I-522 | Part 3 in a Series on the Washington State Initiative for GMO Labeling

GMO
Myths and half-truths

HEALTH RISKS ARE A MATTER OF UNCERTAINTY AND
ONGOING SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY

Devon G. Peña | Seattle, WA | October 15, 2013

My simple rule for food safety is: If you are unsure then don’t eat it. The logic
behind this rule is sometimes called the “Precautionary Principle” – I will
call it P² – and its intent is to place due value on the protection
of public health and the environment. This ethical standard that has been
widely adopted by many scientists, and public health agencies and
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) including many who are concerned with the
uncertainty surrounding the study of the risks of GMO foods.

The question is: Are we as a society willing to
commit to the side of safety until the scientific uncertainties about GMO food
safety are resolved?

The question is: Are we as a society willing to commit to the side
of safety until the scientific uncertainties about GMO food safety are
resolved? Or, will we risk sacrificing our health and that of future
generations so that private enterprises can make money? Obviously, we are
currently stuck with GMO foods on the market and so this means there are at
least some scientists and technologists – including the engineers who ‘apply’
scientific principles to the design and deployment of actual material systems,
for e.g., agricultural production processes – do not agree with the P².

Precaution – and labeling is a simple part of this ideal – is a
moderate proposal. It simply asks that consumers be allowed to express their
support for the values of public health and environmental protection until we
resolve the scientific uncertainty surrounding the safety of GMO food.

There are three major issues affecting the scientific uncertainty on
GMO food safety: Who has done the research? Who funded it?  Was the methodology reliable?  There is a fourth factor contributing to the
uncertainty: There is a significant scientific view that most of the earlier
safety studies were unwisely limited to short-term feeding trials of less than
6 weeks. This is now widely viewed as a serious flaw in the research design
resulting in completely unreliable results. Longer-term feeding trials are
needed to be sure and there are also numerous cumulative effects that have to
be considered. As a result, there are now some more recent studies based on longer-term
feeding trials (6 months to 1-2 years) and the findings indicate GMO foods are actually
associated with various pathologies including tumors and organ failures.

The fact remains: Much of the GMO food safety research mentioned by
the corporate and agribusiness opponents of I-522 is the work of
corporate-affiliated scientists who have used flawed methodology including the
short duration of the feeding – most GMO food safety research involves very
short-term experiments with 4 to 6-week long feeding trials being a recent
norm.

Sadly, the willingness for some scientists to allow themselves to
be used as pawns of the ‘games of truth’ used by corporate interests to
systematically distort the public’s perceptions of GMO food safety research.
This obscures or affects the ability for people to get information pertaining
to legitimate scientific concerns and ethical principles. This scientific
ambiguity offers a huge political opening for the biotechnology industry and
its allies in corporate monoculture farming, food transportation, logistics,
and mass wholesale and retail grocery industries. Instead of acknowledging the
existence of scientific uncertainty on GMO food safety, the interests aligned
with biotechnology corporations want to keep imposing a really radical demand
that allows them to experiment on us without informed consent.

Each consumer, each person, exposed to GMO foods is part of a
long-term experiment conducted without their consent. This radical demand wants
us to authorize private interests to market products as if GMO foods have cleared
some stringent set of scientific testing. This is a distortion of the facts. The
very same corporations that are selling the GMO food products have conducted
most of the safety research. Labeling merely gives the consumer the option of
vetting her choices and thereby giving informed consent until the uncertainties
surrounding the research are settled.

Consumers need to make their choices about
I-522 not just on the basis of what is good for them but with respect and
concern for the millions of workers in the food chain exposed to harmful toxic
substances integral to the production of GMO foods.

Moreover, we need to state a proven fact: Glyphosate herbicide is
dangerous. The detrimental health effects of glyphosate (e.g., Roundup) are
well established (see for e.g., Benachour and Séralini 2009; Friends of the
Earth 2001 for an excellent summary). Numerous studies, since the 1990s, have
proven without a doubt that glyphosate is acutely toxic to farm workers and
wildlife and exposure can cause serious health problems. It must be noted,
further, that the herbicide treatment protocols for Monsanto’s Roundup Ready
lines are requiring farmers to increase
the amount of herbicide they use due to the resistance of weeds to the chemical
spray.

The early promise of the agricultural biotechnology corporations
was that they would use GMOs to make farming more sustainable and less harmful
to the environment. This promise has been thoroughly betrayed. Consumers need
to make their choices about I-522 not just on the basis of what is good for
them but with respect and concern for the millions of workers in the food chain
exposed to harmful toxic substances integral to the production of GMO foods.

