S5:E4 - Genetically Modified Food and the Implications

Hey, hey folks, it's Mark Ottobre here and welcome to the show that punches you in the face with information, but in a good way. It is The Wolf's Den, proudly brought to you by Enterprise Fitness. And I just want to welcome to the show, this show, this particular episode that you're listening to was with Bob Phelps from Gene Ethics. It is a fantastic fantastic episode. I've been wanting to do an episode like this for years.

I haven't found— I never—

I didn't know the right person to speak to, and I found it in Bob Phelps. So I was so excited to speak to Bob about gene research and gene ethics and genetically modified food, and particularly as it relates to Australia. So we do get into a little bit of politics surrounding food, and we do go back and forth, but don't worry folks, it is a COVID-free zone. There's no COVID here. We don't talk about COVID We just simply talk about genetically modified foods and as it relates to the politics. So you can definitely enjoy the conversation and I hope you do enjoy the conversation. And before we do cross and get into it, folks, this episode is brought to you by Enterprise Fitness. Enterprise Fitness is my personal training studio. I've been a personal trainer since 2006 and I love personal training.

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Welcome to today's show. Today's show is going to be an unbelievable one. I've been looking for an expert on gene research, genetically modified crops, for quite some time. There is Jeffrey Smith from the US who is from the responsibletechnology.org, but obviously a lot of, I suppose, gene research gets exposed in the US and overseas. And there's no— I haven't found until recently, obviously, an expert within Australia who I can ask questions to and get the lowdown of what is happening in Australia, because obviously genetically modified food is a big topic and we want to be talking about it of home soil, what's happening here in Australia with genetically modified food, from GM crops to what's growing, exporting, importing. Finally, I found that expert in Bob Phelps. Who is from Gene Ethics. And Bob, welcome to the show. I'm very much looking forward to getting into the topic today on genetically modified food and also genetically modified humans, which I didn't know anything about. So how are you on this marvelous Monday, not Monday, Melbourne rather, marvelous Melbourne morning?

Going well here, thanks Mark. And it's great to talk to you.

Yeah, all right. So I thought we could just start off, tell me a little bit about like, Like, how did you get into this area? Because it is, I suppose, a lot of people, when you talk about genetically modified food, you know, people are a little bit like, what, what's that? So how did you fall into this area of research?

I was working at the Australian Conservation Foundation in 1988. We decided that there was a need for a campaign about genetic manipulation of crops and foods. And as a result of that, we founded Gene Ethics. We were under the umbrella of the Conservation Foundation for a number of years, but since 2003, we've been independent. And what's—

what is Gene Ethics?

Well, Gene Ethics is a network of citizens who are concerned, as you are, about the farming and food that involves the genetic manipulation of crops, of animals and microorganisms that are released to our environment on the pretext that these are needed to feed the people of the world. But as we'll see in the discussion, this has really been particularly Monsanto, the US company's propaganda about the need for its technology to be deployed worldwide. And the technology has failed to do that over the last 30 years. It's remained mainly in North and South America. It's remained mainly in a few commodities: soybean, corn, canola, and cotton. And it's been used mainly for the production of biofuels to drive cars and for animal feed, particularly feeding animals in feedlots in North America.

Yeah, so if I can just kind of like set up kind of what I see with gene— and correct me on any of this if I'm wrong— but basically genetically modified food, um, originally, from understanding, like, it's been done for centuries, right? Well, not genetically modified food, genetically modified crops, in the sense that, you know, farmers would always select for the, the most robust, um, you know, crop, whether it was, was corn. But they do it over, you know, 3 generations or generations. They would look for the best crop and essentially try and plant those seeds and then cross pollinate different, different crops. And then this, this has kind of been an organic thing that's happened in nature that you can't— I mean, there's obviously limitations, you know, you can't get a pig to mate with a spider, for example. I think one of the things was a silkworm, rather, the silkworm to mate with a spider. That's just obviously not going to work. But I believe one of the experiments they try to do genetically modified technology was to put the silkworm's genes into a spider so the spider would spin silk-like webbing for basically, I think, production of more silk, essentially. But obviously that's not going to happen in nature. So from what my understanding is, that people who argue for genetically modified crops, they use a kind of a straw man argument, I think it is, which is essentially, you know, they're saying, well, genetically modified food isn't so dangerous because we've been doing it for centuries, but we haven't been doing it for centuries in the sense of, like, the way, say, Monsanto or Bayer, I should say, now have been doing it. Is that correct, or is there a flaw in my logic so far?

