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Genetic Modification vs. Hybridization of Foods: An Easy Breakdown and History of Monsanto. Plus: Why I Take This Seriously!
Tue, 02/11/2014 - 11:23am
There are few topics more on the minds of American consumers today than food. That is not different than before, it's seemed we've been consumed with food, in one way or another, always. No pun intended. It is, after all, what fuels our bodies, and when done well, nourishes more than our bodies, as it can also positively affect the person's mind and spirit. When done not well, it can have a negative effect. That's making it pretty simple, and hopefully appealing to look at not only what you eat, but how you prepare what nourishes you, and even how you consume it. Is in nourishing your body, mind and spirit?
For many decades now, learning what foods are 'healthy' or 'good for us' has been a key concept for consumers. The word 'diet' is thought of by many as something other than 'what you consume', that's you're 'diet'. "Going 'on' a diet" became a term and by the time I was working at the health education department at a major University in the early 90s, their slogan was 'diet is not a four letter word'. There were rampant numbers of health issues due to the student's growing concerns about body image and they were 'dieting'; so I want to clarify that I want to restore the word 'diet' in YOUsers minds, if not already there, to mean simply 'what you consume'.
I'm one of the later baby boomers, and I was raised in Colorado with margarine and vegetable shortening, not butter and lard. I remember thinking people who used those types of products were behind he times and eating unhealthfully, and then my marketing professor in the late '70s, who was from Texas, changed my paradigm. In a lecture about marketing generally he used margarine as an example. He said that margarine was a product created and marketed to us that was really not healthy for us, as our bodies know what to do with butter and the mishmash of chemicals in margarine are not what our bodies know what to do with.
So why was my marketing professor giving me some of the best nutrition advise I'd had so far in my life?
Because he understood how 'the system' worked! Keep in mind, he is paid by the system, and so he was perhaps slipping some smoke signals in that weren't in his official syllabus, I now realize. Thank you, all teachers, who have somehow worked around 'the system' to leave bread crumbs for us to follow. Dots for us to connect. And I hope that this topic on Lumigrate does the same for you. I believe the article from Wired Science is doing the same, and I have bolded the things in the excerpt that I think are more important for YOUsers to read and think about. (Please also go to the full article at the website and then read the entire thing WITH the great photos they have included.)
My marketing professor long ago also said that the marketers of the birth control pill designed in the week of placebo pills because they felt that women would accept it better initially if it didn't keep them from having menstrual periods, but that was unnecessary and they knew that, it was for 'marketing'. Again, more good advise and many years later the marketers of the products shifted to reflect that with different versions that do not cycle in a non hormone pill every packet/month.
I'm glad I learned that in the late 1970s from my a business professor and then picked up the ball and talked to my medical providers about it, and basically integrated that information into my personal medical regimen. You might say, I was learning early on, out of sheer necessity from the medical symptoms I had which made my life somewhat difficult and miserable at times, how to be proactive and 'take charge'.
As everyone is aware, I'm sure, it hasn't just been fats, as sugars are another aspect that is a whole realm related to diet. Artificial sweeteners have an interesting history as well, which are mentioned in the article below, which is the foundation for this topic. I did my entire semester of public speaking and discussion presentations at university on the subject of saccharine, as at the time they were trying to get it shuffled off to make way for new products that were in development, I now suspect.
Back then, did I know how the system worked? No. Why? Because I was getting my education primarily from 'inside the system'. And the system's curriculum doesn't want the teachers to teach about the system and how it works. And I find today that this is the case with the majority of Americans, in particular, but also 'and beyond', so I wanted to provide this topic at Lumigrate to help people find their way when it has to do with our system and food, as I have never seen more NEW people at the better known "health food stores" making their way through for the first time trying to figure out what products to purchase! It's GRATE to see!
I grew up with saccharine as well as white and brown sugars, and corn syrups in my home, as was the norm in the '60s and '70s. My family actually ate better than most due to my parents' backgrounds and values. And then I brought something to the table as a kid: I had seen a strip of dirt while swinging on the swingset, and had seen seeds in packets and asked if I could plant some seeds and grow plants when I was quite young. That ended up turning into a lifestyle that brought at least some of our foods consumed to be very high quality, and were organically grown. I lived in the community that inspired one of the co-creators of "South Park", so you might be able to picture our challengingly short growing season.
My initiation into chronic medical conditions personally came in my teens, though the symptoms track back to infancy and birth, really, and I was diagnosed with such an extreme case of hypoglycemia in my teens that it was called 'prediabetic hypoglycemia'. The doctor flat out stated that I'd be a diabetic when I was an adult. I certainly didn't want that, and so even in my middle teens strictly followed the recommended diet. I believe my history of relatively good 'compliance' paid off, and I can attest to how difficult it is to eat and drink differently than those around you, as well. I hope that my personal story with this helps YOUsers reading this, and helps you understand why I have been so focused on foods as a key to wellness and illness, since our very beginning back in 2008 and 2009. AND why I wanted to address this issue of 'seed science' with this topic.
As my background is diverse, I had also studied 'systems theory' at one point, and would say that that 'systems stuff' of what your family system, workplace system, and social systems, etc all do has a profound effect on what each person experiences. It takes "behavioral tools" to be compliant with anything that isn't 'coming naturally' to a person because of their habits. Sometimes those are healthy tools people have, and other times people reach for unhealthy tools that are things they learned in the past to cope.
That's a subject for another topic (look in other forums at Lumigrate for our offerings, a topic I recommend is from 2013 and is about The UltraMind Solution by Mark Hyman, MD. I also wove in information from Wheat Belly and William Davis, MD. I'll provide a link, below as well for your convenience. Since modern wheat is a hybrid, and many people now have learned the buzz word GMO, they're thinking incorrectly that wheat is GMO, and it's not. These details become important and are BIG, not 'details', when it comes to figuring out what you're going to consume.
Three decades after my college marketing professor taught me something big about nutrition, I learned of the work of Westin Price, and thought "where have I been? This all makes so much sense. This is so easy to understand and it simplifies understanding of wellness and why so many people alive now, myself included, have never been 'well' in our lives." Westin Price studied indigenous people who were consuming the diets that their genetic ancestors had been consuming, before the modern world's people reached them and changed their diets.
