fairly chase i'm a state senator from the thirty second legislative district and i'm talking today from the presbyterian church in downtown seattle out of wonderful conference talking about seeds and the international implications of se for our future it's been just a great great presentation here today what i tried to do was frame it so people understand that this is an international and national a state and a local issue and that when we when we look  at how we approach our food supply how we regulate it why we even do this work it really comes down in my opinion to two major issues one is food security and i thought it was particularly appropriate that we're meeting in a church today because in the basement of this church is an emergency feeding program for people who do not have enough food and yet we know we have enough food in this society we have a m are our system of distribution is not working so some people have food security and some people do not know where their next meal is coming from and they reach a lot of them go to the churches for food you know food packs hot meals in the like the other issue i raised him it is i think that we have a question of food sovereignty you know who controls the food supply do the people who grow the food the farmers the urban gardeners you know where there's a great move for urban agriculture at the present time but you take a look at the availability of sea and if you control the seeds the supply of seeds then  sensually control the food supply that's sovereignty over the food supply and that troubles me a great deal and some of the other things that i remarked on is the the widespread  participation of all sectors of our community we have people from the universities we have people from most of the occupations you might see i was surprised it was not all students we've got it we've got a sizeable number of young people here but we have people from all ages so it's been a great conference so far they're going to extremely well extremely well let me just say that i understand that monsanto has more money than we do and they're going to spend it liberally but we know that seventy two percent of the people in this state believe that they have the right to know what's in the food they're by and they also have a right they believe to know whether or not genetically engineered ingredients are in their food and in so so people are also adamant that they do not want the government or the corporations telling them what they can eat and what they can't eat or what they can buy or not buy it is a right of people in in this this state according to seventy two percent and we think it's probably hit and getting up closer now to seventy five percent people believe that their fundamental rights as citizens are being tampered with and are in jeopardy and so you mess with an americans rights things that they believe they have a right a fundamental right of citizenship you know you you're messing with the wrong wrong group of people so the campaign is going very well i just got back from a trip i'm and i with a group called penn warren northwest pacific economic region and i was in anchorage and i went over to take a look at pebble that the pebble mine the proposed pebble mine in bristol bay now bristol bay is the site of the largest wild salmon spawning grounds in the world it's where the action is for the for the fish to spawn it also has more washington state fishing and families and processors who get their salmon from the bristol bay run than any other state i was really quite surprised to find that out so this is an issue that is very near and dear to to people in washington state we like our wild salmon and people are concerned and i must say i think there is some legitimacy to this that the the advent of genetically engineered salmon aqua bounty has has produced a genetically engineered a chemical they can call it a fish call it a chemical and it has eels that cross the species line these are combinations of d n a that simply cannot take place in nature i tell my grandson it's all about sex you know you can't have sex outside your species or it's not normal it's not natural and so the genetically engineered salmon has some ocean elan it has some other other species of fish in it and it grows much faster it has a life's lifecycle of maybe ten months twelve months where in a wild salmon has more like four years five years  allergens in this but they only tested with six fish you know in even to get something that is statistically relevant you would have to have at least thirty fish you know to make it any kind have any kind of substantive  information and so you look at that you say well the food and drug administration is taking care of us but you know the food and drug administration has a legitimacy crisis they do not test the food they they sent letters and we've got copies of the letters they've sent they sent letters out to monsanto and other genetically engineering firms to say you are risk we can find based on the the information you submitted to us we think that you're you there's nothing damaging here remember you're responsible for letting us know if there's anything damaging in any of these products for crying out loud you know we need independent peer reviewed science we need some independent scientists to take a look at some of this stuff there are very few independent scientist left in the world who are willing to work on g m o issues and our genetic engineering issues those that do have found some grievous kinds of problems you know tumors in the like well i don't i want that i want that that those studies peer reviewed i want to find out if g m o foods are producing abnormalities and the thing that bothers me you know we know since  ninety six when g m most first entered the food chain that we have right now we have between one and eighty eight or one in sixty births in the united states are our babies are being born on the autism spectrum that there are some some form of autism we