S.D. Wells - Enjoy the Hunger Games? We're all playing the Nutrition Games in real life

Ready, set, go! You have just been released into the wild, a survive-by-any-means world, where nearly all food and medicine is toxic, doctors and dentists prescribe cancer causing medication and radiation, you have no rights to speak adversely about your government, and you can be imprisoned with no rights to a lawyer or phone call, for simply being "suspected" of terrorist acts. Go now, fend for yourself, don't ask questions, and try not to end up in a hospital, where you'll be force fed more toxins and most likely won't get out alive.

That's right, rather than heading to the movie theatre to sit back with your popcorn, candy and a soda to "virtually" engage in the not-so-far-away, post-apocalyptic, dystopian future of America (around the year 2080), just head to the local grocery store and start haphazardly grabbing items off the shelves, then go home, turn on the boob tube, eat your food, watch the news, and "hope" it all gets better.

Welcome to the Jungle 

Welcome to the jungle, we've got "fun and games," where food is full of toxins disguised with natural names. But today in America, instead of having your skull cracked by a "kill-or-be-killed" teenager, and then having your brain devoured by poisonous creatures, you get your skull sawed open by a surgeon, while your brain and internal organs are eaten alive slowly by chemotherapy and radiation, and your only weapons consist of organic food and organic supplements, which may soon be illegal, or converted to GMO, but still labeled as organic.

Read More:

http://www.naturalnews.com/035659_Hunger_Games_nutrition_life.html

Ronnie Cummins - Millions Against Monsanto: The Food Fight of Our Lives

For nearly two decades, Monsanto and corporate agribusiness have exercised near-dictatorial control over American agriculture, aided and abetted by indentured politicians and regulatory agencies, supermarket chains, giant food processors, and the so-called “natural” products industry.

Finally, public opinion around the biotech industry’s contamination of our food supply and destruction of our environment has reached the tipping point. We’re fighting back.

This November, in a food fight that will largely determine the future of what we eat and what we grow, Monsanto will face its greatest challenge to date: a statewide citizens’ ballot initiative that will give Californians the opportunity to vote for their right to know whether the food they buy is contaminated with GMOs.

Read More:

http://www.nationofchange.org/millions-against-monsanto-food-fight-our-lives-1334324632

Ken Roseboro - Scientist says biotech companies encouraging GMO-herbicide treadmill

The dramatic rise of weeds resistant to glyphosate, the main ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, is leading biotechnology companies to develop more genetically modified crops that are tolerant to older, more toxic herbicides such as 2,4-D and Dicamba.

In a paper published recently in BioScience, David Mortensen, professor of weed ecology at Penn State, and fellow researchers criticized this “single tactic” approach of herbicide-tolerant GM crops to control weeds. The paper says the approach will dramatically increase herbicide use and threaten environmental quality, create even more herbicide resistant “superweeds,” and encourage continued neglect of public research and extension investment in integrated weed management approaches in favor of chemical company profit-driven GMO approaches.

In 2010, Mortensen told a US House Oversight Committee that the government should restrict the use of herbicide-tolerant GM crops and impose a tax on GM seeds to fund research and educational programs for farmers.

Ken Roseboro, editor of The Organic & Non-GMO Report, recently interviewed Mortensen.

What were the key findings of your paper published in BioScience?

Read More:

http://www.non-gmoreport.com/articles/april2012/scientist-biotech-gmo-herbicide.php

Michael Blanding - Who Sways the USDA on GMO Approvals?

Government agencies can be "captured" by the very companies or industries they regulate. Looking at how genetically altered food products are approved, Assistant Professor Shon R. Hiatt finds unexpected influencers on the US Department of Agriculture. Key concepts include:

"Regulatory capture" describes the phenomenon whereby regulatory agencies tasked with serving the public instead end up advancing the interests of the companies they regulate.

Traditional theories of capture such as lobbying and campaign contributions had little effect on whether the US Department of Agriculture approved any particular genetically altered agriculture product.

What did seem to affect the approval process was the influence of third-party groups such as associations and even related regulatory agencies.

Read More:

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6959.html

GM crops - Just the science

Do GM crops increase yield potential?

At best, GM crops have performed no better than their non-GM counterparts, with GM soya beans giving consistently lower yields for over a decade54. Controlled comparative field trials of GM/non-GM soya suggest that 50% of the drop in yield is due to the genetic disruptive effect of the GM transformation process55. Similarly, field tests of Bt insecticide-producing maize hybrids showed that they took longer to reach maturity and produced up to 12% lower yields than their non-GM counterpart56.

A US Department of Agriculture report confirms the poor yield performance of GM crops, saying, "GE crops available for commercial use do not increase the yield potential of a variety. In fact, yield may even decrease.... Perhaps the biggest issue raised by these results is how to explain the rapid adoption of GE crops when farm financial impacts appear to be mixed or even negative57."