To condense the take away message of Westin Price's research that has allowed me to see the 'lightbulb moment' when speaking to people in person, as often 'mainstream Americans' are in disbelief that some of the foods we were encouraged to eat are harming our development, I bring into the discussion his foundation's base information about the bones of the head, and other places in the body, do not form correctly when the diet isn't correct. Hence the native people had no need for orthodontics when consuming a native diet. Think about how many people you know who have 'sinus problems' or who have had sinus surgery, and often they have other problems related in inspiration and exhalation, and this can include sleep apnea. It was when working with a holistic dentist I'd seen present about childhood sleep apnea that I learned of Westin Price Foundation. (See below, link will be provided for YOUsers ease.)
But really, in addition to wondering "where I was", under what rock, with my head in what sandpile perhaps, that I'd not learned of Westin Price (and the foundation's) work for so many years, I should have been asking " why hasn't his work gotten to be more well known, why isn't it mainstream? ". So for the Lumigrate YOUsers, we work to help you get connected to relevant information, increasing the odds of your finding out about resources that will be of benefit to you and which are, hopefully, going to help you find not only the information that will help with your learning but ultimately help you make the changes in your lifestyle to create change if that is what you're wanting.
We have a complement of information in the Forums to help on the mind, spirit and body/physical aspects. There's nothing harder than making changes with lifestyle, and foods are certainly no exception. By selecting some good resources and distilling things down, integrating (bringing together) a few things into one topic about 'food science', focusing on hybridizing versus genetically modifying (GMOs), I hope this will go far towards helping you with your health and wellness intentions.
The article I wanted to initially feature and build upon with additional information is by Ben Paynter, and it was published in Wired Science on January 21, 2014. Here's the link, and I encourage you to go, as always, to the actual source site -- the images (photos) help make the entire article and information so much more enjoyable to take in. I'm providing the title and excerpts of what I thought was the more 'core' information for what I know of YOUsers at Lumigrate.
Monsanto Is Going Organic in a Quest for the Perfect Veggie
I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S NOT GMO
This article is written by Ben Paynter and was published at Wired Science January 21, 2014. Excerpts are in different order than they appear in the article, as I felt they served YOUsers purposes presented in this order. I'll put a line between the portions that are separate portions. Any BOLDing you see was added by me for readers / YOUsers who are short on time and skimming or who have cognitive impairment which is helped by BOLDing.
Agriculture giant Monsanto may be best known for genetic modification—like creating corn that resists the effects of Monsanto’s weed killer Roundup. But when it comes to fruits and vegetables you buy in the store, genetic modification is off the menu. Monsanto thinks no one will buy Frankenfoods, so the company is tweaking its efforts—continuing to map the genetic basis of a plant’s desirable traits but using that data to breed new custom-designed strains the way agronomists have for millennia. Here’s how it works—and how the results differ from GMO crops. Thanks to this cross between high and low tech, a new era of super-produce may be upon us. —Victoria Tang
The Old Way
- Identify plants with recognizable, desirable traits.
- Crossbreed those plants together.
- Grow the offspring.
- Wait to see if the traits show up. Repeat as necessary.
The Genetic Modification Way
- Identify plants or other organisms with recognizable, desirable traits.
- Isolate the genes that manifest those traits.
- Use enzymes to clip out those genes and paste them into the genomes of other plants, or inject them using a “gene gun” (for real) or by piggybacking them on a bacteria or virus.
- Grow the plant with the inserted gene. If the gene has successfully incorporated into the plant, you’ll have a novel phenotype.
- The New Monsanto Way
- Identify plants with recognizable, desirable traits.
- Crossbreed the plants.
- Sift through the offspring genome for known markers for desirable traits.
- Grow only the plants with those markers.
The history of Monsanto and some of the key staff was presented very well, I thought, and this is the history portion of the article:
John Francis Queeny formed Monsanto Chemical Works in 1901, primarily to produce the artificial sweetener saccharin. Monsanto was the family name of Queeny’s wife, Olga. It was a good time for chemical companies. By the 1920s, Monsanto had expanded into sulfuric acid and polychlorinated biphenyl, or PCB, a coolant used in early transformers and electric motors, now more famous as a pernicious environmental contaminant. The company moved on to plastics and synthetic fabrics, and by the 1960s it had sprouted a division to create herbicides, including the Vietnam-era defoliant Agent Orange. A decade later, Monsanto invented Roundup, a glyphosate-based weed killer that farmers could apply to reduce overgrowth between crops, increasing productivity. In the early 1990s, the company turned its scientific expertise to agriculture, working on novel crop strains that would resist the effects of its signature herbicide.
Now, breeding new strains of plants is nothing new. Quite the opposite, in fact—optimizing plants for yield, flavor, and other qualities defined the earliest human civilizations. But for all the millennia since some proto-farmer first tried it, successfully altering plants has been a game of population roulette. Basically, farmers breed a plant that has a trait they like with other plants they also like. Then they plant seeds from that union and hope the traits keep showing up in subsequent generations.
They’re working with qualities that a biologist would call, in aggregate, phenotype. But phenotype is the manifestation of genotype, the genes for those traits. The roulettelike complications arise because some genes are dominant and some are recessive. Taking a tree with sweet fruit and crossing it with one that has big fruit won’t necessarily get you a tree with sweeter, bigger fruit. You might get the opposite—or a tree more vulnerable to disease, or one that needs too much water, and on and on. It’s a trial-and-error guessing game that takes lots of time, land, and patience.
The idea behind genetic modification is to speed all that up—analyze a species’ genes, its germplasm, and manipulate it to your liking. It’s what the past three decades of plant biology have achieved and continue to refine. Monsanto became a pioneer in the field when it set out to create Roundup-resistant crops. Stark joined that effort in 1989, when he was a molecular biology postdoc. He was experimenting with the then-new science of transgenics.
Monsanto was focusing on GM commodity crops, but the more exciting work was in creating brand-new vegetables for consumers. For example, Calgene, a little biotech outfit in Davis, California, was building a tomato it called the Flavr Savr. Conventional tomatoes were harvested while green, when they’re tough enough to withstand shipping, and then gassed with ethylene at their destination to jump-start ripening. But the Flavr Savr was engineered to release less of an enzyme called polygalacturonase so that the pectin in its cell walls didn’t break down so soon after picking. The result was a tomato that farmers could pick and ship ripe.
