LS 124 - GMOs: Putting Our Families and Environment at Risk with Dr Sheldon Krimsky

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And now, here's your host, Jason Hartman.

It's my pleasure to welcome Dr. Sheldon Krimsky to the show. He is professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University and Adjunct professor in Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at Tufts University School of Medicine. He's a Fellow at the Hastings center and author of the GMO what you need to know about the food corporations and government agencies putting our families and our environment at risk. Sheldon, welcome. How are you?

Pretty good, thank you.

And I always like to give our listeners a sense of geography. Where are you located today?

Right now I'm sitting in 5th Avenue and 14th street in Manhattan at the new building of the new school where I teach this summer.

Fantastic. So you're in the Big Apple, and maybe we'll talk about apples in so much as they are genetically modified. So tell us a little bit about this social, political, and ethical implications surrounding gmo. There's so much controversy about it, and we've only done maybe one or two shows on it in all the time the show's been running. So let's learn more.

Well, there's a history, a rather interesting history, and it differs in the United States than it does in Europe. The history in the United States.

One could say, began in about 1992, when the federal government decided it was not going to regulate the Food and Drug Administration was not going to regulate genetically modified food. Certainly we're not going to label it, but they really weren't going to require tests. So in other words, if you put a chemical into a food, then you have to have it tested and overseen, but if you put a foreign gene into the food, it's considered substantially equivalent.

When you said they decided they weren't going to require any disclosure or regulate it, what year was that?

1992 was the year that the Food and Drug Administration came out with that. Now, I should also add that the Department of Agriculture does a little bit of oversight. They are interested in whether or not the crop that you that is introduced is going to disturb other crops. So if they have any reason to believe that a genetically Modified crop is going to disturb other crops. They might get involved in it.

That's interesting right there because that's almost like an implicit or explicit vote for the big agriculture lobby, but not for the people. It's interesting. They're concerned about other crops being affected, but they're not concerned about humans being affected. Right.

Well, that's just the way the Department of Agriculture operates. And the Food and Drug Administration is concerned about food and the Department of Agriculture is concerned about agriculture. But the biotech lobby's very strongly convinced the Food and Drug Administration that they didn't need to regulate this. So they established a kind of voluntary regulations. You might say when industry is interested in talking to the Food and Drug Administration, they can talk to them. The Europeans are different. The Europeans require testing for genetically modified crops and food. So we have. That's why the Europeans have been much less. They've been slower at adopting genetically modified plants because they do go through some level of testing according to the European Union.

Right.

I should tell you and the listeners that there's really, in terms of the science, and I really try to focus on what we know about the science. There's three positions on this in the Science. One position, a cluster of articles which says you have nothing to worry about, this stuff is safe. As long as you know where the gene came from and where it's going into, there's no problem and there's no reason to test it. Then there's a second group that says, no, no, no, no, you can't predict where what's going to happen in the food when you put the foreign gene in. You must test it. That's the only way you can be sure that you're not going to get toxins, that you're not going to get.

Substances that we might be allergic to, allergens. So there's no way out. You have to test it. And most of these substances have not been tested, but we can't be sure that they're safe or unsafe unless we test it. Then there's a third group, a smaller group, and that group says, we have already tested some of these and we have found them harmful to animals and animal testing. Now it's a smaller group, but you won't find the mainstream in society listening to this group at all. And on occasion when somebody in this third group appears, they get vilified being producing junk science or bad science, etc. So that's the state of what's happening in the science on this. Yeah.

Okay. So of those three groups, where does Someone like, say a Ralph Nader stand on there.

I think Ralph Nader reads deeply into things of this nature and he knows that there's a deeper literature than what one finds in the Wall Street Journal. He's somewhere between group two and group three. He knows that they're not testing it. He thinks that there should be labels. And he knows that corporations are, they're the actors in this situation. They're shaping what policies are taking on.

As they, their lobbyists and PR firms and polling companies usually do. Right.

What are we to make of the dozen or so, dozen or so tests that have been done on animals which appear to make the GMO crops look more dangerous than they appear anywhere else?

Okay, so that's what I want to ask you about. So of that third group that you mentioned a moment ago, they say they have noticed some harm in animals consuming GMO products, GMO food. What harm have they noticed? What have these experiments yielded?

Okay, they've yielded some organ damage, they've yielded some higher rates of tumorigenicity, tumors in animals.

