created so much confusion that although US food safety law in regard to GE foods is much stricter than EU law, most people are under the illusion it’s weaker – and don’t realize that these inadequately tested foods have entered the American market, not due to the law’s failings, but to the FDA’s failure to obey it.

• Moreover, not only did GE foods gain entry to the market through a major fraud, their continued marketing has depended upon its continuation – and its augmentation by a stream of misleading statements from scientists and scientific institutions that have likewise abused their positions of authority.

• Through this disinformation, the manifold problems caused by GE foods have been obfuscated; and if they had instead been openly and accurately reported, the agricultural bioengineering enterprise would have collapsed.

• For example, most people are unaware that, contrary to the claims of biotech advocates, humans have indeed been harmed by consuming the output of genetic engineering – and that the technology’s first ingestible product (a food supplement of the essential amino acid L-tryptophan) induced an epidemic that killed dozens of people and seriously sickened thousands, permanently disabling many of them. Moreover, the evidence points to the genetic alteration as the most likely cause of the unusual contamination that rendered the supplement toxic.

• Nor is it widely known that numerous laboratory animals have also suffered from eating products of genetic engineering and that well-conducted tests with GE crops have yielded many troubling results, including intestinal abnormalities, liver disturbances, and impaired immune systems.

• Additionally, besides being unsound from the perspective of biological science, the GE food venture is unsound (and outright reckless) when examined in light of computer science; and compared to the careful manner in which software engineers revise life-critical information systems, the radical way in which biotechnicians alter complex cellular information systems is not really “bioengineering” but biohacking.

• Thus, contrary to the assertions of its proponents, the massive enterprise to reconfigure the genetic core of the world’s food supply is not based on sound science but on the systematic subversion of science – and would implode if subjected to an open airing of the facts.

However, don’t expect an “open airing of the facts” anytime soon, from any of the federal agencies entrusted to protect your health. For the first time, American life expectancy has declined, while the average lifespan in other developed nations is still rising. This is in large measure due to the rapidly rising rates of chronic diseases such as heart disease, respiratory illness, kidney disease and diabetes.

Your family can, however, learn a lot from the emerging array of healthy-food and non-GMO advocacy enterprises springing up across America.  And there are a handful of brave, independent and intelligent researchers who are exposing facts about the health impacts of transgenic foods and their linked toxins such as glyphosate. 

Here is a link to a summary of the health impacts of genetically modified crops, as indicated by clinical trials and careful field observations. This does not cover the important effects of the chemicals such as glyphosate used on those crops. After you scan these 65 health risks, you may want to compare that list against the “no health risks at all” affirmation of the Purdue University ag department as published their web section on “The Science of GMOs”.