In the mid-1990s, Monsanto bought Calgene and reassigned Stark, moving him from Roundup research to head a project that almost accidentally figured out how to engineer flavor into produce. He began tinkering with genes that affect the production of ADP-glucose pyrophosphorylase, an enzyme that correlates to higher levels of glycogen and starch in tomatoes and potatoes. Translation: more viscous ketchup and a French fry that would shed less water when cooked, maintaining mass without absorbing grease. And he succeeded. “The texture was good,” Stark says. “They were more crisp and tasted more like a potato.”Is that unhealthy? No one really knows, but it’s certainly true that the law doesn’t require Monsanto to account for potential long-term effects. (The FDA considers all additive-free, conventionally bred produce to be safe.) Nobody has ever tinkered with sugar levels the way Monsanto is attempting; it’s essentially an experiment, says Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist and president of the Institute for Responsible Nutrition. “The only result they care about is profit.”
Monsanto, of course, denies that charge. Make fruit taste better and people will eat more of it. “That’s good for society and, let’s face it, good for business,” Stark says.
Monsanto is still Monsanto. The company enforces stringent contracts for farmers who buy its produce seeds. Just as with Roundup Ready soybeans, Monsanto prohibits regrowing seeds from the new crops. The company maintains exclusion clauses with growers if harvests don’t meet the standards of firmness, sweetness, or scent—pending strict quality-assurance checks. “The goal is to get the products recognized by the consumer, trusted, and purchased,” Stark says. “That’s what I really want. I want to grow sales.”
But he gets coy about the company’s longer-term agenda. “I’m not sure we ever really projected what kind of market share we’ll have,” he says. The vegetable division cleared $821 million in revenue in 2013, a significant potential growth area for a $14 billion-a-year company that leans heavily on revenue from biotech corn and soy. More telling is the company’s steady stream of acquisitions, which suggests a continuing commitment to the produce aisle. It owns a greenhouse in the Guatemalan mountains, where the dry, warm air allows three or four growth cycles a year—great for research.
In 2008 Monsanto bought De Ruiter, one of the world’s biggest greenhouse seed companies, and in 2013 it picked up Climate Corporation, a big-data weather company that can provide intel on what field traits might be needed to survive global warming in a given region. Mark Gulley, an analyst at BGC Financial, says the company is following the “virtuous cycle” approach; it spends heavily on marketing and pours much of the proceeds back into R&D.
Again, the link to this article at Wired Science is: www.wired.com/wiredscience/2014/01/new-monsanto-vegetables/
The Link to Westin A. Price Foundation: westinaprice.org
The Link to Lumigrate's topic in the 'gut/intestines' forum, about Ultramind Solution (fix your gut and then your mind will follow, is the rest of the cover's title information), which brings in the details from Wheat Belly's author about wheat's history, which includes the desire by Big Business to 'feed the world' and hence created a new wheat in the years after World War II/2. www.lumigrate.com/forum/fix-your-broken-brain-healing-your-body-first-gut-key-ultra-mind-solution-mark-hyman-md
__________________
Live and Learn. Learn and Live Better! is my motto. I'm Mardy Ross, and I founded Lumigrate in 2008 after a career as an occupational therapist with a background in health education and environmental research program administration. Today I function as the desk clerk for short questions people have, as well as 'concierge' services offered for those who want a thorough exploration of their health history and direction to resources likely to progress their health according to their goals. Contact Us comes to me, so please do if you have questions or comments. Lumigrate is "Lighting the Path to Health and Well-Being" for increasing numbers of people. Follow us on social networking sites such as: Twitter: http://twitter.com/lumigrate and Facebook. (There is my personal page and several Lumigrate pages. For those interested in "groovy" local education and networking for those uniquely talented LumiGRATE experts located in my own back yard, "LumiGRATE Groove of the Grand Valley" is a Facebook page to join. (Many who have joined are beyond our area but like to see the Groovy information! We not only have FUN, we are learning about other providers we can be referring patients to and 'wearing a groove' to each other's doors -- or websites/home offices!) By covering some of the things we do, including case examples, it reinforces the concepts at Lumigrate.com as well as making YOU feel that you're part of a community. Which you ARE at Lumigrate!
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And here's the link: Why We Will Need Genetically Modified Foods, at MIT's Technology Review
www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/522596/why-we-will-need-genetically-modified-foods/
Our overall belief system has been created, in my generation and those before and after, to be in 'awe' of science, to bow to the scientists and since few of us have the minds that top scientists have, it is really extraordinary what they know. We were raised to worship doctors, and don't get me wrong, they have amazing minds and went through incredible training to become MDs or DOs, and I respect that, but I suggest every YOUser reading this to think about the advise they've gotten in their cumulative lifetime from experts that are 'in the sciences'. Were they ALWAYS right? Nobody's always right.
Allopathic medicine clearly has amassed an astounding array of techniques and products and services for medical consumers to consume (in trade for giving your time, energy and money (which can include from pocket or insurance), and many of them are tremendously helpful and outweight the risks and enhance people's lives overall and long-term. But much of it has contributed to the overall rate of chronic illness that we see today.
Two years ago I prepared a topic on Lumigrate based off of a presentation I attended at our local regional medical center. It was for a presentation that would gain CME credits for those who attended, and was put together and presented by a local pulmonologist whose wife had come upon information about foods contributing / causing a vast majority of the illnesses and symptoms people complain of. So he explored for nine months with the help of the staff at the hospitals' library/resource room and created a very thorough and informative presentation. This was information which we'd had on Lumigrate since the start, which was created within about a mile or so of the allopathic 'inside the box' medical establishment, so for years the majority of providers in town were operating on their old belief system not having learned about the many connections showing commonly consumed foods are causing or greatly contributing to virtually ALL chronic diseases. So this is a one-city example of how there was a flourishing system of health care outside the box, which was supported enough that all the providers were there, though literally by fingernails and skin of our teeth, unfortunately.