Well, people started selecting the best crops, the best animals in their fields thousands of years ago, as you said, and they used traditional breeding, always within species boundaries. So you're quite right. You know, spiders could never cross with pigs. Likewise, only a few crop plants could cross with each other. But they developed the techniques and year after year selected those best crop plants and animals, and that was what gave us agriculture. It was always done in the public domain, of course, and so it was something that was shared as people moved around the world and colonized different parts of the world. They took their animals and crops with them. But, uh, then in the 1980s, the genetic manipulation techniques, which is down at the genetic level, came on the scene. And, uh, the Monsanto company in particular argued that, uh, they should be allowed to have patents, uh, when they transferred a gene from somewhere in nature, that it that existed already into another place where it didn't exist, say into a crop plant, to give the crop, where it was soybean for example, resistance to Monsanto's own chemical, the Roundup herbicide. So farmers could spray more often and at higher doses over the top of their crop, killing weeds but not killing the crop plant. And of course the company said this is safe as houses, we don't need to be regulated. But around the corner at the patent office, they said, oh, we've created something new here and we're entitled to a patent on it. And so we can monopoly own and control, we can charge royalties for our new varieties. And it was a profit bonanza for the company.

So there's so many things to unpack just in that, you know, it's definitely a far cry away from, and from my understanding, the way genetically modified food is done, people think it's, you know, very precise in the way gene manipulation is done. But again, from my understanding, is that when they inject the gene, it's not essentially injecting it exactly into the DNA code. It's more like a shotgun, is they just put the gene in and kind of where it lands, it lands, because that's kind of the best we can do. And this is where you say it doesn't always work. And certainly what you just said about the soy crop particularly. I've read that the soy crops with that are genetically modified now are becoming more genetically resistant to the Roundup, and they've been using even more glyphosate, Roundup, etc., pesticides, up to 10 to 100 times more depending on the farm, which then you have to unpack all the, the runoff of the glyphosate and the pesticides and the paraquat and all these things that are often water soluble that end up into waterways that create havoc in terms of the environment. But I mean, that's a, that's a different topic. Where I wanted to, uh, just kind of unpack was with the gene, the actual patent. If we can come back to this idea of the patent, um, there's two things. One, the ethical implementation of that, but the other thing is with lateral gene transfer through wind, rain, things that are going into other farms. Monsanto, I think, have done a tremendous job at enforcing that patent. Can we talk about that a little bit?

Well, they've done that through their contracts, of course. In North America, which is where the majority of the GM soybean, corn, canola, and cotton were grown, they would enforce the patent on the farmers by putting into the contract that you weren't allowed to save seed, you had to them back and buy the seed every year. And the company gave itself the right to go into farmers' farms without notice, look in their bins, and if they were seen to be misbehaving by saving the seed for planting next year, then of course Monsanto sued a lot of farmers as well. And many went out of business or paid up when the company took them to court and it would become very, very expensive to defend such claims from the company. So Monsanto, through the 1990s and 2000s, sold its genetically manipulated crops, particularly into the American, Canadian, and increasingly into Latin American countries. And by 2010, of course, it had saturated the market for these 4 broadacre crops in the USA. So what we saw was that they aggressively marketed them into Latin America in particular. And take Brazil, for example, huge areas of the Amazon rainforest were chopped down. Soybean, genetically manipulated soybean was grown, again, mainly for export back to the USA. For uses in biofuel production, to drive cars, and also to feed animals in feedlots. Most of it didn't go directly into the human food supply, although of course there have been concerns about the presence of genetically manipulated vegetable oils, starches, and sugars in the human food supply as well. And of course, It's also these feedstocks of soybean, corn, canola, and cottonseed oil are used for industrial purposes as well. Things like papermaking, for example, demands a huge amount of starch. High fructose corn syrup made from genetically manipulated corn ends up in soft drinks. Most soft drinks these days are sweetened not with sugar, but with high fructose corn syrup, which has led, of course, to the pandemic of obesity in developed countries. We've now got something like 4 billion people in the world who are overweight as a result of eating these refined foods as well. So there are a multitude of different issues.