There's a number of claims that are made in the scientific literature and these results are generally published in refereed journals, science journals. And the authors at the end will say these, you know, we advocate for replication of these results. We don't claim that this is the end all and be all of this testing, but this is a warning sign that there could be some problems here. And we're creating these substances to feed animals and they're feeding animals with it and they're finding that there are some problems. Now some of the problems may be with the pesticides that are used in conjunction with the seeds. What we've done with some of these, of course, is that we've introduced the pesticide proteins into the seed instead of spraying the pesticide on the plant. The pesticide is now inside the genetics of the plant. So there could be problems with that, there could be problems with the herbicides that they use. Round ready Roundup. And a lot of these investigators, dozen or so that have reported this, are basically raising questions at this point. And in one case, the investigator from France who did the study in 2012, it was published in a very respectable English language journal, a journal in the United States that is published by Elsevier as a distinguished publisher of scientific journals. And he was attacked bitterly for the results that he produced in this particular study. And he used rats for this particular study. And first his publishers supported him and said, well, you know.

He was put through the peer review process like anyone else and he had to revise and et cetera, et cetera. But then the criticisms kept coming in ways that we generally don't see in science. Usually if there's criticism, then somebody will write another article or somebody will write a commentary in the next issue. This was at a different level. After about a year and a half, the journal editors decided to retract the paper.

Now, I study the ethics of science, and I have never seen a case or a paper has been retracted. Not because there was anything false or that there was misconduct.

Obviously there was some undue influence. Right.

Well, one could assume that the. The. The editors said they're retracting the paper because the results are not definitive.

Interesting. Tell us about what's going on in Vermont. They've got a new GMO law, right?

Yes, they do. And what is that law? The labeling that. They have a labeling law. Connecticut is past the labeling rule, but it depends upon the passage of other New England states. They don't want to be the only one to have.

Right. They don't want to be the. They don't want to be the leaders, you know?

Yeah.

Or they don't want their farmers to be at some kind of a disadvantage or something like that.

Anyway, the.

Vermont is. As I understand it, Vermont has either been threatened at a lawsuit or is. There's a lawsuit engaged with the state of Vermont because of this.

Who would sue them?

Well, the large companies that would lose.

So it'd be like Archer Daniel Midland or something like that.

Or Monsanto.

Yeah, Monsanto. Yeah. I should have said Monsanto. They're always at the forefront of this kind of stuff. Okay. With that labeling law in Vermont, I mean, what does it say? Does it just say this product contains genetically modified organisms, or does it say something else? Is it like a nutrition label saying, you know, here's the blend, you've got some fish DNA in your peanut butter, and you've got some.

No, I suspect. Although I haven't seen the exact wording of the law, but it couldn't be too complicated. It would have to be something that differentiates the genetically modified corn or the genetically modified soybean from those products that are not genetically. That haven't been genetically altered.

I'm just wondering the whole.

Or it's just a. I call the food products. I call them gauf g a u f Genetically adulterated, unlabeled food.

That's a good anacrom. Yeah. Galf. Okay. I like it.

And that's pretty much what the consumers are getting. They're getting genetic alterations, specifically by the scientists and engineers and unlabeled food. So right now, the only reasonable assurance we can have that we don't get genetically modified food is if we buy organic, because the organic label in the United States precludes genetically modified food as well as irradiated food. So if people were willing to spend the extra cost for organic, then there's some relative assurance. I say relative because nothing is absolutely. That they wouldn't be getting genetically modified food.

Sure.

I didn't know that that applied to organic, so that's great to know. But, you know, I want to ask you, Sheldon, who really controls the power structure of our food production? I mean, I recently saw an article that said pretty much everything we consume is from one of about 10 large corporations.

In terms of food, there's a pretty large hierarchy, unless you buy local and local farms. But the food processors are very concentrated. A few major corporations are processing all the food, and even the distributors are fairly concentrated. But the seed producers are probably the most concentrated. Because think of 90% though. Yeah, 80 or 90% of the corn and the soybean coming from one company with one patent. That's a lot of concentrated power.

There's also regulatory power in addition to that. And in a balanced society, you would have a fair balance between.

The power of the producers and the power of the evaluators. I think what's happened is we've created a blend that the people producing are also the ones doing the evaluation. So where are these.

That's the fox watching the hen house. So that's not.

