Maharishi Mahesh Yogi once said, "There is no difficulty that enough love will
not conquer, no disease that enough love will not heal, no door that enough love
will not open, no gulf that enough love will not bridge, no walls that enough
love will not throw down, no sin that enough love will not redeem. It makes no
difference how deeply seated may be the trouble, how great the mistake,
sufficient realization of love will solve it all. If you could love enough, you
would be the happiest and most powerful being in the world."
At
times, love for life and for humanity requires pointing out directions that do
not support us in creating a better, healthier, more fulfilled world. Jeffery
Smith has had the courage to do the research and bring to light the dangers
posed by large corporations that put profits ahead of our collective health.
Jeffrey Smith is the author of Seeds of Deception, the world's bestselling book
on the dangers of genetically modified foods and the recently released Genetic
Roulette. Here are a few of the things that people say about Jeffrey and his
books:
"Congratulations, Jeffrey Smith, for your courage. Thanks to you, your tireless
investigations, we need wonder no longer why corporations spreading GMOs are so
secretive, why they spend hundreds of millions to keep us from even knowing
which foods even contain GMOs," – Frances Moore Lappe, author of Diet for a
Small Planet.
"Jeffrey Smith is the leading world expert in the understanding and
communication of the health issue surrounding genetically modified foods," –
Candace Pert, author of Molecules of Emotion and former chief of the section
National Institute of Health.
"Jeffrey Smith is one of the great campaigners of
our age, a relentless pursuer of the truth, a fearless advocate in the corporate
world of secret influence, and a ceaseless promoter of the public interests
across the world. He is the modern David against the GM, genetically modified,
foods Goliath,"- Michael Meacher, Member of Parliament and former Environment
Minister for the Government of the United Kingdom.
"Jeffrey has counseled world leaders from every continent, influenced the first
state laws regulating GMOs, and has united leaders to support the campaign for
healthier eating in America, a revolutionary industry and consumer movement to
remove GMOs from the natural food industry." – Janet & Chris Attwood
Jeffrey is a popular keynote speaker. He has lectured in 25 countries and been
quoted by government leaders and hundreds of media outlets across the
globe-including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the BBC World Service,
Nature, The Independent, Daily Telegraph, New Scientist, The Times (London),
Associated Press, Reuters News Service, Time magazine and Genetic Engineering
News.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Hi, Jeffrey.
JEFFREY SMITH: Hi.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Jeffrey, you know we call this The Passion Series. You
certainly have had a passion for waking the world up to what is really going on
with genetic engineering. Will you share with us, before we get deeply into that
subject, how your passions, the things that matter most to you, led you to the
work that you're doing today to educate the world about the dangers of
genetically modified foods?
JEFFREY SMITH: There's an ancient quote that "The world is my family," and
that's something that is a spontaneous reality. It's been developing over time
in my life, and I really look after, in my mind, the world. I'm always thinking
about different continents and whatnot. My passion really is to help the world.
I see genetic engineering of the food supply and of the crops as such an
incredible threat that it just drives me to stop. It's like in a triage of an
emergency room, the patient who's bleeding gets the attention.
I didn't
intend to be a leader in the health issues and in the environmental issues, but
when I was aware of the intensity of threat that this has to our food supply and
to future generations, I just got on board. When I hear about the genetic
engineering companies threatening Zambia or South Africa or Brazil, I
immediately think, "How can I help them?" and I try to contact that organization
and sometimes fly to those places and speak to the leaders in the government.
It's really been a passionate exercise for me just basically trying to stop this
craziness and to help the world.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Great. Now your first book, Seeds of Deception, has
been hailed worldwide, as Janet mentioned, it's the bestselling book on the
subject worldwide. Will you tell us the story of how that book came to be? How
did you come to write this book? What inspired you to do it? What was the story
behind it?
JEFFREY SMITH: About 11 years ago, I went to a lecture by a scientist and
was appalled that the biotech industry was about to feed the products of an
infant science to millions of people and release products into the environment
that could never be recalled. I decided to get on the stick and start talking to
people about it. I was a consultant for a mother's group that was trying to get
these products labeled.