What are the dominant—

The destruction, of course, of the Brazilian environment was a critical issue as well. And what we've seen there is that a lot of those farmlands, what became farmland, has now simply been abandoned because the soils were so unproductive for broadacre crop production. And in Brazil, the lungs of the world were destroyed for nothing, really.

So in Brazil, the soil isn't taking to the GM crops, is that what you're Well, those soils which are underneath the forests are fed by the forests themselves.

So it's an interdependent relationship. When you clear forest and you start using it for highly mechanized, high input agriculture, you've got to start adding synthetic fertilizers. You've got to use machinery to manage it, so it's got to be plowed and all the rest of it. These soils are unsuited to that purpose.

And is that because it's deep-rooted? What was there was deep tree roots and they had to essentially plow it and they potentially couldn't have plowed it. It's not fertile. It's a fertile soil for trees, not necessarily fertile soil for farmland. Is that why?

It was an ecological ecosystem. The trees and the soils and the microorganisms and the animals were all in close relationship with each other. You chop the forest down, which is a complex environment, and you make it into a monoculture where year after year you plow the soil and you plant one crop. You denude the soil. It'd get washed and blown away just by weather events, and you create an environment in which only those soybean or corn crops can survive.

So that's failing in Brazil? Is that what you're saying? That's failing in Brazil?

Well, large areas are still cropped. But something like 30% of the area that was cleared is now reverted back to second-growth forest, which of course, the Amazon was always regarded as a critical part of our global ecosystem in that it replenished the atmosphere in particular. So in an era of global climate change, we want more forests, not less. And so this development, this industrialization, which has gone on since 1996 when the crops were first deployed out into the environment, has been extremely destructive indeed. We've seen also, of course, the people who lived in those forests, the First Nations people of Latin America, murdered and tortured and displaced out of their forests. We've seen also the emergence of diseases there, many more insect-borne diseases in Latin America as a result of those forests being cleared. And a particular one, the Zika virus, came out of there in 2015 and in pregnant women created major problems where hundreds of women were having babies with microcephaly, which is a stunting of the brain development of the children. And that was seen as quite directly the result of our impacts on the environment. We are impacting the environment globally, so we need to think about this globally and realise that we are responsible not only for global climate change, but in fact the degradation of the global natural environment as well, on which we depend for our own survival.

Yeah, I'm always, I'm always amused when it's the hippie vegan activist, social activist warrior, who goes on a vegan diet and supports soy and then talks about climate change in the same breath. And it's like those two things, if you want change for climate, then don't support soy. Don't support soy and don't eat soy and don't support genetically modified food because these things are terribly destructive to the environment. But it is always amusing. Have you seen that a lot of like the kind of the hippie environmentalists also at the same breath, they're supporting soy or they're eating a diet of soy?

Vegetarians like ourselves have a very diverse diet, and those of us who care about these issues eat locally. Things that are produced locally, not in broad-acre monocultures, are the thing to go for. I don't think that the people that you've characterized as hippie vegans are over-relying on soybean, for instance. And of course, soy is a perfectly fine crop if it's grown in the right way. The problem is that these huge monocultures of commodities are not good for the environment. In Australia, for instance, the National Farmers Federation and the government are now shooting for doubling the amount of commodities produced annually by 2030, up to $100 billion a year. It's a mining concept. We're going to mine the soils and the water of Australia so we can send wheat, oats, and barley and canola over to Europe to be used as biofuels or into Asia.