We who don't go into the box or step out from the box don't have the easiest of times because what we do is either relatively unknown to people, or they have others with bravado telling them that there is insufficient science to support what complementary medicine says. I hope this topic thread underscores where the money 'system' comes from and how their form of science is extremely expensive, how is someone to compete? It would be like setting up a local honey-sweetened lemonade stand next to a soda fountain with all the commercial products known and loved by the masses, and having to charge the same amount because operating expenses are fixed in the real world, and hoping people would support you.
As consumers, we each have to decide whether we're going to keep going along for the ride with what 'convention' is doing, or invest some time, energy and money resources in deciding what we want to believe is our 'truth'. YOUR truth -- YOU, the Lumigrate YOUser, is here because you're wanting to learn more, so I commend you for that!
I'd like to point to quality topics on both sides of issues sometimes -- generally people can turn to WebMD or many other conventional sources of information and I only construct topics with the 'outside the box' clues and links accompanying my input and perspective.
On this subject I wanted to also provide the MIT Inside the Box perspective. I noticed a great comment below this article, and this is what it said -- note the links they set up, those might be of interest to YOUsers too:
Live and Learn. Learn and Live Better! is my motto. I'm Mardy Ross, and I founded Lumigrate in 2008 after a career as an occupational therapist with a background in health education and environmental research program administration. Today I function as the desk clerk for short questions people have, as well as 'concierge' services offered for those who want a thorough exploration of their health history and direction to resources likely to progress their health according to their goals. Contact Us comes to me, so please do if you have questions or comments. Lumigrate is "Lighting the Path to Health and Well-Being" for increasing numbers of people. Follow us on social networking sites such as: Twitter: http://twitter.com/lumigrate and Facebook. (There is my personal page and several Lumigrate pages. For those interested in "groovy" local education and networking for those uniquely talented LumiGRATE experts located in my own back yard, "LumiGRATE Groove of the Grand Valley" is a Facebook page to join. (Many who have joined are beyond our area but like to see the Groovy information! We not only have FUN, we are learning about other providers we can be referring patients to and 'wearing a groove' to each other's doors -- or websites/home offices!) By covering some of the things we do, including case examples, it reinforces the concepts at Lumigrate.com as well as making YOU feel that you're part of a community. Which you ARE at Lumigrate!
Now, to present the OTHER side now (so initially more moderate/independent, then conventional 'in the box' (MIT), now outside the box:
http://www.trueactivist.com/geneticist-david-suzuki-says.../
Here's the last portion of this article at TrueActivist dot com, so that you can see what it's presenting about before you decide to click on the link and go see the full article. You'll see at the bottom that it was originally presented at Collective Evolution, and that link is provided for your ease to find that website resource AND David Suzuki's website is also provided. I hope this topic gets YOU started pursuing in directions that help. Our YOUsers are diverse and we hope you'll come back for other topics and tell others about Lumigrate so we can help light the path to health and well-being for others as well.
Some have argued that we’ve been eating GM foods for years with few observable negative consequences, but as we’ve seen with things like trans fats, if often takes a while for us to recognize the health impacts. With GM foods, concerns have been raised about possible effects on stomach bacteria and resistance to antibiotics, as well as their role in allergic reactions. We also need to understand more about their impact on other plants and animals.
Of course, these aren’t the only issues with GM crops. Allowing agro-chemical companies to create GM seeds with few restrictions means these companies could soon have a monopoly over agricultural production. And by introducing SmartStax, we are giving agro-chemical companies the green light not just to sell and expand the use of their “super crops” but also to sell and expand the use of the pesticides these crops are designed to resist.
A continued reliance on these crops could also reduce the variety of foods available, as well as the nutritive value of the foods themselves.
There’s also a reason nature produces a variety of any kind of plant species. It ensures that if disease or insects attack a plant, other plant varieties will survive and evolve in its place. This is called biodiversity.
Because we aren’t certain about the effects of GMOs, we must consider one of the guiding principles in science, the precautionary principle. Under this principle, if a policy or action could harm human health or the environment, we must not proceed until we know for sure what the impact will be. And it is up to those proposing the action or policy to prove that it is not harmful.
That’s not to say that research into altering the genes in plants that we use for food should be banned or that GM foods might not someday be part of the solution to our food needs. We live in an age when our technologies allow us to “bypass” the many steps taken by nature over millennia to create food crops to now produce “super crops” that are meant to keep up with an ever-changing human-centred environment.
A rapidly growing human population and deteriorating health of our planet because of climate change and a rising number of natural catastrophes, among other threats, are driving the way we target our efforts and funding in plant, agricultural, and food sciences, often resulting in new GM foods.
But we need more thorough scientific study on the impacts of such crops on our environment and our health, through proper peer-reviewing and unbiased processes. We must also demand that our governments become more transparent when it comes to monitoring new GM crops that will eventually find their ways in our bellies through the food chain.
Sources:
http://davidsuzuki.org/blogs/science-matters/2009/09/more-science-needed-on-effects-of-genetically-modifying-food-crops/
Credits:
This article first appeared on Collective Evolution.
Read more http://www.trueactivist.com/geneticist-david-suzuki-says-humans-are-part-of-a-massive-experiment/Live and Learn. Learn and Live Better! is my motto. I'm Mardy Ross, and I founded Lumigrate in 2008 after a career as an occupational therapist with a background in health education and environmental research program administration. Today I function as the desk clerk for short questions people have, as well as 'concierge' services offered for those who want a thorough exploration of their health history and direction to resources likely to progress their health according to their goals. Contact Us comes to me, so please do if you have questions or comments. Lumigrate is "Lighting the Path to Health and Well-Being" for increasing numbers of people. Follow us on social networking sites such as: Twitter: http://twitter.com/lumigrate and Facebook. (There is my personal page and several Lumigrate pages. For those interested in "groovy" local education and networking for those uniquely talented LumiGRATE experts located in my own back yard, "LumiGRATE Groove of the Grand Valley" is a Facebook page to join. (Many who have joined are beyond our area but like to see the Groovy information! We not only have FUN, we are learning about other providers we can be referring patients to and 'wearing a groove' to each other's doors -- or websites/home offices!) By covering some of the things we do, including case examples, it reinforces the concepts at Lumigrate.com as well as making YOU feel that you're part of a community. Which you ARE at Lumigrate!