I ran
for US Congress to raise the awareness of the health and environmental risks. I
worked at a GMO detection laboratory as Vice-President of Marketing. After that
I realized that the information was still not getting out. I needed to figure
out a way to get it out and not have to rely on the corporate-controlled media
that had consciously avoided discussing the controversies of genetically
engineered foods and crops.
I also
knew that there was terrific material. There were scientists who were fired,
stripped of responsibilities, forced out. There were hijacked regulatory
agencies and rigged research. There was real X-File stuff. What I decided to do
was to take those real-life thriller stories and write those stories up with
protagonists and all actual facts, and weave into those stories the science
behind genetic engineering and the risks.
That
turned out to be the proven winning formula, so it did become the bestselling
book on the subject around the world, and it really changed the nature of the
debate. All of a sudden, people now realized that it was industry manipulation
and political collusion, not sound science, which got these foods approved, and
that the foods were seriously dangerous.
As I
traveled around the world with Seeds of Deception, I spoke to hundreds of
senior political leaders around the world, and I would give them the book, and I
realized that they may never get to reading this book. It reads sort of like a
novel, they may not have the time, but I knew that I had the information to win
the argument that genetically engineered foods were unsafe.
I had to
think in my mind, "How can I convey that to them?" Then I had this vision of a
two-page spread where a health risk was described on the left side with an
executive summary, some main points, a quote from the scientist, and the right
side was detailed, cited text. The CEO or the politician could read the left
side and his staff or scientists could read the right.
When I thought of this I realized I need to write
another book that just basically conveys the health risks to the decision makers
in the world. I worked with more than 30 scientists over the last two years and
just released the book Genetic Roulette which documents 65 health risks
of GM foods, each in two-page spreads. I've since given that to the Secretary of
Agriculture and to the 75 members of Congress. I've presented at the European
Parliament Office and in Brazil to Regulators there, as well as in Australia.
It's
becoming the new reference book and that's also reframing the debate with
irrefutable, overwhelming evidence that genetically engineered foods are unsafe
for health. That was just basically born of the need for a tool to use to convey
this around the world.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Amazing. Now, I want you to talk in a few minutes about some
of the things that you've uncovered in your research, but first share with us
how in the world you thought that you could really make a significant difference
when you have companies that are spending billions and billions of dollars in
this industry? What made you think that you could actually make an impact on
that?
JEFFREY SMITH: Truth triumphs and I figured there was a lot of information.
It's like the controversy was so clearly documented that these guys manipulated
science, manipulated regulators, and I felt like if I could convey that. My
background is in education, communications, marketing, getting information out,
and also converting complex, profound information into simple concepts for
people to understand.
To me,
knowing what I knew and seeing how I could convey these concepts to people, it
would have been too much of a pressure on my life not to convey it. In fact, it
was easier for me to devote the time to convey this than to bottle it up and
say, "Well, I think I know how to convey it, I think I know how to stop it," and
not do anything.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Now you had a pretty clear idea when you wrote Seeds of
Deception that there were some serious things that needed to be addressed,
but were you surprised as you did your research, as you went deeper, by anything
that you discovered? Can you tell us any stories of the things that you found as
you wrote these two books?
JEFFREY SMITH:
There are two things. There's the most shocking evidence of health dangers, but
just so people are clear about what genetically engineered foods are…
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Yes, please.
JEFFREY SMITH: GM foods, genetically modified foods, are foods in which
genes from one species are transferred into the DNA of another species. Some of
the more bizarre combinations are that they've taken genes from spiders and put
them into goats in the hopes that they can milk the goats to get spider web
protein to make bulletproof vests. That's true.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Wow.
JEFFREY SMITH: They've put genes from jellyfish into pigs so that their
noses glow in the dark. They've put human genes into rice, which is now growing
in Kansas, to produce pharmaceutical medicines for children. For the crops that
they're growing around the world-principally soy, corn, cotton and canola-they
take genes from bacteria and viruses so that the crops do not die when sprayed
with the company's herbicide, or they produce their own pesticide.
By the
way, your question is excellent because that's the question I always ask to
scientists-What is their most shocking moment?-because I want to write a book of
shocking moments. Let's start with that. I asked a scientist who had been fired
from his job after 35 years, silenced with threats of a lawsuit, when he
discovered that genetically engineered foods caused significant damage to
laboratory animals.