So just saying, I want to—

as a trade issue, not to feed people, but just to get on this bandwagon of we've got to produce this stuff to trade. It's interesting that, of course, the mining magnates who mine the soil, Gina Rinehart and Twiggy Forrest, for instance, are also now the biggest agricultural landholders in Australia. Twiggy is about to take over the aquaculture industry in Tasmania, which is also an extremely environmentally destructive activity as well, reliant on catching wild-caught fish to feed the fish in the fish farms. Or what they're trying to do is genetically manipulate canola so that it's suitable as a fish feed as well. So it's rape and pillage the land, the productivity of the soil, and the environment simply to create things for trade. And Australia is among the worst countries in this regard. We've got all this land, and instead of making a priority of feeding Australians well, the government and the agricultural lobbyists are mad keen to create commodities. We don't value-add them at all in Australia. We don't employ people making good quality products in Australia. We bulk ship them overseas for biofuel production, for industrial purposes, claiming that this is a great thing to do, and we're just on the wrong track. We need to transition to regenerative and organic farming systems that are going to look after our soils and our scarce water supplies. That's getting going, but it's happening slowly because most of the resources for research and development are going into genetic manipulation research, artificial intelligence, drones, bigger machinery to run monocultures and basically mine Australia for export. That's where we're on the wrong track.

I did read a couple of months ago, I think it was the Financial Review, called Australia the rich and dumb. And essentially we ranked, I think it was 93 in the world for innovation. And there are a bunch of countries that you wouldn't suspect that were above us. But, and the reason for their statement of the rich and dumb is because of what you've just said, is we're very, very too quick to ship out our resources to other countries as a trade issue. And one of the things is, I just wanted to touch on, I'm certainly not a vegan. I do encourage a diet of of meat and a few other things. But certainly what you said there was local, which is a huge thing regardless of how you, like what your diet is constituted of. I think if you can buy local and buy from your local farm and support local farmers where you can, it's a huge step in the direction. But before we move on to another issue of local and the global food supply, I did want to ask about one of the issues that I understand with genetically modified soy crops specifically, is, um, with organic farms. So you have an organic soy farm that's set up, uh, Monsanto, Bayer, um, they've found the organic, uh, farms to have the genetically modified crop because it's, it's not because they've been planting it, but because of, of rain, wind, dust, etc., being, um, the seed. Is this, is this, is this been happening, or is this not, not exact, that the organic farmers have been affected by the genetically modified crops as well?

Well, just before we move on to that, I do want to mention too that this thing about local production and local consumption is critical. In Australia, we think that we're all very sweet and we're very food secure, but industrial agriculture and this priority on exporting everything leaves 1.5 million Australians food insecure. There are families in Australia, including hundreds of thousands of children, who can't reliably put a meal on their table and are dependent on charity from Foodbank and other charities around the country. We've got 100,000 homeless people. These people are poorly catered for as far as food is concerned as well. So we need to get our priorities right and to start focusing on local, clean, green, sustainably produced foods for feeding Australians first, then think about all of this export stuff of mass commodities afterwards. And we particularly, as you mentioned yourself, need to think about how we can value-add, not just mine Australia and send the bulk commodity, whether it's steel, iron ore, or agricultural products overseas for somebody else to do that value adding to them.

What would this food model look like in Australia? I know, is it correct in thinking that it's a lot of little farms? Is it like North Queensland, you know, putting back a lot of these local farms and kind of, I don't know, disbanding or fractionating the big farms into smaller farms that produce, I suppose, more crops but less of them?