didn't have that before for that time i don't know that you can say with any certainty scientific certainty because we don't have any studies is this related to some of this g m o food we're feeding our families and we don't even know it and want labels i you know our family would not eat that stuff if we knew and i think that most of the citizens in the state of washington agree with me and so that's the kind of thing that we're learning at this conference i think it's just fabulous conference hey tom altera here certified nutritionist to science degrees from best year university work with the autism research institute and i'm really concerned as a father of five about the health and wellness of the children of today and tomorrow so i'm looking into food i'm looking into chemicals and i'm here at a bio safety alliance conference in seattle so we can talk to people about the probable health effects of the consumption of genetically modified foods so a lot of people are interested in what may be happening to the human population with the consumption of jim and the reality is no one knows although the average united states citizen is consuming about one hundred  ninety eight pounds of genetically modified foods per year we don't know what we're consuming because it's not labeled and we have no idea what the adverse health consequences may be the f d a in one thousand nine hundred two under the supervision of michael taylor who was a month sent to employee past without really much regulation the allowance of genetically modified food into our food supply and there are a number of geneticists scientists who are saying no wait a second these are not the same as regular hybrid plants why in the world are we doing safety testing well as a lot of people saying they are the same they're similar enough that you shouldn't be concerned however the term genetic modification implies that these are indeed new to nature in fact they are patented if they were not different than natural compounds they would be no need for patents so if they are different which they are and you're in genes into a portion of an organism that you have no idea where the insertion is taking place you're just hoping it does take place you have no idea what the surrounding genome might be you have no idea what happens when you do cloning there is likely numerous variants in the d n a itself we know of in the research all the time now something called the single nucleotide polymorphism which is one nucleotide one little base pair in the d n a that's changed and we know that that can increase disease risk so what happens when there's hundreds if possibly thousands of changes when you insert genes into an organism we have no idea so where's a a big call amongst the scientific community the say we further testing in fact in the european union what we're finding now is they've said look cyril ynys data the study showing the rats who were fed g m corn roundup were around up and g m corn that had tremendous tumor growth and abnormalities of the pituitary gland the kidney the liver they're now saying look this research is valid we need to be concerned about this so i'll tell you the next step is for us as a group to stand up and say wait a second i don't want my children consuming this until you can guarantee me there are not going to be adverse health effects to my children and to the environment in which my children are growing up in because what we're seeing now is that the genetic modified pollen is getting on to the milkweed which then can change butterfly migration and all sorts of factors so we have no idea with the now suggested introduction of r n a silencing apples or with genetic modified salmon we're just adding more insult to injury the original genetically modified crops have not been proven safe there are no human safety data studies there are new long term studies at all in humans there are no short term studies in humans this seems a little absurd to try and introduce now a species there's a rainbow trout they're working on there's a salmon they're working on we really need to stop pause and say wait let's make sure these are safe and then we can consider continuing on if we do it all so as a clinician what we're looking at these days is a tremendous increase in irritable bowel we're looking at a tremendous increase in neurological and behavioral disorders so a d d a d h d autism interesting thing swanson wrote a paper in the seattle examiner that did a correlation between the introduction of an herbicide that's commonly used on genetically modified crops called glyphosate and the increase in autism and she found almost a perfect correlation point nine  so the correlation coefficient was point nine hundred five the tightest you can get is a one one point zero so we're very very close to that is it possible by us increasing the use of  roundup over the last decade plus that we might be leaving our kids more susceptible for neurological diseases because it turns out that this glyphosate is a very potent  it binds to minerals and does not let them go by binding those minerals those minerals are not available to plants plants need those minerals in order to survive they use them in their own bio chemistry to produce things like is that feel good neurotransmitter melatonin is this sleep neurotransmitter it regulates your sleep wake cycles so is it possible that we've had a four hundred percent increase in the use of anti depressant medication yes since the increases of life say in the introduction of genetically modify crops it's true it has happen is it possible that we're seeing more aggressive behavior that we're seeing more behavioral disorders autism because of the amino acid insufficiency it's we don't know no one's looking at the data although anthony sam so stephanie sent off an article in entropy did examine some of the existing research and said this is  possible explanation for some of the increase perhaps that's why swanson sees such a tight correlation