Dangers of Genetically Modified Food

As a follow-up to this previous post, I'd like to write about the dangers of genetically modified food. This is important because nearly 1/3 of agricultural land in the United States is now being planted in gene-altered crops, and 70% of processed foods at your local grocery store have GM foods in them. And there are no requirements for these processed foods to be labeled as such. Likely everyone reading this has already consumed a fair amount of this kind of food. It is hard to avoid, even if you don't buy processed food. That's because it is also prevalent in any kind of restaurant food as well (particularly soy, corn, and canola).

Here are just a few reasons that GM foods are dangerous:

• They create "super-weeds" that cannot be controlled.
• The FDA assumes these foods are the same as the originals without even testing them; there have never been any studies on the effects of GM foods on humans.
• In animal testing, GM foods have caused numerous health problems, including lung damage, cancer, and death.
  
• GM foods have an inherently higher risk for children.

This is such a small sampling of the number of problems with GM anything. I didn't even mention rBGH (genetically modified hormone given to cows), terminator technology, the Star-Link corn fiasco, etc., ad nauseam. This information can be found easily over the internet. Dr. Mercola is an excellent trustworthy source for this kind of information if you find conflicting information and don't know who to trust. Naturally, any kind of information written by or paid for by any big seed/chemical/GM corporations is likely untrustworthy. This site has a list of 50 Harmful Effects of Genetically Modified Foods. I don't know anything about the rest of the site, but this page has some good information.

Next week I'll write about how you can avoid genetically modified food.