Well, the, the trend over the last 30 or 40 years has been you either get big or you get out of farming. It's mechanization, less people working on the farm, monocultures. You know, the family farm, the day of the family farm is really, although they are nominally still there, the corporatisation and the foreign ownership of Australian croplands is going on apace. And it's seen as agribusiness primarily, not an activity that's for feeding Australians, which needs to be the primary thing. Of course, we've had the emergence over the last couple of decades of farmers markets, which has been incredibly beneficial for those smaller farmers, particularly those who are doing organic production, to actually meet their customers directly, sell directly to the customer, and cut out the markets, the middlemen, the people who are transporting the food around for commercial purposes. We need them too, but the farmers' market where the farmer engages with the person who's actually going to buy and eat the food has been an incredible trend and making more of that available, the direct marketing of beverages and food, I think is a critical way for people to understand better, that we do depend on the environment. There is no economy without ecology, without the soil, the water, and the sun which feed us. And when we forget that and we think that food comes from supermarkets or out of a packet, you know, the other thing that's been going on which has been great is that The kids in school are doing gardening as part of their curriculum. That has been a fantastic innovation because this generation of little kids are getting that hands-on experience, are getting in touch with the fact that their food comes out of the ground, and we're starting to see them growing up and starting to have their own gardens as well at home. So I think that, um, normal life, we live in cities, we need urban agriculture as well as a movement so that we feed ourselves.

So, so one thing that I am concerned with, and you probably are as well, um, and this ties into local farming, is that Coles and Woolies, for example, I think it was last time I looked, they, they, I suppose control, I think, essentially about 70% or 80%. I think it's quite around that 70% mark of the grocery market in Australia. And they essentially do have a monopoly on farmers and they can dictate. I know some farmers have fought back with $10 million lawsuits, which to Coles and Woolies obviously isn't a huge amount. To the farmer, it might be a big payday, but to to Coles and Woolies at the level and the scale of what they're doing things, but what are the implications of a Coles and Woolies controlling that much market share as it relates to local food?

Well, it has driven down the prices in the supermarket. I think milk has been the prime example. The $1 a litre milk was an absolute disaster for the dairy industry. Thousands of farmers had to walk off their farms and close their dairies as a result. It was simply impossible because they were at the point where their costs outstripped the returns from milking cows 365 days a year. It just wasn't supportable. But those who have survived that, of course, have had to get a lot more efficient. They've aggregated their farms, they've done a number of different things. And of course, the people who buy milk, the dairy processing companies, have now had to increase their prices just so that they could continue to get a supply because so many farmers were going out of business, dairy farmers. But that's been happening everywhere. You see a special in the supermarket, the farmers are paying for that special. Not the supermarket. The supermarket still wants its share of the take. It's still working on the same profit margin. It's just driving down the price from the supplier. This is an unfair situation, but of course, the duopoly, as you mentioned, Coles and Woolworths, have now got rivals, Aldi, IGA, and a few others. Are in there trying to grab market share as well. And so in the great capitalist enterprise, competition is supposed to keep everything good. And it's— the critical thing I think is that shoppers think about, understand, know, and can do something about where their food comes from. For example, we're running a campaign at the moment about the, uh, recent approval of the irradiation of all fresh fruits and vegetables in Australia. Irradiation is the application of energy to, um, particularly fruits and vegetables to kill the larvae of fruit fly and other insects that might be in the fruit. And now with diseases being spread internationally, the government has become very obsessed with biosecurity. So now fresh fruits and vegetables that might be infested with the Queensland fruit fly in particular are going to be exposed to between 1.5 million and 10 million equivalent X-rays in order to kill those larvae. But that has a number of different effects on these so-called fresh fruits and vegetables themselves, decreasing their nutritional value, destroying, uh, critical nutrients like, um, vitamin C, for instance, um, leaving radiolytic products from the process in the fruits and vegetables. Now, Foodstanz Australia New Zealand, our regulator, says this is all A-okay, the experiments were done years ago, astronauts eat irradiated foods and they're all okay. But we think that the evidence is not all in, that there are impacts, subtle ones and long-term impacts on human health as a result of these treatments. One thing that's happened is that in the food standards, irradiated fruits and vegetables are required to be labeled. And so it's now up to shoppers to start making sure that the law is enforced in relation to labeling. So the first shipments of irradiated fruits and vegetables have been into New Zealand already. Australian tomatoes irradiated have arrived there, and we've been alerting New Zealand shoppers to keep their eye out for the labels. We know the product is there. Will the government enforce the law? Who knows? And we're asking supermarkets as well sticky questions like, are you going to put these treated fruits and vegetables in the same section as other untreated fruits and vegetables to try to normalize what is a very intrusive and very destructive technology that's just arrived into our food supply. So we're saying to shoppers, keep your eye out, look out for the labels, And if something's irradiated, then you've got to make a judgment about whether you think it's fit to eat or not. But it will become, I think, much more general. An irradiation facility has been built at the Melbourne Wholesale Market in Epping. We don't know what is going to be irradiated. But the pretext that, uh, you need to do it for fruit fly larvae control is not the full story. For instance, the shelf life of treated products will also be extended. So you might see a fruit or vegetable that looks okay, but who knows how long it's been on the shelf because the shelf life is extended, the fruit and vegetable is basically sterilized, its nutrient value is affected, and it could be rather older than it appears. So these are issues that people need to consider. They need to become very discerning shoppers and look out for the food irradiation labels, which might incidentally be a dinky little flower-like logo rather than a word saying treated with irradiation or exposed to nuclear treatment, something of that kind, which is more direct and more alert.