What I
asked him was what was the most shocking moment? It wasn't being fired from his
job, it wasn't discovering the problems. It turned out it was months earlier
when he was still a pro-GM scientist in good standing, and was asked to review
the scientific papers that got GM crops approved in the UK. He said reading
those studies was one of the most shocking moments in his life, a turning point
in his life, because he realized how bad the research was.
He said
what they're trying to do is as little as possible to get their foods on the
market as quickly as possible. That was his most shocking moment. Then I asked
another person what his most shocking moment was. This was a professor at UC
Berkeley. He said he was threatened by a senior Mexican government official who
implied, "We know where your children go to school," trying to get him not to
publish evidence that genetically engineered corn had contaminated crops in
Mexico.
There are a lot of shocking moments like that, a lot of
real X-File type conspiracy things that turn out to be true. As far as the more
shocking moments in terms of what can go wrong with genetically engineered
crops, I'll give you a couple. In the only human feeding study every conducted
it showed that genes that are inserted into genetically engineered crops
transfer into the DNA of the gut bacteria inside our intestines.
This
means that long after you stop eating genetically engineered foods, your own gut
bacteria might be producing these foreign proteins, which might be allergenic or
toxic or carcinogenic. In fact, I mentioned earlier that there are some
crops-corn, for example-engineered to produce its own pesticide with a gene
inserted into the DNA from bacteria.
If that
pesticide-producing gene transferred from some corn chip that you ate into your
gut bacteria, it might turn it into living pesticide factories, possibly for the
rest of your life. These are really shocking discoveries on the health side, and
what's also shocking is that these types of problems have never been adequately
tested to see how it's affecting human beings.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Jeffrey, are genetically modified foods all bad? I mean, the
story that we've been told is that genetic engineering is the next great
revolution and it's going to make food abundantly available to people throughout
the earth. Is that all not true?
JEFFREY SMITH: The current generation of genetically engineered crops is a
very primitive technology based on obsolete science that causes massive
collateral damage in the DNA that can change proteins and natural compounds in
ways that we could never predict. It's an unstable technology and it was rushed
to the market before the science was ready. Now this does not mean that sometime
in the future we will not be able to safely and predictably manipulate genes in
food and crops for the benefit of mankind and environment.
We are nowhere near that space now. We can link these
crops to thousands of sick, sterile and dead animals, thousands of toxic and
allergic reactions in humans, and damage to virtually every system and organ
studied in laboratory animals. Also, I take no position on human gene therapy
where the risk ratio is very different. You're just making a change in one
person's gene and that person is risking their life, but we're not risking the
lives of a generation.
We're
not risking the lives of future generations. This is self-propagating genetic
pollution. Once you put a GM crop into the environment it can transfer to non-GM
crops, it can transfer to wild relatives and persist in the environment,
generation after generation, outliving the effects of global warming and nuclear
waste. We're not saying that genetic technology per se is bad, but the current
application into foods and crops is simply driven by profits and is risking the
health and environment.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Now the FDA is set up to supposedly protect us from these
things. How did these foods manage to get approved and get into our food supply
and past all of these protections that we're supposed to have?
JEFFREY SMITH: Excellent question. It turns out that the FDA's policy
written in 1992 claimed that the agency was "Not aware of any information
showing that the foods created from these methods differ in any meaningful or
uniform way." That's the quote in their policy upon which they made the
statement that they don't need to test anything, "If the biotech companies tell
us that these foods are safe, there are no further questions by the FDA."
It's
simply a hands-off policy. Now this concept that the agency was not aware of any
information showing that the foods were different turned out to be a lie. We
didn't know it at the time, but 44,000 documents from the FDA's files were made
public due to a lawsuit. It turns out that the overwhelming consensus among the
FDA's own scientists were that the foods could create allergies, toxins, new
diseases, nutritional problems. They had urged their superiors to require
long-term studies, but were ignored.
The
reason was that the FDA was under orders from the first Bush Administration to
promote the biotechnology industry, and so the FDA put the person in charge of
policy at the FDA, they took Monsanto's former outside attorney-Monsanto's the
large biotech company-and put him in charge of FDA policy during the time that
the GMO policy was being created.