coefficient between the increased use of this round up and the incidence of awesome autism so as a what is the most important thing is to clean up the diet and what does that mean as a consensus of nutritionists who are working in the autism eighty eighty h d community that means putting kids on organic diets getting rid of the processed foods lowering their exposures to some of the chemicals in order to do this my wife and i put out actually a cookbook called the whole life nutrition cookbook and we have a website a blog called life nutrition and and we try and point out the fact that usually kids are imbalanced adults are in balance we're as a population in balance when we have either too much of something or too little of something we're either getting exposed to too many chemicals and toxins or food sensitivit or we're not getting enough nutrients in so we focus on consuming organic whole foods that are very nutrient dense and removing the processed foods and at the same time making it taste absolutely delicious so if you want something that will help with lots of health and that's where this ill irritable bowel attention deficit autism whatnot consider eating a very nutrient dense whole food style so the question becomes should we be voting on these initiatives initiative five twenty two that's coming up here in washington it would label genetically modified foods and by labeling genetically modified foods then you could make a choice as to whether or not you want to contribute to a science that's very infantine that's very not proven safe and you could then vote with your money because that's how change is going to happen folks it's not to happen at the ballot box it's going to happen at the grocery store it's going to happen on a daily basis when you go and you look in an item and you say aha genetically modified well that means i'm going to promote the use of billions of pounds of chemicals that may be affecting bees that is affecting soil that's affecting water that may be affecting humans and we definitely know adversely affects animals so yeah why wouldn't you vote why wouldn't you label that product so you can do your own experiment remove those from your life and see if your eggs in your irritable bowel your mood changes get better because that's what i'm seeing in clinical practice and i'm hoping you find something similar as well hi i'm karen chase with the yes on five two two campaign and i am thrilled to be joining you from chima km which is next to port townsend over on the peninsula i was over here talking to some wonderful regional leaders about yes on five to two in their upcoming film series and i just love being over here i am thrilled actually to be joining the campaign as a grassroots organizer my official title is karen chase director of constituencies and you can reach me at karen at yes on five to two dot com right now what i'm doing is running all over the state talking to regional leaders on how we can implement our voter contact plan and talk to voters about truth in and transparency which is our right to have information about the foods we eat and we purchase for our families it's about labeling pure and simple it's going to take every single one of us to win this we know that the no campaign has five five donors and they've donated over of almost three and a half million dollars and they're all from out of state by the way whereas we are a true grassroots campaign we have over five thousand donors in washington state that have donated small donations you know like what the people can donate under twenty five dollars that kind of thing of course we've got our wonderful supporters like dr bonders and p c c and those guys but we are majority of small donations and we have also raised three and a half million however we are going to be outspent at least at least five to one we're thinking so every little bit counts what's going to win this for us is direct conversations between you and your neighbors there's lots of support in this campaign because it's going to be up to us to get out the vote so we can label genetically engineered foods so you know what we're ahead of the polls right now it's like we know that the majority of washingtonians really want to have information about their food so they can make their own informed decisions but once the misinformation from those the no campaign starts putting t v ads out it's going to be really important that we're keeping conversations open and talking about five to two is a is about having a right to know what's in our food so that we can make our own informed decisions there are so many people connected to this campaign it's your neighbors it's local groups it's all of us working together on this what's really exciting is that my mom senator mar chase is a co chair of the campaign so i'm really proud of her and excited about that also representative carrie can datta a republican as a co chair as well as treated by alec with p c c it's incredible to work with such a broad diverse coalition of people but what's also fascinating are the the numbers of farmers fishers the chefs the co ops the moms that are all involved in this so so it's as though we're a giant washington state coalition that really do want to make their own decisions on food ok my name is kate bell i'm from washington d c and i just got to seattle washington cross country with the fishy food tour we drove on the lovely our cars you see behind me all the way across the country to seattle washington to promote awareness of genetically modified food and to support the ballot initiative in washington state for mandatory labeling of that food so my friend rico's one of the organizers of the fishy tour and she's been educating me on this issue for a while now  it's fairly new to me i initially thought ok g m o's science we're going to improve our food supply that all sounds good right and then i started doing my own research and i realized that when you actually buy genetically modified seeds from monsanto