So in short, the problem with irradiated food, 'cause I remember hearing about this from my friend Randy Roach, who wrote the book Muscle, Smoke and Mirrors back a couple of years ago. And I asked him what some of the most shocking things, actually my very first podcast I ever did, 2011, 2011, we speak about radiated food, and he said that was one of the most shocking things. So in short, with radiated food, it's, it's kind of like an X-ray essentially the food goes through, which affects nutritional value, depletes nutritional value, but extends shelf life. And the implication of that is that— and I believe with tomatoes specifically in Australia, the book Food Shock by Diana— I forget her last name, I'm not sure if you know it, um Sensational book, by the way. Small publishing house that published it. But she talks about Australian tomatoes. They're gassed with a certain chemical. It's a hormone that tomatoes are essentially picked ripe green, essentially. And then in the truck they gas them and then they freeze them, and then when they arrive they ripen. And that's why a lot of supermarket tomatoes, when you bite into them, they're tasteless, completely tasteless. And they, they just, they're they don't taste like tomatoes. So with—

yeah, that's the industrial production really, and particularly pumping up the size of fruits and vegetables with synthetic fertilizers. And in hydroponics, of course, the whole thing is done in fluid. You know, you add the nutrients to the water and the plant takes it up. The thing about getting fruits and vegetables to market, of course, is why farmers markets are so great because you know the stuff was picked the day before and there's the farmer who picked it selling it to you the day after. You know, there isn't that long supply chain. So getting something like tomato from the field down to Melbourne from Queensland, for example, when they're not in season here in Victoria, takes time and the fruit's got to be kept in condition. So a lot of things like kiwis from New Zealand is another example where things are gassed, but we can do our own gassing of course as well. If you get a kiwi that's hard, you put it in a brown paper bag with an apple and the gas from the apple will ripen the kiwi.

Really?

I think a lot of people know that. So it's a management issue really that if you pick the tomato ripe in Queensland and you're going to sell it to a customer a week later in Melbourne, it's going to be slush if you're not careful. So there are logistical issues and gassing in itself is just a way of those industrial fruits and vegetables like bananas or another one, picked green, delivered to the market, put in the gas chamber and then made to ripen. So we, you know, we do have problems. We, the agriculture has to try to deal with these. I don't think that particular process is too bad. But take another one. The Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority has approved something like 11,000 different chemicals for agricultural spraying and for veterinary treatment of animals. It is huge, and the residues of those chemicals are not assessed for for the interactional effects. So they're each individually approved, um, without regard to what a mixture of different chemical residues in the food supply will be. And this is why I personally, and an increasing number of people, go for organic. Because when you go in the regular fruit and veggie store, you're getting a chemical cocktail and you can't be at all sure what's in it. And it's not only the so-called active ingredients which the regulator— which are the only chemicals that the regulator assesses. All of these things are formulation. There are surfactants, there are other chemicals that spread the active ingredient across the crop plant and into the environment that have different modes of action. These things are not assessed at all. And the other thing is that the food regulator does not set the maximum residue limits. It's actually the agriculture people who do that. The chemical companies say we need to spray so much of 2,4-D or Roundup or dichamba or paraquat in the environment to get the management effect on the farm. They set the level, then it goes to the food regulator, they div— which divides by 100 and says, yes, that's a safe level, the maximum residue level in the food supply. The system puts the priority in the wrong place, and we've been arguing for years that it's the food regulator that should set the maximum residue levels, not the agricultural side.