Well, yeah, or I'd like to say the sector boundaries have just overlapped. And that's something we have to be prepared to watch very carefully in this country. We don't want Boeing. They may make great planes, but we don't want them to be responsible for evaluating the safety of the planes. We don't want GM to be the sole evaluator of the safety of their cars. We need to have independent people doing this who are not simply paid by the corporations. That's not the case with GMOs right now in the United States.

Not yet. Hopefully, that change. So at least there's disclosure, if that, you know, at the very least now. And the debate can rage on and on about whether they're harmful or not. And, you know, we'll let some years go by and of course, we'll, yeah, you know, see a bunch of surprise new cancers, weird things. The listeners.

Listeners should understand that sometimes it takes between 25 and 50 years to discover that something is harmful. And we have cases of DDT, we have cases of PCBs, we have cases of asbestos. So the fact that we were exposed to lead 30 years before we began to realize they were dangerous, that's not a good reason to say it was safe.

Well, and of course, then there's the tobacco industry, which you didn't even.

Well, yes.

You know, and just kind of wrapping up here, I want to ask you one sort of really broad, simple question. And we're kind of going back. Maybe this should have been at the beginning of the interview. I remember in 8th grade science class and biology classes throughout my career as a student, where we just heard about those famous old experiments of genetic experiments about, you know, changing the color of the roses by blending roses.

Yeah.

And things like that that everybody probably learned is listening here. And so what's wrong with gmo? I mean, is it just that kind of thing? You know, some people want to slough this off and dismiss it, saying that this is something that's been going on for a long, long time. It's no big deal. And this is different than that, right?

I mean, no, it's. It is different. I mean, it's a myth to say that.

Well, okay. I mean, when you, when you create a hybrid crop, you combine two crops of the same species, it's as different as procreating between humans and humans procreating with an animal. You know, it's as different as mixing our DNA with a cow's DNA to produce.

Some animal, as it is to mix the same DNA of the same species.

You're making hybrids, you're making hybrid crops crop. You know, like, what's it, what, what is it mixed with? Is it really the DNA of a. Of, say, a fish and corn or, you know, what. How radical is it?

Well, right now, what it is is a toxin from a bacterium that's put into the genetics of the seed. So you have. You have a gene that makes a toxin that would ordinarily appear in a bacterium and is coming into the seed. And there's no natural way for that to happen. It has to be done by human hands. It has to be done by scientists. And then there's also a sequence of chemicals, a gene that codes for sequence of chemicals which disarms an herbicide so that these are not natural things that we would ordinarily be consuming.

They couldn't happen in nature anyway without.

And if they ever did, it would be at such a low probability and a low rate that it would be of insignificance. So here we're talking about putting in every seed a toxin that comes out of a bacterium and just multiplying it billions and billions of times. Every time you know you're exposed to the seed, you're exposed to this particular protein that is a toxin to these insects. And so these are the. So that's point number one. Point number two is when you put in a foreign gene into a seed, into a plant genome, it's not like a Lego system. You don't just put it in and get what you think you're going to get. It disturbs the other genes in the system. It can interfere with the other genes. It can create new proteins that you're not aware of. So you really need to know what other factors are produced when you put that foreign gene in.

Sure. Yeah. This really is playing God. That's amazing. Tell people where they can get their book. And do you have your own website where people can get more information?

First, I should say that the Council for Responsible Genetics has a website and it's very informative and it's totally free. And the Gene Watch, which is produced every two months, is free. And there's just a great resource for everyone. And that's at www.councilforresponsiblegenetics.org counsel for responsible genetics, responsiblegenetics.org my own website. The best way to get to it is just to Google my name and the first thing will come up will be my personal website with things that I've written about this issue as well as other issues. Just have to Google Sheldon Kremsky. And the first thing that comes up in the Google search will be my Tufts website. And you can just navigate through that if you'd like.

Fantastic. And I just want to. And the book, of course, is available in all the usual places, including Amazon.com.

Yes, Barnes and Nobles, and can get it directly from the publisher, Skyhorse Press.

And the title again is the GMO what you need to know about the food corporations and government agencies putting our families in our environment at risk. Dr. Sheldon Krymsky, thank you so much for joining us today.

You're very welcome.

Thank you so much for listening. Be sure to check out hartmanmedia.com for appropriate disclaimers and terms of service. Remember that guest opinions are their own and if you require specific legal or tax advice or advice in any other specialized area, please consult an appropriate professional. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode.