(Photo courtesy of Jeff Skeirik)

There’s just so much we still don’t know about GMOs, and we’re weary of the studies that “prove” their safety. Luck for us, we were able to sit down and speak with celebrated consumer advocate Jeffrey Smith about the dangers of GMOs and corporate science in America. Here’s the first part of our two-part interview with the author of Seeds Of Deception and Genetic Roulette. 

Hiland Naturals: Why did you feel it was necessary to write your books?

Jeffrey Smith: I have been aware of the growing evidence of the dangers of GMOs and how little people knew about it. In fact, I was reading the news in Europe about GMOs daily for years and comparing it to almost no coverage in the US. I wanted to find a way to convey the concerns and the evidence to a large number of people. At the time, I had a choice between a film and a book, but I didn’t have the funding to guarantee production of a film, so we went with a book instead and it became the world’s best selling book on GMOs until this point.

Hiland Naturals: You are pretty much THE speaker when it comes to discussing the health dangers of GMOs. So many scientific studies are being published telling the public that GMOs are perfectly safe. Why do you think this is happening and what evidence is there to the contrary?

Jeffrey Smith: The industry funded research is largely tobacco science where they’ve been caught red handed over and over again meticulously designing their studies to avoid finding problems, and then when problems arise, they can hide the evidence. We know this from scientists analyzing the research, both research design and doing reanalysis of the raw data.

I’ve even spoken to a former Monsanto scientist who admitted exactly same thing, that when the rats were fed Monsanto’s corn and were damaged, instead of withdrawing the corn, they rewrote the study to hide the effects.

The independent research that’s conducted, and also some of the research conducted by industries—despite their best efforts to hide it—show significant lift in disorders including gastrointestinal, reproductive, immune disorders, organ damage, early death, infant mortality, tumors, cancer, etc. In addition to the GMO research, we can now lean heavily on the research related to RoundUp and its active ingredient Glyphosate, which was just declared by the WHO (World Health Organization) a probable carcinogen.

So RoundUp is linked to Parkinson’s and cancer and bacteria imbalances, problems in the production of key hormones like serotonin and melatonin and dopamine, interfering with detoxification by the liver of other poisons, damage to the intestinal walls, endocrine disruption, mitochondrial damage, digestive enzyme suppression, and it’s also an antibiotic. So all of those are now attributes of GMOs, 80% of which are designed to be sprayed with RoundUp which can soak into the crop and into the food that we eat.

We now have overwhelming evidence of harm if you include both the GMO information and the RoundUp in formation, so there’s no scientific justification for declaring GMOs safe—although that hasn’t stopped Monsanto and the other biotech companies because they’ve never needed scientific justification.

For example, in the FDA scientists we now know, because of documents released from a lawsuit, repeatedly warned their superiors that GMOs were different and dangerous and could cause create allergens, toxins, new diseases, etc. and required long-term study before being released to the public. But the person in charge of policy at the FDA was Michael Taylor, Monsanto’s former attorney, greater Monsanto’s vice president, and now back at the FDA as the US food safety czar. He, in charge of the FDA policy, ignored the scientists entirely and allowed GMOs on the market without any required safety studies and without labeling.

So this is an example of an early fraud that occurred in collusion with FDA and Monsanto, and that same type of fraudulent presentation on the safety of GMOs continues to this day.

Hiland Naturals: That’s a little bit scary!

Jeffrey Smith: If you really want to be scared, I can tell you about how you might turn your intestines into living pesticides factories from eating corn chips! So in addition to the toxin RoundUp and the other herbicides that are used on GMOs, there’s a built-in toxin in corn and cotton. It’s called BT toxin, and it’s an insecticide, and it breaks open the stomach of insects to kill them. It’s not supposed to have any influence on human cells, but that’s been proven false—it does, in fact, poke holes in human cells similar to the holes in creates in the cells of insects.

Now, the key toxin may create holes along our intestinal walls, which is called leaky gut. Leaky gut is linked to cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and autism, autoimmune disease, inflammation, food allergies, etc. The BT toxin was found in the blood of 93% of the pregnant women tested and 80% of their unborn fetuses, possibly getting into the blood through holes created in walls of the intestine. If it gets into the blood, another study done with mice shows that it’s toxic to that blood cell and might be linked to leukemia. If it gets into the unborn fetus blood, which it does in 80% of the women tested, it might get into the brain due to the lack of blood-brain barrier at that age. In which case, we have a hole-poking toxin in the brains of the offspring of this generation, which might link to, who knows what.

Now the BT toxin should wash out of the blood fairly quickly, so how come 93% of the pregnant women tested have it? They must be taking it on a frequent basis, so the authors of the study suggest that it might be the milk and meat of the animals eating GMOs because they eat BT corn and cottonseed as part of their daily diet—especially the corn. So they’re suggesting that the toxin might stick around in unbroken down form and then remain active when it gets digested in humans.

Another plausible explanation is that the gene could transfer to the DNA of gut bacteria and continue to function, meaning that it would convert our intestinal floor into living pesticides factories. So the reason why the BT toxin may be in their blood in such high percentages is because they’re producing it in their intestines.

Now, this is not just a theory, because the only human feeding study—the ONLY human feeding study—on commercialized GMOs show that a part of the gene from RoundUp soybeans did in fact transfer to the DNA of gut bacteria. There’s evidence supporting the notion that it continued to function, although that wasn’t proven.

This could mean that we are producing GM proteins like BT toxin on a regular basis. These are some examples of the serious dangers that haven’t been investigated by the companies, by government, or in this case, even by independent scientists. Yet, we’re being used as the guinea pigs for a very, very dangerous technology.

In fact, the technology is based on outdated notions of science. The fundamental assumption used as the basis for safety claims have turned out to be untrue and a whole other group have yet to be tested. The whole process is so primitive and dangerous that there’s massive collateral damage in the DNA as a result of the genetic engineering process.

This has resulted, for example, in the turning on of the silent gene in corn that now produces an allergen in Monsanto’s corn that’s never been in corn before. An increase of a known allergen in soy, in Monsanto’s soy, as much as seven times the amount of the allergen compared to non-GM soy. And that’s just the process itself, irrespective of what gene you put in.