they make you sign a contract that's not going to do scientific research but them so essentially what we have is a system where the company that's profiting from this product is blocking scientific research into whether or not it's safe and instead they're selling it to americans and using us as a science experiment it's a little bit like having the tobacco companies in control of all the research determining whether tobacco is good for you which obviously would not have been a good idea and what we're doing right now is we're trying to raise awareness and get these products labeled so that you as a consumer can make an informed choice about whether or not you want to see a most mature was a lot of fun we started on the fifth with our kick off and d c august fifth and we left the next morning stopping in pittsburgh columbus and salt lake city chicago a bunch other places along the way we took cars cross country everybody loved them especially kids we got a great reaction to the cars and it's a fun thing it's a form of positive activism so that people can see something fun and humorous and you know point we can point out that it's a in issue that matters everybody and it's been a great experience i'm very privileged to have been able to go across country with a bunch of wonderful people we camps mostly camp rounds we had a couple of local activists that hosted us in their homes the most part we were at campgrounds we actually were eating g m o free as much as we possibly could so we had a chef on the tour and he made us food from donations of non g m o food a lot of organic food that we purchased ourselves and we cooked every night at the campground personally i drove the tomato a little bit i also drove our so one of our two sport vans th came cross country with us to haul gear and food and stuff like that we had about two or three people for each vehicle to drive and kind of rotated to keep everybody fresh and safe on the road oh  actually the we rest stops were her or surprisingly a lot of fun every time we saw for gas every gas station would be looking around wondering what's going on wanting to talk to us wanting to know what the cars were all about and we actually did a lot of like face to face grassroots activism just stopping to get gas just talking to people so that was a lot of fun we had homes in denver that was really great it was really nice to get to spend a little bit more time there we had a great event with a local activist group there has been meeting every week and working really hard on this issue locally and it's always great to see that them get all excited as well and come through and support their efforts that they're already doing so that was a lot of fun well we're all kind of dispersing after  seattle a lot of people are flying back to the east coast to their home since we're leaving the cars here to support the initiative in washington state i personally i'm going back to my worldwide backpacking tour and fly in central america i'm going to believe is to to do some scuba diving and then i'll be traveling around central south america on sabbatical right now from my job as a criminal defense attorney i was working in baltimore for the last four years and right now i'm just traveling around the world and i'm happy to have had an opportunity to give back while i'm doing that there are sixty some countries worldwide that sixty four countries thank you over law that requires g m o labeling almost all of europe like lots of other places in the world but unfortunately not in north america so the united states and canada are kind of falling behind here terms of what other countries are doing genetically modified food basically means that they're splicing the d n a from these crops with things like from other plants and even animals like fish so it's different from the traditional selective breeding that humanity has done for generations and generations these things are being made in the lab they're not anything that would be created by nature and the problem is that we just don't know all of the long term impacts of what this is doing to the environment there's a lot of cross contamination farmers that are trying to grow organic and they don't want to most of the pollen is coming in from g m o crops and pull looting and contaminating their crops so this is a real problem the pesticides are a huge problem where these crops are being made resistant to pesticides like round up which is sold by monsanto the company that is probably profiting the most from genetically modified food and what happens is the farmers  more and more pesticide on these pesticide resistant plants they're creating pesticide resistant organisms that are going to keep destroying the plants and they're getting more and more present science into the food that we're eating it's virtually impossible to be  o free in the united states right now because our sugar that we're eating calms largely from the sugar beet which is mostly the corn syrup and other sweeteners that we're eating is coming from corn which is g m o even if you're not eating meat that's being fed corn you're probably eating soya products and ninety five percent of our soil in this country is g m o so it is difficult to avoid them eating whole foods and eating organic foods is really helpful and avoiding processed foods because that's where you're going to get the majority of your chamas but there's a lot of good companies that are voluntarily putting a g m o free label on their products so you can keep an eye out for that and again also buying organic fruits and vegetables and natural whole foods absolutely vote yes on five twenty two this is the mandatory labeling initiative here in washington state if this gets passed it will be a huge step in the right direction for the rest of the country to see that this is an important issue that people do care about it and there's nothing wrong putting a label on the product just gives consumers more information to make an informed  right right