Absolutely, because otherwise it's a fox guarding the henhouse, right?

Thoroughly wash any conventional food they buy before eating it and not assume even that that is going to be sufficient to get rid of those chemical cocktails that are sprayed out in our agricultural environments.

Yes, otherwise it's a fox guarding a henhouse, really. The food regulators are setting their own— well, the agriculture, rather, setting their own limits of what they can use, where really it should be— that needs to be regulated. It's, you know, coming up with a product and saying, basically, this is how I'm going to use it, now give me the tick. You know, really, that needs to be independent.

Yes, and the other thing, of course, is that governments don't want to carry the can. Of paying for the regulations. So these days, in relation to agricultural chemicals, for example, depending on how much of a chemical you sell, take Roundup for instance, which is the most used herbicide in the world. The owner of the chemical, which was Monsanto but is now Bayer, the company that markets it, and there are 500 different formulations of Roundup, in the market in Australia.

There's 500—

sorry, there's 500 different formulations of Roundup in the market, are registered for sale in the market with all these different added chemicals to give you a different mixture for different purposes and to make different claims on the label. And, and to give an example of that, yeah, on the basis of that, they then charge the the chemical company for the regulation. So the regulated, the companies, pay to be regulated. And of course, that compromises the integrity of the regulator right there. It's the size of the Food and Medicines Authority. It's going to be completely conflicted.

Well, I mean, isn't the whole purpose of government to protect the people, not to put in power the corporation? I mean, that's the whole thing, right? Like, it's there to protect people. But if you're putting putting the, the party— I mean, this is, this is where it's very backwards. I know with, um, with, with the chemicals that you're talking about, one particularly that I was looking at the other day, the paraquat, I think, or paraquat, or however you pronounce it, um, that, that was banned in the European Union, I think, in 2009, um, as a known carcinogen, um, and, and known to, to cause cancer. Yet in Australia, we give it the green light. My friend, um, who— and mentor who passed away, uh, couple of years back now, Charles Poliquin, he went around the world lecturing and he would do this thing called the biosignature test, testing hamstrings. And he had a theory which had a lot of proof to it with his biosignature. He'd say that Australia is one of the most exposed to phytoestrogen— xenoestrogens rather, and toxic chemicals and has the most unregulated laws of pesticides in the world. What he saw in terms of body fat composition was that Australians always had fatter hamstrings. And obviously, he had tested, we had tested thousands of people with their body fat, and it was consistent that Aussies had much fatter hamstrings, which is in the BioSignature corresponds of xenoestrogen detoxification. And to your point, I think with what Australia has done with the list of whatever it is, that chemicals that just basically get a green light. It's kind of like the reverse of how the FDA, I think, work and the TGA work. The TGA, when it comes to supplements, is, you know, it has to be proven safe. So then there's things that are kind of like, uh, what is it, the zinc? Um, I think there's a certain type of zinc that it's not illegal, but it's not also for sale. You can order it in from the US, but you're not supposed to retail it as an Australian distributor. There's things like that in the TGA law that it's kind of like a gray area of supplementation where the FDA, their ruling is a bit more, it's innocent until proven guilty. And I think the Ephedra that they used to put in some of the fat burners was a good example. The FDA used to allow that as a stack. And then because a kid died or a couple of people died from it, they pulled it from the market and they said, this has actually caused harm now and it's proven harm, so we're gonna pull it. But it sounds like with agriculture, the TGA, they operate the opposite with pesticides. They allow everything until it's actually proved harmful. Is that fair?

Well, that's a different regulator. Therapeutic Goods Administration looks after pharmaceuticals.

Yeah, I know, I know that.

