How do genetically engineered crops and foods affect our health?

The genetic makeup of plants and animals have been feeding humans for millenia. Now genetic engineers are changing that genetic structure, and genes from bacteria, viruses and insects are being spliced into our food, things that have never been a part of the human diet in all of history. No long-term safety studies have been done to show what these foods will do to the people who eat them, nor have studies been done to see if new proteins are being created in our food or if important food elements are being taken away as a result of genetic engineering.

Internal FDA documents show that agency scientists warned that GM foods might create toxins, allergies, nutritional problems, and new diseases that could be difficult to identify. Although they urged their superiors to require long-term tests on each GM variety prior to approval, the political appointees at the agency, including a former attorney for Monsanto, ignored the scientists. Official policy claims that the foods are no different and do NOT require safety testing. A manufacturer can introduce a GM food without even informing the government or consumers.

The biotech industry often claims that there have been no proven health problems due to GM foods. This is misleading for a number of reasons. One is that no one has been monitoring the impacts of GM foods on public health; these foods are not labeled which makes health affects even more difficult to track. However, the only two independent animal feeding studies that have ever been conducted on the health effects of GM foods found damage to the immune system and vital organs, potentially pre-cancerous conditions, stomach lesions, and early death in animal test subjects.

In 1989 there was an outbreak of a new disease in the US, contracted by over 5,000 people and traced back to a batch of L-tryptophan food supplement produced with GM bacteria. Even though it contained less than 0.1 per cent of a highly toxic compound, 37 people died and 1,500 were left with permanent disabilities. More may have died, but the American Centre for Disease Control stopped counting in 1991. The US government declared that it was not GM that was at fault but a failure in the purification process. However, the company concerned, Showa Denko, admitted that the low-level purification process had been used without ill effect in non-GM batches. Scientists at Showa Denko blame the GM process for producing traces of a potent new toxin. This new toxin had never been found in non-GM versions of the product.

According to a March 2001 report, the Center for Disease Control says that food is responsible for twice the number of illnesses in the U.S. compared to estimates just seven years earlier. This increase roughly corresponds to the period when Americans have been eating GM food. Could that be contributing to the 5,000 deaths, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 76 million illnesses related to food each year? Might it play in role in our national epidemic of obesity or the rise in diabetes or lymphatic cancers? We have no way of knowing if there is a connection because no one has looked for one.

Find out more:
	What is genetic engineering?		How is genetic engineering different from traditional crop breeding?
	What crops are being genetically engineered?		Who is doing genetic engineering? Why are they doing it?
	How are these crops regulated?		What impact will genetic engineering have on Hawaii's farmers?
	How do genetically engineered crops and foods affect our health?		What effect will genetic engineering have on Hawaii's environment?
	Where are these experiments being conducted?