Here's more about GMO foods, products made with Genetically Modified Organisms -- the lifeforms formerly known as "plants." My last post revealed how their weed-killer residues are qualified to kill beneficial bacteria in your gut.
Modifying organisms genetically means that engineers are tampering with plants' DNA, tinkering with their cells' essential operating code. Commercializing life's core intelligence in this way subordinates the integrity of creation to the increase of corporate profits.
By my lights, since it's likely to be lethal, the enterprise is insane. It's unholy, a slap in the Creator's face. Frankly, I'd love to hear how Creationists feel about genetic engineering and GMOs.
What's the backstory?
When Monsanto launched Roundup® in 1974, the company declared the herbicide to be safe for humans. Less toxic than aspirin. Safe as table salt.
Safe? In 1996 the State of New York's Attorney General filed suit against Monsanto and its claim that Roundup® is "safe as table salt." Without copping to wrongdoing, the company paid a fine and agreed to stop advertising its glyphosate-containing products as "safe, non-toxic, harmless or free from risk."
Still, stories about the safety of genetically modified (GM) edibles with attending glyphosate residues persist. GM foodstuffs are supposedly so safe that, in the United States at least, products containing these engineering marvels don't have to label themselves as such.
Safety Engineering
Put "safe" and "engineering" next to each other, then think of another GM, General Motors. As of August 1, 2014, General Motors had recalled 26.41 million vehicles -- about 40% of the total number of GM cars and trucks on American roads -- in order to fix defects that make them dangerous to drive.
Typically, 10 to 20 million American vehicles are recalled each year due to safety concerns; in some years the number of recalls has surpassed 30 million.
Oops.
As a profession, auto engineering has been around much longer than genetic engineering. Yet look at its track record. Do we really want to feed ourselves and our children engineered food, no matter how "safe" its proponents and profit-takers declare it to be?
R-Words
Recall. Also Roundup®. The brand name itself is appalling. In my mind, it provokes disturbing images. Not only rounding up weeds for extinction by blanketing fields with massive doses of chemical poison. Also cowboys rounding up cattle, herding them to slaughterhouses. Gestapo rounding up Jews, herding them to concentration camps. Genetic engineering, genocide -- the words are shiveringly similar.
How Lethal?
Microbiome-disrupting GMO food: In my understanding, it's a serious blunder. Like the one the Romans made, lining their water pipes with lead. Apparently, lead in the water poisoned bodies and minds, hastening the decline of Roman civilization. Aside from making us fat, what will GMO foods do for us?
I put this impending disaster down to human ignorance, greed, and arrogance. It's a sad and humbling case of we don't know what we do not know. Mixed with there's a profit to be made, so why not?
Product developers deemed weed-killer glyphosate safe for humans because, as we all know, humans are mammals. Glyphosate endangers only plants and microbes. In fact, in the early 2000s, Monsanto claimed a patent for glyphosate as a microbe-killer.
Did the engineers and product managers developing Roundup® know that we humans are only about 10% mammal, the rest of us being a randy collection of microorganisms? That we depend on the microbes we host for our lives?
I wonder whether they would have knowingly gone ahead promoting Roundup® for the short- term gain, even if the long-term prospect for the product was bleak.
After all, who'll be around to buy GMO foods after those products have devastated their consumers' gut bacteria? After those consumers have become deranged, have keeled over, no longer functional in body and mind?
What to do?
Bottom line, as it seems to me: Eat non-GMO foods.
Eat organic. Love your belly bacteria. Love your belly.
© 2014 Self-Health Education