Afterwards, this man, Michael Taylor, then took a position as Monsanto's
vice-president, so really it was industry regulating, or in this case
non-regulating, themselves and so the FDA really has no required studies and
safety testing whatsoever.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Is the impact of genetically modified foods limited? You
mentioned cotton, soybeans, corn, a few other things. Is it limited to those or
is it broader?
JEFFREY SMITH: There are four major crops-soy, corn, cotton and canola-and
there are three minor food crops-Hawaiian papaya, a little bit of zucchini and
little bit of crookneck squash. Now the tomatoes that were on the market years
ago were taken off the market, the potatoes were taken off the market. There's
an industry that wants to introduce genetically modified sugar beets next year.
There
have been more than 170 different species of crops that have been tested in
field trials, and many more developed in the laboratory. The stated goal of
Monsanto's executives, years ago, to their consultant, for their ideal future
was to genetically engineer 100% of all commercial seeds in the world and patent
them. That was how they developed their plans. Another biotech company also, in
1999, projected that within five years they would see a takeover of 95% of all
commercial seeds in the world within five years.
Fortunately, there was an eruption in Europe a few weeks later, and the concern
by consumers there forced the food industry to promise, "We're not going to be
selling genetically engineered ingredients in our foods in Europe." That has
stopped it to these four major crops grown in six countries with two major
traits instead of the entire food supply. There's also milk from cows treated
with genetically engineered Bovine Growth Hormone, which is put out by Monsanto
to increase milk supply of cows.
It also
has very grave health risks associated with it, for example, an increase of a
hormone that's linked to cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer, et cetera.
Fortunately, we're seeing the same kind of consumer rejection that they saw in
Europe against this Bovine Growth Hormone right now. Major companies like
Publix, Starbucks, Kroger and others are rejecting all milk from cows treated
with this dangerous genetically engineered drug.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Wow. Now you mentioned Europe, and as we said earlier,
you've traveled around the world. Why do you think that consumers in Europe have
been so much stronger about rejecting genetically modified foods versus
consumers in America?
JEFFREY SMITH: Because they know about it. It's interesting that in 1999,
this scientist, the one I had interviewed earlier who gave me his shocking
moment, was silenced with threats of a lawsuit from his former employer. He was
working on a UK government grant to develop a testing protocol for GM crops that
was rigorous. When he discovered it was actually is dangerous, he was muzzled
and his protocol was never implemented.
Just
after the biotech industry had claimed that they were going to be taking over
the food supply in five years, his gag order was lifted by an act of Parliament.
Within the week, 159 column feet of material was written about it in the press
and within the month, 750 articles. One editor said that it divided the society
into two warring camps on the GM issue.
With the
controversy stirred in the press, people hearing about the health risks, and
hearing about the way it hasn't been tested for food safety, it was too much for
the consumers and so they were resisting it. In April of 1999, Unilever,
Britain's largest food manufacturer, committed to remove GM ingredients from the
European brands and within a week, so did virtually every other major food
company.
Now by
comparison, these same companies do not remove GM ingredients in the United
States, where only one in four are even aware that they've ever eaten a
genetically engineered food in their lives. If you ask people, "Have you ever
eaten a GM food?" 60% say no, 15% say, "I don't know." The foods continue to be
sold and the biotech industry prospers on the basis of consumer ignorance.
If some
event or issue would raise this topic onto the national radar screen, or if even
just a small percentage of shoppers started making their choices for non-GM
products and actually started knowing which products were genetically engineered
and avoiding them, that would be enough to cause the tipping point, that
landslide that we saw in Europe and the tipping point that we saw with Bovine
Growth Hormone.
The real
issue is, not only that the United States consumers don't know much about it
because they haven't been told by the press, but if they did know about it, we
could get rid of this stuff very quickly.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Now why aren't genetically modified foods labeled? We have
some of the strictest labeling requirements in the world in America. Why don't
we know which foods are genetically modified just by looking at the labeling on
our packages?
JEFFREY SMITH: According to several lawyers, it's actually this concept
that it should be labeled violates those strict laws and the FDA is doing it
because they have been told by the White House to promote the biotechnology
industry. It is a stated official goal of the FDA. They know that nine out of 10
Americans want GM foods labeled, and they also know that more than half would
choose to avoid GM foods if they were labeled, which would kill the biotech
industry in terms of food.
