everything you have to know about dangerous gen ethically modified foods by international bestselling author and filmmaker jeffrey m smith mr smith is the executive director of the institute for responsible technology and a leading spokesperson on the health dangers of genetically modified organisms his first book seeds of deception became the world's best selling and number one rated book on g m o is second genetic roulette is the authoritative work that presents irrefutable evidence that genetically modified foods are harmful former u k environment minister michael meacher says the revelations in genetic rillette may change the global course of events this century and he describes jeffrey smith as one of the great campaigners of our age mr smith has counseled world leaders from every continent and has been quoted by hundreds of media outlets including the new york times washington post b world service nature new scientist and time magazine the following keynote speech took place at the weston a price foundation conference in november two thousand and eight please join me and welcoming jeffrey smith we activists how many people consider themselves food yes yes all right here's a loaded question how many people have convinced several others to change their diet over fifty over a thousand yes we are you know the seed crystal in nature there's the seed crystal that changes the entire structure of the organism organization and i'll tell you with a genetically engineered foods the seed crystal is planted and it's moving we have a phenomenal opportunity i know from whence i speak genetically engineered bovine growth hormone remember that well it will soon be history ye starbucks kroger's publix at least forty of the top one hundred dairy so far so what happened to the seed crystals at work it turns out others call a tipping point a small percentage of consumers changing brand choices based on information all of a sudden using a product becomes a marketing liability and it moves the market so if you look at the actual new york times reports in the washington post in the boston globe they talk about tipping point they talk about explosion in the industry how did this arrives well it turns out a few of us did it on purpose it was no accident we simply had to explain oh yeah that milk the one with more pu oh and more antibiotics and more bovine growth hormone and more i g f one in civil like growth factor what you know the stuff where if it's in high levels in your blood it increases cancer and incidence of fraternal twins oh that milk you want that milk so we started spreading it around writing about it in books giving powerpoint presentations having postcards go to different berries and the tipping point was reached about two and a half years ago till the book the largest second largest cheech cheese chunk producer in the united states wh so we've got the formula we know that we can convince a small percentage of consumers to change their bren's and the tipping point happens so what about genetically engineered foods what is going to cause kraft or nestle's or hershey's to hold onto its genetically engineered corn very little there's no consumer benefit not a single one not like trans fats which gives you something in aspartame which theoretically gives you something and takes a lot away there's no consumer benefit to g m o's you can change to non g m o without even changing the formula for your product just switch to the non g m corn the non g m soy so if we get about let's say five percent of u s consumers fifteen million people of voiding brands that contain genetically engineered foods i think that's more than we need to get kraft and hershey's and nestle's and mcdonald's and others to switch to non g m because they'll see a reduction in their market share they'll see a trend and they'll simply tell their supply chain use the non g m varieties you know when the tipping point was hit in europe in april of one nine hundred ninety nine within one week virtually the entire food supply in europe all the major manufacturers committed to remove g m gradients for europe but those same companies feed us o's because in the united states we haven't hit the tipping point and part of the reason we haven't had the tipping point is that people don't really understand what products are g m what products are genetically modified there's no labeling here and c b s new york times poll this year said that if g m moves were labeled fifty three percent of americans would not eat them if one in ten of those if nine out of ten of those people were lying it's still enough to have a tipping point so we just need to give the information about which products are g m and which products are not g m and add a little bit of motivation by describing how eating a genetically corn chip might turn your intestinal flora into living pesticide factor we've created the campaign for healthier eating in america whose slogan is healthy eating starts with no g so all you foodies out there this is your montra this year coming so you have all these things to give to all of your friends and your devoted and your patients and you want to talk about raw milk and you want to talk about so but healthy eating starts with no g m o's because by the end of next year we expect it the tipping point and we're going to do it here now we have created non geomorphic ation centers and on the top of that are non g m o shopping guides which list the brands that are non g m and list samples of products that are g m and also describes how you can evaluate a product by reading the ingredients and looking at the at the packaging to determine if it's g m or not so we are giving we're not waiting for the government to label will do it ourselves thank you meet me after the talk over there you all get your free non g m o shopping guide you all get your health risks brochure which encourages you to use the shopping guide for those that have you there are doctors we have a package for your patience and we're putting it out through many different organizations in electronic form and physical form we expect to distribute the shopping guide totally in the tens of millions next year so we are going to do what people have been sort of we've been whining about this for twelve years waiting for the government to do it for us what a waste of life there and also unfortunately starting this year the sugar supply in the united states will be genetically