I think there's a lot of good information at TrueActivist dot com in general, and since they produced a nifty printable list that people can use as an easy resource when going shopping or making our their list as they go through what's in the pantry and upgrade what they're purchasing and consuming (or feeding their family and other loved ones)(human an non), I wanted to add onto this topic with the following link:
www.trueactivist.com/printable-list-of-monsanto-owned-food-producers/
I hope our YOUsers find this a helpful tool. Remember, YOU're in control of a LOT, as our model shows:
Think of YOU! and the things you buy surrounding YOU, too, similar to providers/experts.
Live and Learn. Learn and Live Better! is my motto. I'm Mardy Ross, and I founded Lumigrate in 2008 after a career as an occupational therapist with a background in health education and environmental research program administration. Today I function as the desk clerk for short questions people have, as well as 'concierge' services offered for those who want a thorough exploration of their health history and direction to resources likely to progress their health according to their goals. Contact Us comes to me, so please do if you have questions or comments. Lumigrate is "Lighting the Path to Health and Well-Being" for increasing numbers of people. Follow us on social networking sites such as: Twitter: http://twitter.com/lumigrate and Facebook. (There is my personal page and several Lumigrate pages. For those interested in "groovy" local education and networking for those uniquely talented LumiGRATE experts located in my own back yard, "LumiGRATE Groove of the Grand Valley" is a Facebook page to join. (Many who have joined are beyond our area but like to see the Groovy information! We not only have FUN, we are learning about other providers we can be referring patients to and 'wearing a groove' to each other's doors -- or websites/home offices!) By covering some of the things we do, including case examples, it reinforces the concepts at Lumigrate.com as well as making YOU feel that you're part of a community. Which you ARE at Lumigrate!
This is a nice, short article that addresses this question. Note what the GMO Awareness dot com heading says -- at least now it says something to the extent of "Ever wonder why the world's biggest pesticide/herbicide maker is in the food business?' It's so great to see people getting so active in this. May it translate into much wellness and quickly for those who are investing in the education and changes involved. ~ Mardy
gmo-awareness.com/2011/05/05/is-organic-always-gmo-free/
Ben Davidson was a guest mid May 2015 on OneRadioNetwork and he wanted to offer something that's up the usual alley of the radio show with Patrick Timpone (which is about health freedom, essentially), so offered this up about GMO. Ben had this explanation and underscored that GMO aspect and glyphosate aspect are different, so I wanted to add it here. HOWEVER, he didn't pronounce glyphosate properly, it was something like 'glysophate', and he routinely called it a 'pesticide' when it is an HERBICIDE. BUT he had an interesting story on how he got interested in the GMO issue, which he covers at his website, which is mostly about Earth and solar or solar system science. Naturally, when it comes to what's going on with our weather on Earth, he might be a great resource, and this affects our food supply.
Ben's primarily an Earth changes and space weather information provider, and his website, they said, is suspiciousobserver.org BUT AT THAT LINK I found a dead website so here's what I got as a link for the website ... www.suspicious0bserverscollective.org/
The sun and the whole solar system has changes, the Earth has less than the others. The first thing that comes to people's mind is that then our pollution must not be a problem, but he encourages us to remember what we know about environmental science and pollution and think of all the factors.
Every week he does an update on the GMO issues at his website.
Ben related that he worked as a "due diligence analyst" (research rat/expert) for an investment company previously. Mining opportunities, and biomemedic pharmaceutical was something he learned about there. Things that seek to work with the body using a peptide that's in the human immune system already rather than something unnatural, so in studying how these peptides work, he could see why some of the more popular genetic modifications are so bad for you and wants to share.
Almost all the invaders in your body (fungi, bacteria, virus) have proteins which have a negative signal/ charge. The peptides have a positive head group on the chemical which seeks out the negative on the proteins on the pathogen (which are bacteria, virus) so they can go destroy them. That's how the peptides find things in our body, a pretty simple concept. Now....
What did they do to make it so they could spray glyphosate on our food, Roundup resistant? The insects will die but the food plant is resistant and produces us food.
They found a bacteria that didn't let this glyphosate into the cell, or if they did get in it would have the ability to get it removed very quickly. In order to make the plants glyphosate resistant,
So they took that gene sequence and put it into our food, so our food expresses this form on the outside, these gate keepers of the cell, if you will.
These are the same negative proteins
In order to make these things glyphosate resistant, these same outer cell ________ these are inserted into the food. Our food then expresses , except now it's in our food.
What does this do to us? It's a cascading effect. The negative signalers stimulate the immune system. Your immune system is good in that it can help fight disease, but it's not healthy to have your immune system stimulated, particularly if you're unwell. It's stress on your organs ... skin, brain too, not just those in your midsection. So out come the positively charged peptides lookign for this invader. Even the phospholipids that make up the outside of the cells, impart a negative charge to it, but that's not the case with our food. Our food is what they like to say the membrane is situation with a postiive/neg/pos/neg ...
Looking at it from afar, the entire cell look electrically neutrally charged because the cell has small negative / positive/ negative..... All they can do is seek out the negative signal but they can't find it, because whenever it gets close to it, it appears 'neutral' instead of being able to find that negative charge, and now our peptides are flowing seeking these negative invaders.
The next most negative thing in the body is our red blood cells. So eventually they'll attack the RBC if they don't find something to attack. But it cascades further.
When the red blood cells break open, the peptides kill invaders by breaking open the cells --- so if the things inside a red blood cell gets out into the blood stream, they cause 'cytotoxicity' and that causes further stress on the body, further immune system dysfunction, and slowly, as time goes on, more and more, you get more and more of that in the body. So the FDA's six month or a year or two years' testing protocol wouldn't see the damage, it might even be more than one generation to affect the DNA system.
It's the positive / negative signalers in our immune system that set it off ... it's those same invaders that we've hidden inside our food in the case of GMO foods which can make us sick for years on end. Our bodies have no idea what to do with them. It will do this to you if every molecule of glyphosate is removed, this is the genetically modified portion of the double edged sword.
That (above) is SEPARATE from the glyphosate. It's about how we made the food via the GMO itself a poison. If it has no chemical on it, all the pesticide is washed off, the GMO will still do this to you. So it's TWO SEPARATE ISSUES.