They
have decided to ignore the desires of nine out of 10 Americans to support the
financial interests of six agricultural biotechnology companies. It's a real
shame, but unfortunately that's the equation and how it's working.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Who are those major players? Who are the major biotech firms
behind genetically modified foods?
JEFFREY SMITH:
Monsanto has the patents to about 90% of all the acreage planted. There's also
Syngenta, Bayer CropScience, Dow, DuPont and BASF. Those are the only six that
have commercialized food crops in the United States and Europe, et cetera.
CHRIS ATTWOOD:
Earlier, you talked about that there are risks associated, or that we don't know
the impact of certain genetic modifications. Are there actual cases where
harmful effects have been seen or studied or results have been observed as a
result of genetic engineering?
JEFFREY SMITH: Absolutely. The earliest one happened in the 1980s. About
5,000 to 10,000 people got sick with a horrible, debilitating disease. About 100
people died. It was traced to a food supplement called L-tryptophan, but only
one brand of the tryptophan and that was the brand that was genetically
engineered by a company in Japan. We also know that, because there's no
post-marketing surveillance of genetically engineered foods in the United
States, no clinical trials, we have to look at correlations in other evidence.
We know
that soon after genetically modified soy was introduced to the UK, soy allergies
skyrocketed by 50%. We know many ways in which genetically modified soy might
increase allergies. In fact, there's a least one study that shows people who
have a skin-prick reaction test only to the GM soy, but not to the non-GM soy.
We know that the cotton that produces its own pesticide, when farm workers
harvest this cotton, load it, even lean against it, they describe really bad
allergic reactions, hundreds of them.
They're
the same type of allergic reactions that we would predict for people being
exposed to this pesticide. When they let sheep graze after harvest on these
cotton plants, one in four sheep died within a week, about 10,000 sheep in
total. We know that about two dozen farmers say that their pigs or cows became
sterile as a result of genetically engineered corn. We know other farmers who
say their animals died as a result of eating the corn.
We have
laboratory studies showing higher death rates, stomach lesions, problems like
that. One of the most shocking studies came out of Russia, where they fed
genetically modified soybeans, the same that are approved in the United States
and that we eat every day, to Russian rats-these were mother rats-and after
giving birth, 56% of the offspring died within three weeks, compared to only
about 9% of the offspring when the mothers were fed natural soy.
There
was also a very lower birthrate and poor health, and the offspring couldn't get
pregnant from the offspring of the mothers who were fed the GM soy. In mice that
were fed GM soy, they showed changes in their young sperm cells and also changes
in embryo DNA expression, so we see changes that can result in the next
generation very clearly in the research, but this has not been studied in human
beings, so it's much safer just to avoid these foods.
CHRIS ATTWOOD:
It's so interesting that with all these sorts of things that there aren't
clinical trials or clinical laboratory testing going on of these foods in the
US. Do you attribute this solely to the impact or the leverage that these six
large companies have?
JEFFREY SMITH: Absolutely. According to US law, it's a food additive that
should have been tested thoroughly and labeled, but it's because of the
influence of the biotechnology companies. One person at the FDA said that in
this regard, the regulatory agencies have done everything that Big Ag business
has asked them to do and told them to do. Yes, it is also their influence in
other regulation schemes like in Europe and in Brazil.
I've
been to many of these places and I've talked to these regulators, and it turns
out that we're seeing the same kind of influence there that we saw here. It's
really the biotech industry that's dictating terms. They're even telling the
regulators, "We can't afford it. If you have us test our foods like a
pharmaceutical, we couldn't afford them because there's not enough profit, and
you wouldn't be able to have them in your society so you would lose out.
The only
way that you can win and become profitable and competitive in biotechnology is
to let us do our own testing and you review it. It can't be extensive and it
can't be long-term. It has to be under these conditions." Now in part of my
book, Genetic Roulette, I describe the state of their testing and how
they have very carefully and masterfully rigged research to avoid finding
problems, how they have gotten bad science down to a science.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Talk about that a little bit.
JEFFREY SMITH:
I'll give you an example …
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