engineered from sugar beets so this is the first new crop introduced in a long time so we have to move quickly we don't have time to waste ok everyone raise your hand everyone asiad thank you all for volunteering to do more on the g m o issue and you  know how to do it within an hour and it will be easy and fun and successful remember r b g h well your children won't all right so the reason we're here is due to the glories of the food and drug administration based on a single sentence g m o's have flooded the market the sentence in the policy says the agency is not aware of any information showing that the food created by these new methods differ from other foods in any meaningful or uniform way now it's obviously not true in fact documents made public from a lawsuit proved that that sentence was a lie but on the of that sentence the f d a said no testing was necessary the f d a said if the companies that produce the biotech foods believe they are safe yeah  i guess it's coming they can put it on the market without even telling the f but a friend of mine sued the f d a forty four thousand and turn on memos became public and it turned out that the overwhelming consensus among the f d a is on scientists were that g m o's might create allergies toxins new disease nutritional problems they have urged their superiors to require long term studies but every time the policy came back the new draft of the policy the concerns of the scientists were systematically extracted and removed and ignored one scientist wrote in a memo what's become of this document it's basically a political document there's no science in it it does not address the unpredict side effects so who overruled the scientists the person in charge of policy at the f d a michael taylor monsanto's former attorney and later my sandals vice president he had worked with monsanto and a group of biotech companies before working at the f d a to create the ideal regulatory system for the companies and then evidently implemented it himself this was in  his policy still stands so the companies do participate in a voluntary consultation process technically called a meaningless exercise where they bring their conclusions not the raw feeding study data not real science their conclusions and the f d a responds with a letter which says you believe your foods are safe it never says the f d a says the foods are safe it says you understand it's your responsibility to evaluate your foods and we understand that you value way to miss safe over the questions and that is our glorious assessment system of genetically engineered foods now one food one g m food the flavor savor tomato was the only genetically engineered crop the first one to ever go through a thorough systematic feeding study that was turned over to the f d a they did a rat study with the tomato and the rats refused to eat the tomato ever want to market rat proof tomatoes you know where to go it turns out farmers and scientists reporters from all over north america say that when given a choice many animals chose to avoid eating g m o's pigs cows geese elk squirrels direct cones mice and rats in fact in the in my book seeds of deception before each chapter i write a little vignette the wisdom of the animals with another description and someone evidently read that about squirrels where they put corn on the cob for squirrels and the scrolls would need the bt corn so he wanted to do this experiment and see if it works for the squirrels around his house so he bought a couple of bags of corn bt corn that produces its own pesticide and natural corn and he put it in the garage waiting for the winter to feed the squirrels and he forgot and in the spring he discovered the bags and the mice had done the experiment for them i said broken into they done g m corn and finished every now they force fed the rats and seven of twenty developed stomach lesions and seven of forty died within two weeks now in the u k they decided let's do long term feeding studies and prove to the skeptical public that g m o is were safe so they put out a a request for a proposal to to create the testing protocol they got twenty eight different applications and they gave the three million dollars grant to dr r pod posed the world's leading expert in his field how many people have heard of our part to study alright so i write all about them in the first chapter of my book someone did a master ceases on the impact of my book on the passage of the first state regulation on g m o it was in vermont and he interviewed a bunch of representatives and they said normally books don't influence policymakers because they're too thick we don't have time but when i started reading it i could put it down and someone said the book spread like wildfire and was the basis for every conversation on g m o's in the state house once  arrived so here's the first activist tip if you choose to use this in your lending library than the what you say is just read the first chapter and that's usually all it needs and that that first chapters are kind of a microcosm as we'll see in a minute of what's going on with g m o's because doctor he worked with a team from three different institutes including his own very prestigious institute twenty or thirty scientist and he created a protocol there was going to be used as the e u testing protocol for geos and what he did was he created a potato engineered to produce an insecticide took a gene from a snowdrop plant put it into the potato and as part of the protocol they fed it to rats along with a completely balanced diet at another group of rats were fed natural potatoes and a third group were fed natural potatoes spiked with the same insecticide genetically engineer potatoes were producing so g m potatoes natural potatoes natural potatoes with the insecticide only the g m group got sick what was the cause of the problem what caused the potentially precancerous cell growth in the digestive tract the smaller brains livers and testicles the atrophy of the liver the damaged immune system what caused the intestinal walls on the rats on the right side of the photo to have such prolific cell growth or the stomach lining to look about double the size it was not the insecticide it was  process of genetically engineering the potato now dr proust i went public with his concerns was a hero for about two days of his prestigious institute and then two phone calls were allegedly placed in the u k prime minister's