Patrick asks if it's more the glyphosate than the GMO, but 'you're saying 'no, it's both'. Ben says glyphosate is a carcinogen, it causes cancer, and just then he dropped from Skype it is later revealed. He also said he wished it was the first time he had been on an interview talking about Monsanto's products and it was interrupted but that occurs often. It took a while for Patrick to get back to him which was frustrating to me when listening to the interview multiple times to 'get this down' in my mind, and so I decided to simply take the time and transcribe it when I had the opportunity, here on a topic at Lumigrate. They end up seeing Patrick's dyslexia in action because they reach a man named George when calling Ben's number so then he tried AGAIN and got Ben that time. Then the phone connection wasn't great but they ended up rolling and it was fine to my ears.
Patrick then asks him where he learned all this, and he said it was this biomemedic compound which was modeled after these peptides, and it was his job to understand how the peptides and interplay worked, and then he casually read something about the genetic modification to make plants resistant to Roundup. This was a gene modification for them to be sprayed.... membrane proteins had to be involved, and so he looked and they had
... our immune system just can't find them.
How this builds on itself over time, Patrick said, has to be difficult to study. This is so far beyond anything that they test for. Let's be perfectly honest, some people eat processed and nonorganic foods all the time. When a gun is shot at you it doesn't mean that it's going to go through you. Every person could react differently; but with all the people in the US who have some sort of problem with health is so massive.
One of the reasons
they're good at when space energy prediction,
End of April he created an enhanced quake watch and the morning of April 24th, and that night the Nepal disaster occurred, which killed 8,000 people. How many factors were going on with that, so how can you attribute the cause? It's similar with GMO and glyphosate and processed foods and our love of alcohol and tobacco, it's a combination.
They bring it into the conversation about babies being on drugs for their brains, teens, children, because Patrick had initially said that it was people 30 or over that had rampant unwellness.
Unless you're having to study these interactions as he did to understand the opportunity of what he was being paid to research in the past, he'd not have been able to learn what he just related. "There'd be no way to figure it out and there's no way to test for it either."
On Facebook he is Ben Davidson, his YouTube channel is findable googling it with 'suspicious observers'.
So then Patrick wanted to talk about the weather, related to sunspots and how that affects the weather.
Two major thigns happening now, both a natural cycle of Mother Nature, and they're occurring right about now.
First things first, the Sun correlating with Earth temperatures is much more of a tie than with human pollution. The late 1800s, and from that time to now, CO2 has gone up as did temperatures UNTIL the global warming pause occurred about 20 years ago. We've had significant heat events, but we've had more cold events. More people die from cold events than any other natural disaster almost every year. We are constantly breaking cold records, not just the highs.
Georgia for example -- more snowfalls in the last two winters than the previous 30 years combined. He won't say the Earth is cooling, but there is a plateua
400 years ago we were capping off the 'little ice age'. We were at the Grand Solar Minumum. The maximum was in the 1970s to 1990s and maybe a bit before that, exactly during 'global warming'. Despite that CO2 is going up, etc., and the sun has turned back toward a grand minimum. So this transition from the strongest solar activity in 400 years to a 'snooze' coincided with the pause that we had in global warming. The sun started trailing off with activity, there has been no more activity (keeping in mind the delay time or lag time). There is a better correlation between the sun and the global temperature.
Until you start to look at what NASA and the European Space Agency is saying, for example, this activity change in the sun is way more than we are seeing on Earth. Venus' winds has sped up and the rotation speed has changed more than on Earth. Other planets he discusses as well, such as Jupiter's radio emission changed, Saturn had a super storm -- it has a 30 year orbit around the sun -- except it just arrived 10 years early, lasted 2x as long. Uranus is having strongest storms too. Our entire solar system is changing, and the other planets are changing more than Earth. Saturn's rotation speed is changing too. These are all recent changes.
People in the audience when he speaks publicly show him what 'trained monkeys' we have become because someone in the audience will ask how our pollution gets out to the other planets in our solar system to affect them. Ben then provided this quote: The truth is first ridiculed, then violently opposed, and then accepted as self-evidence.
A question is asked about the strange sound videos on YouTube, and there are a lot of hoaxing videos. There is background noise of the planet too.
Planetary alignment next week and the Jade Helm military exercises were asked about. When there's this much information about something it's not what you need to be concerned about, and when there
On social media there are a couple of people talking about May 28th having an alignment of Earth and other planets ... Ben said it's actually on the 30th that the alignment will occur, it happens a couple of times a year. There are a couple of folks that make Earthquake predictions and they make a lot of them and then hope to have things occur which will help their following, Ben says.
Warmer days are going to be a couple of degrees warmer, the floods will be worse, the cold waves with the polar vortex will make it so the winters get worse and worse. Ice everywhere, no driving to the store, no way to get help. They've shut down Atlanta because of these polar vortexes driving the frigid weather down south.
This coming winter, it's going to affect Europe more than the US but after that it'll be hitting Texas where Patrick. Climate extremes... 90 degrees two days ago and now 40s today where Ben is. The wettest May in Texas; all the rain records are falling right now. He said there'll be one more round of rain after this one that Texas (and much of the west) was having, and then it'll be done.
He's eyeing the SE part of the Rockies as a place to move to, Colorado into New Mexico, and he likes areas around Sedona except it's too expensive for a scientists salary. Patrick asks about elevation. Ben thinks it might be a big event like a major tilt and the equator will change and
cosmic coincidence is the 400
the other is the thousands and thousands of years magnetic cycle and we think that is resetting now. Magnetic reversal is real and unfortunate that the pole shift got such poor treatment by Hollywood and mainstream mind benders such as those who use the 'conspiracy theory' term.
magnetic reversal dot org is a good source he says.
We have to be careful to recognize that information is kept from us, but to not think that everyone and every agency is trying to keep information from us. The majority of comets and asteroids are discovered by individuals and they cannot lie to us. 90% of what NASA puts out he doesn't rely on, but the other % he can find that being verified by other sources in the world.
Do you think that every doctor is part of the conspiracy that the medical system is generally doing? With the new truth laid in front of you, we've been inclined to then get sucked into many things, and many out there are trying to make us look foolish by what we say we follow.
