everything you have to know about dangerous genetically 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 now let's take a look at the bt toxin and see if that has a problem according to the environmental protection agency which registers the crops as official pesticides the bt is not a problem because it has a history of safe use among farmers among forestry organic farmers they say the bt toxin is destroyed during digestion and is completely benign to mammals anyway because we don't even have receptor cells for it it would just pass through our system if it weren't destroyed during digestion now this is the assumption that allow them to approve bt crops without testing them however the assumptions about the basic natural bt are false about five hundred people in north america got allergic type reactions when they were sprayed with bt what it was used for gypsy moth infestation when they took bt and they fed it to mice the mice developed an immune response as powerful as if they had been fed cholera toxin some developed a damaged intestines so it survives digestion it does interact with mammals and it does affect humans in its natural state but the bt that's produced in crops is thousands of times more concentrated than the spray for it's designed to be more toxic than t spray form and it has properties of unknown allergy so now what we're seeing in india are hundreds maybe thousands of workers who touch the bt cotton are reporting allergic reaction the same allergic reactions as those that were reported by the five hundred people in north america sneezing runny nose watery red eyes itching burning inflammation swelling skin some had fever some went to the hospital here's a picture that i received last week from a different region in india than the particular study i just pointed to and the person said in the two to three years since the many many people have  each ng all over their bodies he ruptured wounds and discoloration on october twenty sixth of this year the sunday india newspaper reported that hospital records show that victims of inching ever increased massively this year and all of them are related to bt cotton farmer a pharmacy manager said almost every cotton worker from this village suffers from itching not a day passes by without a few of them coming to purchase medicines for in two thousand and six it was reported that when they let sheep graze on the cotton plants after harvest within five to seven days one out of every four sheep die in february of this year some colleagues in india did a little study they took nine sheep they went three of them graze on genetically engineered bowl guard one three of them on genetically engineered bu guard two and three of them on natural cotton plants this was after harvest they noted a progression of symptoms just among the groups fed g m first of all they reduced their food intake and there was swelling lips frothy salivation nasal discharge then bulging of the heads and a slight fever and then between day twenty five and thirty there was  hundred percent mortality among the six animals fed bt plants those three that were fed non bt had no symptoms about ten days ago i received an email from someone in india about buffaloes in cows and then in an area northwest of delhi turns out the buffaloes most refused to eat bt cotton seed oil  those that did have prolapsed uteruses many of them premature deliveries most abortions became very common the age of conception advanced up to two years milk is so important from these buffaloes and yet there was a reduction in the milk supply and the fat content and the taste quality there were skin problems and lots and lots of deaths among both adult and cans so one thing that i do is i always consider this area my responsibility because food is all of our responsibility and i've noted that the reason why g m o's are on the market is because systematically governments and individuals and companies have done just the opposite they've said someone else's responsibility you ask a business well what about your g scientists who were doing safety studies on r b g h for months santo and all of them switched to organic milk so they also said it's not our responsibility someone else will make the decision we won't eat it so i look at this and say no what can i do so i emailed this person that sent it to me and said maybe we can help fund some video of what's going on to do an investigation so yesterday we secured five i mean everybody we were poor ization but i put it out there and then i found  funding yesterday and we're going to send two veterinarians and a reporter and of and a film crew to leave next week i went to one village in under pradesh and for seven or eight years they allowed their buffalo to graze on cotton plants after harvest but on january third of last year they allowed their animals to graze on bt cotton for the first time and they grazed for one day the next day they were either hunted conscious or an able to move and the vets couldn't revive them after three days they were all dead whole thirt told me that their twenty six sheep and goats had died the post mortem showed holes in the longs the liver was darker flat than dry and there was under i jested food in the room in the room it is like the early stomach which is usually breaks down the cellulose through microorganisms so it raised the question does the tea talks kill the room and bacteria now the cotton problems i talk a lot about health danger and that strategic because if i want people to avoid eating g m o's many people can hate but santo many people can be concerned about the environmental impacts the patenting of life the concentration of ownership of farming all these terrible problems associated with geos but to get people to change life long getting abbots and to switch brands it's more about the health but there are other things about g m o's that are very very dangerous in fact the environmental impact may be far worse than the health impact why because the genetic pollution we're putting into the environment is self propagating the genes we put into the gene pool that genetic pollution can't outlast the effects of global warming and nuclear waste we are altering our biosphere may be irreversibly we don't have the technology today to fully clean it up we can reduce it dramatically but today we cannot pull the contamination of g m corn out of the indigenous corn varieties in mexico they want to introduce in two years genetically engineered insects they want to introduce genetically engineered salmon imagine trying to do a recall one santo bought the seed companies in india and pushed the bt cotton in certain areas in some cases removing the availability