office to the director of the institute the next day dr poussaint was fired from his job after thirty five years silenced with threats of a lawsuit his twenty member research team was disbanded they never implemented the long term safety testing protocols instead they mounted a campaign to trash his reputation he's since got the data back it's published in the lancet and it implicates the process of genetic engineering as very dangerous these problems occurred in ten days now one thing that was interesting about the potatoes was that they would have passed the assessments used around the world even where they're required in the  done by industry are so poor so superficial that the potatoes would have made it to market but the crops that are already on the market have never been tested in the ways for these things that the potatoes were tested for so they may be creating the same problems because they were created from the same process so this is the first possible cause of problems the very process itself of genetically engineering a crop causes massive collateral damage and unpredicted side effects so what is the process let's say you want to take corn and turn it into a registered pesticide take the gene out of that pesticide they make changes in it so that it'll work in crops but they have to figure out a way to turn it on because normally genes are self regulating based on the needs of the cell but they're ignoring the needs of the cell so they put in a viral promoter and on switch that turns on their gene twenty four seven around the clock to pump out that bt toxin they put an end switch at the very end stop signal saying to the cell stop reading the the gene ends here then they make millions of copies of that gene construct and put it into a gun and they shoot that gun into millions of cells hoping that some of the genes make it into the d n a of some of those cells you can't tell where it ends up they can't even tell by looking at it if it got in there so they need to figure out a way to to figure out which ones which one of the cells have the genes functioning so before they make millions of copies they add another gene into the gene construct it's called an antibiotic resistant marker gene its job is to produce a pro n that renders the cell invincible to a normally deadly antibiotic so after they shoot the genes into the cell they and antibiotics killing almost all of the cells except the very few that have the gene construct functioning inside the d n a because that has rendered the cell invincible to that antibiotic then they take those cells and they clone them into the corn plant that produces the bt talks so it's a lot of things but it's not natural it's not sex and what it does is it causes unexpected changes in the d n a two to four percent of the d n a is different as a result of the process of insertion and the clone it and most of that is hundreds or thousands of mutations up and down the d n a genes can also be deleted permanently turned off permanently turned on and on top of that the single insertion causes a holistic response where as much as five percent of the genes the natural functioning genes in the plant change they change the levels of expression of the proteins they're producing so we're talking about massive collateral damage when you change the d n a you change the r n a which the d n a creates you create your change the proteins the proteins interact to create all these natural compounds which give the special qualities to a plant many of them can be increased decreased there could be new ones and we don't test for them they don't test for them they test for a small handful of known nutrients maybe one or two known toxins and put it on the market knowing that there may be hundreds of different compounds that have changed levels of expression or are new so one example that was found accidentally was that it saw n corn have higher levels of lignin after being genetically engineered it's that woody component in trees and plants but the metabolic pathway that produces lignin produces wrote known also which is a known play a pesticide which may be a cause of parkinson's disease so if it creates more limited by create more wrote it might create more parkinson's disease but we don't know it's just one of a myriad of things that can change as a result of the process it  genetic roulette the second cause of problems is that the protein that they intend to be produced in the plant what happens is just to review the basic science they put a gene into the plant so that the gene produces a protein and the protein has a trait that they skin siddur desirable so there are the protein may be harmful now there are two primary traits about eighty percent of all crops are designed not to die when sprayed with a particular herbicide so here's how that worked monsanto found bacteria surviving in a chemical waste dump in the presence of the normally deadly roundup there herbicide and they said let's put in the food supply so they took the gene that produced the browned up ready protein allowing the bacteria to survive and they put that gene into soil corn cotton canola and now sugar beets so that when you spray the field with roundup you just kill all the other plant  biodiversity in the field not the roundup ready crops that are but the other twenty percent of the crops produce their own pesticide bt then there's a tiny percentage of those cryptic squash that have virus resistant proteins now viral proteins it turns out there's more than one hundred studies that show that viral proteins can suppress the defen mechanism against viral infection and they may also be toxic interfering with things like the cell cycle which might be cancerous so the protein itself it's intended to be put into the product in the case of these squash might fear radically be causing us to be more susceptible to viral infection and cancer or other diseases tha everything you have to know about dangerous gen ethically modified foods by international best selling author and filmmaker jeffrey m smith mr smith is the executive director of the institute for responsible technology and the leading spokesperson on the health dangers of genetically modified organisms his first book seeds of deception became the world's best selling and number one rated book on g m o is second genetic roulette is the authoritative work that presents irrefutable evidence that genetically modified foods are harmful