Patrick brings up something Mr Obama said recently about anyone being against the information about global warming that they're basically a national threat. Then Ben said something about the puppets and what they say. I really like the way the people heard on this site overall cover that aspect. Very matter of fact and then let's get back to what we are wanting to learn.
CO2 can be heating in the lower atmosphere but up higher is one of the more efficient thermospherent coolants. From 1880 up to now, temperatures were going up gradually in step with rises in CO2, then CO2 shot up after the industrial revolution and by the 1880s until the global warming pause the lines diverged and no longer were so close.
If they create too many clouds with geoengineering, CO2
Earth Changes Media and Mitch Batros is someone Ben is collaborating with, that was how PAtrick connected with Ben. MagneticReversal dot org..
The north pole is now in Siberia.
South is coming up in the Indian Ocean.
The protection we receive, our magnetic shell, is weakened. So energy from the galaxy, etc., is less shielded. The magnetosphere is studied and the pole shift is midway it is thought, from the latest information. It can shift in as little as 80 years and we're 100 years into this shift at this time. The poles could end up shifting back the way they were coming from, nobody has a crystal ball he says. All of the factors suggesting that we'll continue on the direction we're going, we only have decades at the most and more likely years until this happens.
How we pigeonhole things doesn't help us. The sun appears to only decrease it's activity in Earth's direction during the solar quiet (aka grand minimum). We can see it firing off in the other directions. Why doesn't the sun want to fire in Earth's direction? He has no answer .....
Patrick said: If we take the position that all souls in the solar system and all consciousness, and we're all connected, then we're creating this whole thing. Circumventing hours of homework and thinking, Ben says this statement just did. Vacuum energy is essentially the force that is in Star Wars, which Ben brings up. Think of how bad news or laughter can rub off on you, these are energies interacting with one another. Princeton University tracked brainwaves all over the world... holidays, catastrophies, and they could track human consciousness. They saw a cohesion of global consciousness and were confused by it, but it didn't tie to any news or holiday event. Five hours later the first plane was seen hitting the World Trade Center, and then they saw it end at the same time that the last event of the 9/11 event occurred.
Seaweed and bromine and the oceans were brought up by Patrick. Ben didn't know about bromine he said. He said he wants clean water, he wants clean air, but that's not his focus. He wants to get the 'boxing gloves' out and talk about HAARP at the next interview.
When you sign up and become a member at suspicious observer dot org, you'll get to click on the premium tab, and they have episodes of 'deeper looks'. Every Saturday they do a podcast and they call it 'flyon the wall', and there are some original things --- everything that is not part of the free daily show, which is five minute overviews. June 1 when they partner with Earth Changes Media, it will be $30 for a year, the price lock to get in before that it'll be $20/year forever. And they hopped off with that.
The link to the topic at the OneRadioNetwork website is oneradionetwork.com/environment/ben-davidson-pole-shift-climate-change-natural-disasters-how-the-sun-is-changing-the-earth-and-solar-system-may-21-2015/ A topic from this site when I Searched there on GMO, which is Ben Davidson's written, prepared version of what he had related here to reinforce what I provided, above:
For more than a year I did extensive study on the antimicrobial peptide mimic, CSA-13; it is a synthetic biomimetic compound that is active in the body much like ll-37.
CSA-13 has a strongly cationic (positively charged) head-group and a hydrophobic tail, but to make a long-story short: it is electrically attracted to the anionic (negatively charged) expression of pathogen membranes, whether that is the LTA, LPS, or the lipid bilayer of the membrane itself.
Once CSA-13 is attached, the hydrophobic tail inserts itself into the cell causing blebbing, apoptosis and cell death. MRSA, drug-resistant pseudomonas, and even multiple myeloma cells are utterly destroyed by this compound. It was my responsibility to understand, research, and characterize the membrane depolarization mechanisms of the compound.
Those negatively charged outer portions of the pathogens are what trigger the human immune response. The immune system is necessary in that can help us 'get better,' but it is not exactly 'healthy' to have this immune response triggered.
When the immune response is triggered, it is stressful to nearly every organ of the body. If the resistance to Round-Up is as previously described, then there is the possibility that these specific GM foods are subtle triggers of the human immune system; causing inflammation and potentially worse, unforeseen consequences...
I'll assume the professionals have made the mental leap already, so, let me spell it out for everyone else: not only are Round-Up resistant crops potential stressors for the body in small amounts, bit by bit over time, but when they trigger the immune response, it causes our peptides to go on the offensive; looking to kill.
The problem is that food cells express zwitterionic membranes (positive-negative-positive-negative) and as a whole, appear electrically neutral. This means that our peptides won't be able to find them, they won't have any 'bad' cells to attack, so, what is left? Red blood cells.
From there, you get into cytotoxic elements of the cell interiors that are perfectly fine inside the cell, but bad news if allowed to float freely in the bloodstream.
Round-Up resistant crops passed regulation on what is basically a "substantial equivalent" basis from the FDA. This was during Reagan's deregulation push, and the process is laughably less rigorous than EVERY standard through which drugs and devices are now forced to pass.
This is an unacceptable risk given the subject matter: food. It is also a legitimate concern given basic microbiology. This letter does not definitively prove anything, but it is imperative that further studies are conducted.
This author recommends a gene array analyses to ascertain all the subtle effects of the resistant expression of those foods, there are number of laboratories that can easily perform one; it may be as simple as that.
- Ben Davidson, JD
About Glyphosate:
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Garimella et al. 'Conformation of the phosphate D-alanine zwitterion in bacterial teichoic acid from nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy.' Biochemistry, October 2009.
Glukhov et al. 'Basis for Selectivity of Cationic Antimicrobial Peptides for Bacterial Versus Mammalian Membranes.' J Biol Chem, October 2005.
Kim J. (July 1991) 'Binding of peptides with basic residues to membranes containing acidic phospholipids.' Biophys J. 60 (1): 135-48.
Matsuzaki et al. 'Molecular Basis for Membrane Selectivity of an Antimicrobial Peptide, magainin 2.' Biochemistry, March 1995.
Nan et al. 'Prokaryotic selectivity and LPS-netralizing activity of short antimicrobial peptides designed from the human antimicrobial peptide LL-37.' Peptides. June 2012.