of non bt seed they had spiritual leaders push their cotton bollywood actors pushed their cars and they convinced hundreds of thousands of farmers to took take out loans to invest in the cotton and the agricultural chemicals that would allow them to become rich and in many cases the cotton fail and there has been farmer suicide nov third the daily marilyn in the u k gave us an idea of how many farmer suicide about one hundred twenty five thousand so our food supply is under attack our farmers are under attack this is something that needs to be handily mediately to finish up about beaty twelve cows died on a german farm after being fed exclusively a certain variety of bt corn about twenty five farmers in the midwest say that their pigs or cows became sterile bt corn in the philippines a village of about one hundred people developed skin respiratory intestinal reactions and fever while breathing in the bt pollen during the time of pollination they took the same and planted them in four more villages the same symptoms returned in all four villages during the time of pollination though the symptoms were different then the cotton farmers some of them were the same but also had headaches stomach ache dizziness diarrhea vomiting weakness and numbness and there were deaths among horses water buffaloes and chickens and five unexplained human deaths even monsanto's own study made public from a lawsuit show that when rats  corn variety they had indicators for liver and kidney toxicity and indicators for blood pressure problems allergies infections or disease high blood sugar and anemia when they fed mice b t corn they had multiple immune responses just like the mice who were fed the bt toxin alone this with i was a government study in the italy released last year and astrid study release last year showed that the corn they fed to mice the fewer babies were born and the smaller the bibi's were so these problems they may be the result of massive collateral damage but it also may be simply per the bt toxin itself which is intended to be produced inside our food so that's the second potential problem in that you have the massive collateral damage is the one you have the toxin itself or the the protein itself maybe the other the third is that the protein that you produce inside the crop may end up being very different than the one that you and ted here's a little science very simple you have a little computer program called the genetic code in the gene that you insert the gene is called the trans gene and that code determines the r n a and that code every three of them determine which amino acid is being used to create the protein and the protein that you mean unless it's lined up they fold into a protein now in the process of inserting the gene you can often mess up that sequence it can mutate or truncate one of months santals bt corn varieties thirty percent of it was just lumped off and it creates a protein that was different and the other one has a mutation inside it which could produce a protein that's different now another set of studies this is very interesting in europe a set of laboratories did an analysis they actually tested the genes sequence and the nearby regions and in every single case out of six popular g m varieties the sequence that they found in the plants was different than that which was registered by the company and in some cases one lab found a different sequence than another lab and the same  suggests that the sequence is unstable and could rearrange over time so how can you evaluated safety today if it morphs and mutates tomorrow now just suppose that the sequence goes in as you wanted to and that's what they suppose the cell can read it differently or produce many proteins from the same gene now just suppose and they do that it produces the amino acid alzheimer's misfolded proteins or you can might have different molecules attached to the protein which can turn a harmless protein into a deadly one and that appears to be what has happened to pieces that were genetically engineered in australia to produce an insecticide they took genes from kidney beans that naturally produce an insecticide and they put it into p the piece had already passed all of the tests necessary to get on the market anywhere in the world but these developers decided to do a test that had never before been done on g m food crops they decided to do an image immunology test with mice they took the protein from the peas and they tested it excuse me from the kidney beans in its natural state expose it to mice and the mice were five then they took the identical protein in this case they did test the amino acids it was exactly the same they took the protein and they fed it to mice and they expose it to mice and a variety of ways and in every single case the mice had an inflammatory reaction in the longs on the fee suggesting that the peas could create deadly and awful lactic shock in human beings so they cancelled the commercialization of the peas which would have been exported to india for their for their food supply now the scientists that i spoke to three of them who had done this study what it was said were very concerned and confused as to why the identical protein what acts so differently and completely clear in closely related species so they did another test which is almost never done on just by g m crop developers and they found that the molecules that had attached to the protein the sugar molecules ship which is known to have potentially allergenic properties that the shape that the pattern had changed slightly they set up this subtle change in the sugars is probably why the harmless protein had become a potentially deadly one however those peas could have made it to market without those tests so when monsanto's spokes person in europe was asked to comment on the cancellation of the piece in australia he said this shows that the regulatory system works he never mentioned that none of his products had ever been tested in the same way and that not only was his products you see they thought they were surprised that the protein had changed in such closely related species but monsanto takes genes from different kingdoms from bacteria from viruses and put it into plants and expects it to act the same and puts it on the market without testing it before we get the fourth possible problem is that there are more herbicide residues on the herbicide tolerant crops so in the in the first nine years of herbicide tolerant crops there was an increase of one hundred thirty eight million pounds of herbicide in the united states and it's accel orating because of the development of herbicide tolerant we could no longer respond to the same amount of