Read More:

http://gmwatch.org/gm-crops-research-documenting-the-limitations-risks-and-alternatives

Anthony Gucciardi - Stealth GMOs Rapidly Consuming Global Food Supply

Obviously there is no room for GMOs in truly healthy food products, which is why it is truly vital that you understand the nature of GMOs and how they are oftentimes hidden in commercial food products. It may very well shock you to know just how prevalent GMOs are within the food supply. It’s truly amazing that modified products continue to go unlabeled despite being linked to organ damage — among a barrage of other conditions — in a prominent review of 19 studies.

In fact, nearly 93-95% of US soybeans are genetically modified in order to resist powerful weed-killers that were found to be killing the actual soybeans as well as the weeds. Following current trends, genetically modified food products will makeup the majority of the future food supply if a change is not made. For now, that change has been shot down by the FDA — the very organization tasked to defend public health. Just recently, the agency deleted around 1 million signatures from the GMO labeling campaign ‘Just Label It.’

Read More:

http://www.nationofchange.org/stealth-gmos-rapidly-consuming-global-food-supply-1333373288

Josette Dunn - GM soy linked to birth defects, cancer: new study

Monsanto's herbicide Roundup used on genetically manipulated (GM) Roundup Ready crops is linked to human cell death, birth defects, cancer and miscarriages, says a report released at the European Parliament by an international group of scientists.

The report comes at a crucial time for Australia, where a popular infant soy formula has tested positive to unlabelled GM soy and corn, and Roundup Ready canola and cotton are grown.

The report, “GM Soy: Sustainable? Responsible?”, highlights new research by Argentine government scientist Professor Andrés Carrasco and an international coalition of scientists. They found serious health impacts from Roundup’s active ingredient, glyphosate, other chemicals in the formulated herbicide and its breakdown products. The report also provides a global overview of scientific papers and other documents on the impacts of GM soy production. The new research is published in the American Chemical Society journal ‘Chemical Research in Toxicology’.

Read More:

http://www.ausfoodnews.com.au/2010/10/06/gm-soy-linked-to-birth-defects-cancer-new-study.html

Tom Philpott - Are Genetically Modified Foods Safe To Eat?

We know that eating food derived genetically modified crops won't make you keel over and die. How do we know that? According to the USDA, about three-quarters of US corn and upwards of percent of soy are from genetically modified seeds - a rapid ascent since their roll-out in the early '90s.

Those two crops suffuse our food system: they provide the sweetener for soft drinks, the cooking oil for French fries, feed for the animals we eat, and countless ingredients used by food processors. By 2003, the Grocery Manufacturers of America was already reckoning that 75 percent of processed food in supermarets contained GMO ingredients. So if eating a bowl of cereal made from GMO corn, or a Pop Tart sweetened with high-fructose GMO corn syrup, posed an immediate threat, we'd know it by now. Millions of people do it every day. So for what public-health people call acute effects, GMOs have more or less been proven safe.

But what about chronic effects - slow-moving, unspectacular conditions that could take years to detect, much less to diagnose? Here we're on murkier ground. GMOs have been on the market for less than a generation: not a large span of time for gauging long-term effects on a population.

Read More:

http://motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2011/09/gmos-safe-eat

Monsanto EU GM Maize Plans Undermined by Damning US Report

A review by the US Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) [1] describes Monsanto’s insect resistance monitoring strategy for Bt maize in the US Midwest as “inadequate and likely to miss early resistance events”. It also highlights how the crop itself may be causing the problem and how a failure to enforce mitigation measures, like refuges and rotations, is making it worse.

The review confirms that in Iowa and Illinois a major pest of maize, the western corn rootworm, has developed resistance to the toxic Cry3Bb1 protein present in Monsanto’s MON863 and MON88017 Bt maizes. It goes on to report “severe efficacy issues for Monsanto’s Cry3Bb1 trait” in Minnesota and Nebraska.

Monsanto has applied for authorization to grow MON88017 in the European Union. GM Freeze published a review of insect resistance in Bt crops earlier this year [2] and is releasing today a critique of the European Food Safety Authority’s support for approval of EU cultivation of MON88017. [3]

Read More:

http://www.gmfreeze.org/news-releases/173/

Joan Melcher - More Evidence Linking Pesticides and Malformations Additional studies suggest that common pesticides may be endocrine disruptors, bad news that nonetheless warms the heart of one citizen scientist.

Concern about toxic chemicals in the environment has erupted into the mainstream media again, with new reports tying pesticides to disruption of male hormones, birth defects and cancer.

Andres Carrasco, head of the molecular Embryology Lab at the University of Buenos Aires and chief scientist at the National Council for Science and Technology, linked glyphosate, the active ingredient in the popular herbicide Roundup, to escalating rates of animal birth defects — including cyclopia, where a single eye is present in the center of the forehead), infertility, stillbirths, miscarriages and cancers — in agricultural areas of the country. The result "opens concerns about the clinical findings from human offspring" exposed to the chemical in the same areas, he wrote.

Following up on Carrasco's work, The Ecologist, a British environmental magazine, published a grisly account of the effects of glyphosate liberally sprayed on genetically modified soy crops in Argentina. The story told how Carrasco was assaulted by a mob when he arrived at a rural town where he was to present his findings.

Read More:

http://www.miller-mccune.com/environment/more-evidence-linking-pesticides-and-malformations-30560/