Vance, DE. 'Biochemistry of Lipids, Lipoproteins and Membranes.' Elsevier. pp. 80-81. ISBN 0-444-89321-0.
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About
It may seem implausible that glyphosate could be toxic to humans, given the fact that government regulators appear nonchalant about steadily increasing residue limits, and that the levels in food and water are rarely monitored by government agencies, presumably due to lack of concern. However, a paper by Antoniou et al.[12] provided a scathing indictment of the European regulatory process regarding glyphosate's toxicity, focusing on potential teratogenic effects. They identified several key factors leading to a tendency to overlook potential toxic effects. These include using animal studies that are too short or have too few animals to achieve statistical significance, disregarding in vitro studies or studies with exposures that are higher than what is expected to be realistically present in food, and discarding studies that examine the effects of glyphosate formulations rather than pure glyphosate, even though formulations are a more realistic model of the natural setting and are often orders of magnitude more toxic than the active ingredient in pesticides.[189] Regulators also seemed unaware that chemicals that act as endocrine disruptors (such as glyphosate[108]) often have an inverted dose–response relationship, wherein very low doses can have more acute effects than higher doses. Teratogenic effects have been demonstrated in human cell lines.[212] An in vitro study showed that glyphosate in parts per trillion can induce human breast cancer cell proliferation.[289]
Adjuvants in pesticides are synergistically toxic with the active ingredient. Mesnage et al.[189] showed that Roundup® was 125 times more toxic than glyphosate by itself. These authors wrote: “Despite its relatively benign reputation, Roundup® was among the most toxic herbicides and insecticides tested.”[189]
The industry dictates that 3 months is a sufficiently long time to test for toxicity in rodent studies, and as a consequence none of the industry studies have run for longer than 3 months. The only study we are aware of that was a realistic assessment of the long-term effects of GM Roundup®-Ready corn and soy feed on mammals was the study by Séralini et al. that examined the effects on rats fed these foods for their entire life span.[261] This study showed increased risk to mammary tumors in females, as well as kidney and liver damage in the males, and a shortened lifespan in both females and males. These effects occurred both in response to Roundup and to the GM food alone. These effects only began to be apparent after 4 months.
There are multiple pathways by which glyphosate could lead to pathology.[248] A major consideration is that our gut bacteria do have the shikimate pathway, and that we depend upon this pathway in our gut bacteria as well as in plants to supply us with the essential aromatic amino acids, tryptophan, tyrosine, and phenylalanine. Methionine, an essential sulfur-containing amino acid, and glycine, are also negatively impacted by glyphosate. Furthermore, many other biologically active molecules, including serotonin, melatonin, melanin, epinephrine, dopamine, thyroid hormone, folate, coenzyme Q10, vitamin K, and vitamin E, depend on the shikimate pathway metabolites as precursors. Gut bacteria and plants use exclusively the shikimate pathway to produce these amino acids. In part because of shikimate pathway disruption, our gut bacteria are harmed by glyphosate, as evidenced by the fact that it has been patented as an antimicrobial agent.[298]
Metal chelation and inactivation of cytochrome P450 (CYP) enzymes (which contain heme) play important roles in the adverse effects of glyphosate on humans. A recent study on rats showed that both males and females exposed to Roundup® had 50% reduction in hepatic CYP enzyme levels compared with controls.[156] CYP enzyme dysfunction impairs the liver's ability to detoxify xenobiotics. A large number of chemicals have been identified as being porphyrinogenic.[77] Rossignol et al.[242] have reviewed the evidence for environmental toxicant exposure as a causative factor in autism, and they referenced several studies showing that urinary excretion of porphyrin precursors to heme is found in association with autism, suggesting impaired heme synthesis. Impaired biliary excretion leads to increased excretion of heme precursors in the urine, a biomarker of multiple chemical sensitivity syndrome.[77] We later discuss the ability of glyphosate to disrupt bile homeostasis, which we believe is a major source of its toxic effects on humans.
Glyphosate is a likely cause of the recent epidemic in celiac disease.[249] Glyphosate residues are found in wheat due to the increasingly widespread practice of staging and desiccation of wheat right before harvest. Many of the pathologies associated with celiac disease can be explained by disruption of CYP enzymes.[156] Celiac patients have a shortened life span, mainly due to an increased risk to cancer, most especially non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, which has also been linked to glyphosate.[85,253] Celiac disease trends over time match well with the increase in glyphosate usage on wheat crops.
Glyphosate is also neurotoxic.[59] Its mammalian metabolism yields two products: Aminomethylphosphonic acid (AMPA) and glyoxylate, with AMPA being at least as toxic as glyphosate. Glyoxylate is a highly reactive glycating agent, which will disrupt the function of multiple proteins in cells that are exposed.[90] Glycation has been directly implicated in Parkinson's disease (PD).[57] Glyphosate has been detected in the brains of malformed piglets.[155] In a report produced by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), over 36% of 271 incidences involving acute glyphosate poisoning involved neurological symptoms, indicative of glyphosate toxicity in the brain and nervous system.[122]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4392553/
Live and Learn. Learn and Live Better! is my motto. I'm Mardy Ross, and I founded Lumigrate in 2008 after a career as an occupational therapist with a background in health education and environmental research program administration. Today I function as the desk clerk for short questions people have, as well as 'concierge' services offered for those who want a thorough exploration of their health history and direction to resources likely to progress their health according to their goals. Contact Us comes to me, so please do if you have questions or comments. Lumigrate is "Lighting the Path to Health and Well-Being" for increasing numbers of people. Follow us on social networking sites such as: Twitter: http://twitter.com/lumigrate and Facebook. (There is my personal page and several Lumigrate pages. For those interested in "groovy" local education and networking for those uniquely talented LumiGRATE experts located in my own back yard, "LumiGRATE Groove of the Grand Valley" is a Facebook page to join. (Many who have joined are beyond our area but like to see the Groovy information! We not only have FUN, we are learning about other providers we can be referring patients to and 'wearing a groove' to each other's doors -- or websites/home offices!) By covering some of the things we do, including case examples, it reinforces the concepts at Lumigrate.com as well as making YOU feel that you're part of a community. Which you ARE at Lumigrate!