roundup or to round up at all so in the next two years there was an additional one hundred twenty million pound increase and in one year thirty eight percent increase recently but sound now farmers are using the more toxic compounds like two four d which is up two hundred thirty seven percent in two years with increased herbicide you end up with an increased fungus f which creates micro toxins a decrease in trace minerals and a possible impact on gut bacteria because these herbicides are anti bacterial and there are higher concentrations so they can mess up our our gut bacteria chickens fed liberty link herbicide tolerant corn diet at twice the rate but this was an industry funded study designed so poorly that even a doubling of the death rate was due to stickley in significant the fifth possible problem is that genes might transfer into our gut bacteria or into our own d n a now this was of grave concern to the f d a scientists reviewing the first flavor savor tomato the flavor saver tomato uses an antibiotic resistant marker gee we discussed that before the division of anti infective drugs wrote a memo complaining about this tomato and they said in all capital letters it would be a serious health hazard to introduce a gene that codes for antibiotic resistance into the intestinal flora of the general population can anyone guess why they were concerned that this antibiotic resistant marker gene might transfer to pathogenic bacteria allowing the bacteria to be invincible to one or more antibiotics but the buyout sic industry and the political appointees at the f d a said not to worry genes are destroyed during digestion transfer is impossible well they finally tested this and a study published in two thousand four the only human feeding study ever conducted on genetically engineered food was a brilliant study it took seven human volunteers wh bags that their lower intestines removed not for the study they fed them a sawyer burger in a store milkshake genetically engineer they looked in the class to be bag and were surprised to find how much intact genetically engineered soy d n a had survived passage through the stomach and small intestine it was supposed to be destroyed and not all of it was but in three of the seven volunteers before they were fed the soy burger and soy milkshake scientists found inside the d n a of the gut bacteria the gene that monsanto scientists had found in the chemical waste that they had put into soybeans that ha into the food supply that had somehow in the past been eaten by these three people from england and had integrated into the d n a along with that promoter that own switch and it was functioning they had roundup ready gut bacteria unkillable with round a purpose so this means that long after we stop eating genetically engineered foods we might have little hitchhikers that have left the food and joined us in our internal community to bless us with whatever now what can transfer the promoter did transfer according to the study and that promoter is a voice is a very aggressive switch made from a virus and they discovered that that switch can turn on genes not just the gene to which it's attached but other genes natural  permanently at high volume so if that promoter transfers to gut bacteria it might over produce an allergen a toxin a carcinogen or something good we don't know it's a genetic will it the antibiotic resistant marker gene might transfer causing super diseases the roundup ready gene did transfer and that has properties of unknown origin according to the w h o if that particular property is there they should never commercialize the g m crop because it might cause allergic reactions but that's a recommendation that's not enforced and that's the protein that's produced inside of us continuously the liberty link je another herbicide tolerant gene it might have the capacity of turning non toxic residues in liberty link crops into herbicides inside my transfer so this is where i meant eating a genetically engineered corn chip might transform your intestinal flora into living pesticide factories possibly for the rest of our lives and the only one that's been tested is roundup ready the rest is theoretical now if i stop the discussion here at a general scientific talk with probiotics scientists ready in the audience to poun during the q and a they would assure the audience that i was a fear monger because we've been eating d n a for centuries and thousands of years and if gene transfer were a problem we would be green like plants we'd have photosynthesis it's simply not a problem and this is their intellectual scientific argument as to why we should be concerned about gene transfer you see it turns out plant genes don't readily transfer to bacteria in our gut bacteria genes transfer all the time and one of the main reasons why they do is because they're similarity in the sequence but the sequence implant genes is substantially different and therefore very unlikely to transfer it's also longer making it very unlikely to transfer the genes that are in the soil corn counted canola are from bacteria they have the similarity second if genes transfer from plants into bacteria it is unlikely that they will function the promoter of the on switch in plants does not work in bacteria the genes th promoter that they put into the genes that they put into so i corn and canola comes from a virus it works in bacteria another point if the plant gene transfers to bacteria it's got something inside  called in trogs little sections that get in the way where the cell has to remove those interests and reconnect and wanted to produce a protein that happens inside higher organisms it happens inside us it does not happen inside that tyria so if it transferred the bacteria would have no clue how to make a protein from it it wouldn't work the genes that are put into the soil corncob and canola don't have in so the natural barriers that have stopped playing genes from populating our gut bacteria and functioning have been dispensed which means we may be shuttling all of these genes from genetically engineered crops colonizing are bacteria now the big question is is there a selective advantage for the bacteria to take these genes because if it is then to live long  fruitful and multiply we don't know there's herbicide tolerant genes in there and we eat large amounts of herbicide on these herbicide tolerant crops because they get sprayed by so much herbicide and that means that there may be a selective advantage because those bacteria won't die because their roundup ready got bacteria so we may be altering that such that precious area of our health and digestion the gut bacteria altering it throughout north america