Political campaigns typically involve a certain amount of
mudslinging and, usually, a considerable amount of purposeful distortion or
omission of facts. The case of the campaign launched by the well-heeled
opponents of I-522 is no exception. This post is not an attempt to do a reality
or fact check on each and every claim being articulated by both sides. Instead,
I wish to highlight the state of the risk science dealing with the safety of
GMO foods for human consumption.

There are three significant indisputable facts surrounding the
safety of GMO foods:

1. The safety of GMO foods is an unsettled matter and additional
   independent scientific testing is needed.


2. The corporations that produce GMO crops and foods have done most of
   the risk studies used by the FDA and USDA to determine safety. Longer-term
   feeding trials are needed and these must be to be done by independent third
   parties.  The vast interlocking
   relationships between the biotech industry and the regulatory agencies are a
   serious problem that thoroughly compromises existing food safety testing
   protocols.


3. There are some disturbing early warning signs that GMO foods pose
   substantial risks for longer-term human health. This calls for a new focus of
   attention on the cumulative risks of GMO foods.

Given
these facts, reasonable persons could surmise that a sound and justifiable
public policy position would be for the adoption of the P². In
the interests of public health and safety and environmental protection, until
all the relevant evidence has been gathered and the scientific uncertainty is eliminated,
then regulatory law and policy should favor safety over commercial interests.

Ideally,
this means we should ban the commercial production and sales of GMO crops and
foods until all safety and environmental uncertainties have been resolved. A
labeling law will at least allow consumers to make informed decisions based on
their understanding of the uncertainty surrounding the safety of GMO foods.

The
safety of GMO foods remains unsettled

An
honest accounting of the state of the risk science on GMO foods reveals that we
still do not know about much about GMO food safety.  The limited state of the risk science on GMO
foods is due to several factors including two that stand out: First, not enough
research has been conducted; the field is, frankly, still in its infancy.
Second, much of the research that has been conducted has used flawed methods that
undermine the reliability of the data. Despite these limitations and concerns,
the USDA and FDA started approving GMO foods as if the risk science was
definitive and reliable – it is neither.

In a comprehensive
review of the risk science on GMOs, Smith (2007) notes how in 2003, there were
a mere 10 peer-reviewed animal feeding studies; by 2007, there were twenty 20
peer-reviewed animal feeding studies with only one human feeding study.

Moreover,
critical assessments of these studies by other scientists concluded that the
research designs were flawed because the duration of all of these studies was
too short. Indeed, one study based its safety conclusions on observations
conducted over a mere 10-14 days (as reported in Pryme and Lembcke 2003). This
is astounding. Recent research suggests the effects of animal-feeding trials do
not appear until 6 weeks longer. In human beings, one can surmise that the
effects will also emerge over the longer term and may actually depend on completely
unknown cumulative and synergistic risk factors (i.e., such as poverty,
historical trauma, etc.).

The
bottom line: Any claims about the safety of GMO foods are less than provisional;
they lack a sound scientific basis at this time to be honestly articulated.
What is the honest truth? We are unsure about the safety of GMO foods but some
of the early indications from limited independent third party testing, based on
sound methods, are not encouraging or reassuring. Even Robert J. Scheuplein,
former director of the FDA’s Office of Special Research Skills, has said that,
“The data fall short of a demonstration of safety.” (quoted in Smith 2007:24)

Credit: Antigmofoods

GMO
industry produces most of the safety studies

Many
people assume that the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have verified the safety of GMO foods by
relying on independent third-party studies. Actually, the truth is that the
biotechnology industry is itself responsible for the conduct of most of the
safety studies. This is the old wolf in charge of the chicken coop problem.

Indeed,
recent research demonstrates that the regulatory agencies and the industries
they are supposed to regulate are thickly intertwined with all sorts of interlocking
relationships. This has led many public health and sustainable agriculture
advocates to observe that the USDA, which is charged with assessing the
environmental impacts of GMO crop technologies, is a subsidiary of Monsanto
since so many former Monsanto officials and staff members are now working
inside the ag agency (see Figure 1 below).

The
industry has used political campaign donations, bribes, charitable donations,
and other means to influence policymakers, elected officials, and regulators. One
particularly revealing example is the case of Monsanto in Indonesia where the
corporation bribed 140 officials to get approval of their GMO cotton (Smith
2007:176).

