The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) doesn’t think so. The Academy reported that “Several animal studies indicate serious health risks associated with GM food,” including infertility, immune problems, accelerated aging, faulty insulin regulation, and changes in major organs and the gastrointestinal system. The AAEM asked physicians to advise patients to avoid GM foods.
Before the FDA decided to allow GMOs into food without labeling, FDA scientists had repeatedly warned that GM foods can create unpredictable, hard-to-detect side effects, including allergies, toxins, new diseases, and nutritional problems. They urged long-term safety studies, but were ignored.
Since then, findings include:
•Thousands of sheep, buffalo, and goats in India died after grazing on Bt cotton plants
•Mice eating GM corn for the long term had fewer, and smaller, babies
•More than half the babies of mother rats fed GM soy died within three weeks, and were smaller
•Testicle cells of mice and rats on a GM soy change significantly
•By the third generation, most GM soy-fed hamsters lost the ability to have babies
•Rodents fed GM corn and soy showed immune system responses and signs of toxicity
•Cooked GM soy contains as much as 7-times the amount of a known soy allergen
•Soy allergies skyrocketed by 50% in the UK, soon after GM soy was introduced
•The stomach lining of rats fed GM potatoes showed excessive cell growth, a condition that may lead to cancer.
•Studies showed organ lesions, altered liver and pancreas cells, changed enzyme levels, etc.
Unlike safety evaluations for drugs, there are no human clinical trials of GM foods. The only published human feeding experiment revealed that the genetic material inserted into GM soy transfers into bacteria living inside our intestines and continues to function. This means that long after we stop eating GM foods, we may still have their GM proteins produced continuously inside us. This could mean:
•If the antibiotic gene inserted into most GM crops were to transfer, it could create super diseases, resistant to antibiotics
•If the gene that creates Bt-toxin in GM corn were to transfer, it might turn our intestinal bacteria into living pesticide factories.
Although no studies have evaluated if antibiotic or Bt-toxin genes transfer, that is one of the key problems. The safety assessments are too superficial to even identify most of the potential dangers from GMOs.
See our Health Risks brochure:
http://responsibletechnology.org/docs/140.pdfand State of the Science report for more details and citations.
http://responsibletechnology.org/docs/145.pdf
Posted: Wed Feb 29, 2012 4:19 pm