Moreover,
according to William Freese:

Contrary
to popular opinion, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not regulate GE
foods. Instead, the FDA has a ‘voluntary consultation’ process that allows
biotechnology companies to make all of the important decisions related to
bringing their novel GE crops to market. The company, nut the FDA, decides,
which, if any safety tests to conduct and how they will be performed. The
company, not the FDA, determines which data, if any, are shared with
regulators. (Quoted in Smith 2007:177-78)

Because
many of the health risks associated with GMO foods are unintentional,
unpredictable, and can take years to develop, the FDA voluntary review process
as it currently stands is clearly inadequate for rendering independent
(neutral) assessments of the risks. Even many scientists who support GMO crop
technologies are calling for more stringent and better safety testing (Freedman
2013:81).

Rats from Seralini study. Credit: academicsreview.org

Some
early warning signs

There
are studies based on more rigorous methodologies that are pose serious concerns
about GMO food safety. There is a very wide range of concerns and Smith (2007)
provides a useful summary of the problem areas and research studies. Early
warning signs abound for many issues including:

• Gene
  insertion disrupting plant DNA leading to uncertain variations in successive
  generations.


• Allergenicity
  from proteins introduced into GMO foods.


• Transfer
  of genes to gut bacteria, internal organs, or viruses.


• Increased
  environmental toxins and bioaccumulate toxins in the food chain.


• Herbicide-tolerant
  crops increase herbicide use and residues on foods.


• The
  promoter genes used to produce GMO crops can trigger unpredictable and
  unanticipated changes in plant DNA, which can produce unanticipated human
  health effects.

One of
the first things to remember about GMO crops is that the transgenes used are
highly promiscuous [sic] and unstable, What this means is that their location
on the plant’s DNA can change unpredictably from one generation to the next and
this could have serious environmental and health implications. The problem is, we
just don’t know.

Perhaps
the most controversial study to date is the research by the French scientist,
the molecular biologist Gilles-Eric Séralini. Greenpeace funded some of his earlier
research and it is fascinating how his detractors will point that out while
ignoring the fact that the preponderance of food safety research is funded or,
worst, conducted by the biotech companies themselves.

Séralini’s study was published in September 2012 in the
peer-reviewed journal Food and Chemical
Toxicology. Séralini (2012) and his colleagues found “health effects of a
Roundup-tolerant genetically modified maize “ including the development of
cancerous tumors in male and female rats fed a GMO corn diet with corn from the
Monsanto line of transgenic crops. Specifically, the study found that “Females
developed large mammary tumors almost always more often than and before
controls, the pituitary was the second most disabled organ; the sex hormonal
balance was modified by GMO and Roundup treatments.” They also found organ
damage to kidneys and liver tissues and significant endocrine disrupting
effects. What marks this as an especially significant study was its longer duration
compared to most previous food safety studies: This was a two-year feeding
trial.

The study has been thoroughly criticized as flawed by a wide range
of scientists. However, the fact remains that it was peer-reviewed and found to
be acceptable on methodological grounds. This suggests that it must have had
some scientific merit. So, instead of wringing our hands over the merits of
this particular study, perhaps, the point would be to accept this as a clear indication
that what we really need are more long-duration feeding trials by independent
third parties. In the meantime, acceptance of the Precautionary Principle seems
warranted and the GMO labeling law would allow us as consumers to exercise this
democratic privilege.

Sources
cited

Benachour, Nora and Gilles-Eric Séralini. 2009.
Glyphosate formulations induce apoptosis and necrosis in human umbilical,
embryonic, and placental cells. Chemical
Research in Toxicology 22:1:97-105.

Friends of the Earth 2001 Health and environmental impacts of glyphosate: The implications of
increased use of glyphosate in association with genetically modified crops.  London: Pesticide Action Network-UK.

Freedman, David H. 2013. Are engineered foods
evil? Scientific American 309:3
(September).

Pryme, Ian F. and Rolf Lembcke. 2003. In vivo studies on possible
health consequences of genetically modified food and feed – with particular
regard to ingredients consisting of genetically modified plant materials. Nutrition and Health 17:1:1-8.

Séralini, Giles-Eric, et al. 2012. Long-term toxicity
of a Roundup herbicide and a Roundup-tolerant genetically modified maize. Food and Chemical Toxicology 50:11:4221–4231

Smith, Jeffrey M. 2007. Genetic
roulette: The documented health risks of genetically engineered foods. Fairfield,
IA: Yes! Books.