Yes, it operates under—

They're operating—

It operates under guidelines. Those guidelines fit where they touch. They really are not enforced properly. They're mostly based on whether or not the company advertises so that it doesn't mislead the public. So it's really up to people to be very vigilant themselves. And I think the examples you just gave are a pretty good example of a failure of regulation. But just to come back to the APVMA and the Food Standards Australia and New Zealand, They do cost recover from the industry. The industries dominate the scene. When a new product comes along for regulation, the regulators really only consider the evidence that's provided by the applicant themselves. And we know that these so-called experiments and studies are chronically biased in favour of the approval of all products. So getting independent evidence and taking a precautionary approach, saying that we need better independent evidence that something might have an adverse effect, this is something that we really, really need to do. To require our regulators to be independent, to be unbiased, and to take a precautionary approach, but all of our efforts to get them to do so really fall on deaf ears as far as governments and so on are concerned. Just to take one simple example of how you can get a terribly bad outcome was that the Gillard government in 2013 set up what would have been a very, very good system for reassessing and re-registering all of those 11,000 chemicals that are approved for use in agriculture. And the system was to come into effect on the 1st of July, 2014. Unfortunately, the Abbott Liberal government got elected and Barnaby Joyce, who's now leading the Nationals again, then fulfilled his promise to the agrochemical industry and got the Labor Party to agree to cancel the review, the reassessment and re-registration scheme, which would have meant that all agricultural chemicals were reviewed every 15 years. This is what's done in the USA. In the European Union, it's every 10 years. Those chemicals have to be brought back. New evidence has to be given about their safety and their efficacy. And we don't have any such system in Australia. Reviews of agricultural chemicals can take 10, 15, or even 20 years as the evidence of harm builds up. And groups like our own, the National Toxics Network, and others are making representations all the time to the regulators, and mostly they fall on deaf ears. I mean, coming back to the irradiation for a moment is very interesting because tropical fruits and vegetables for 20 years were dipped in two chemicals, dimethoate and fenthion, which we said from the beginning were too toxic, were carcinogenic, and impacted health in other ways. Finally, about 2 or 3 years ago, the APVMA, under enormous pressure, finally accepted and agreed, yes, they are too toxic to be used, we'll phase them out. And what do they give us instead? Irradiation. They were dipping the bangos and the pawpaw and the rest of them in these toxic chemicals for a couple of decades. Until finally the evidence was just so overwhelming. And then they said, but we still have to deal with this problem, so we'll let the industry irradiate its fruits and vegetables to deal with fruit fly. Now, what do organic growers do? They prevent the problem in the first place. Instead of allowing the fruit fly to, to get to the fruit, they bag their fruit, they use pheromone strips to divert the insects, other low-impact strategies of management in the field to produce clean, green food. Yes, it costs a bit more. Yes, it's more labor-intensive, it employs more people, but you get a product that you can rely on. Instead, the industrial industry says, okay, we've got this fruit fly problem. Okay, we'll dip it in the chemicals and/or we will irradiate. And that's how we end up with our food supply being degraded and being, in the long term at least, essentially unsafe to eat.

So just a couple of things. You mentioned the National Toxic Institute. What's that?

National Toxics Network. That's like ourselves, a community group that campaigns about toxics in the environment. It was formed about the same time as GeneEthics in the late 1980s and has been campaigning for tougher regulation ever since.

I just wanted to just point that one out to people because I haven't heard of that one. People can research that one if they want some more information on toxic chemicals. My question is as well though on this, there is a big push for, for climate change and to do, you know, uh, reduce carbon emissions. It sounds like part of the push though should be to encourage organic food, because if you encourage organic food, or if the government subsidizes organic food, um, there's going to be less toxic chemicals in, in, in the environment, there's going to be less carbon emissions, um, there's going to be people growing smaller farmers. Is, is, is, is the government so far I don't know, use the word corrupted by big business, that's just never going to happen, that those who are in support of, say, climate change or lowering toxic load on the environment, is it really, I think, the action step for everyone really? Because at this point, I don't think the government is too slow to act. And a good example that you gave was that 2013-2014 Julia Gillard policy example, then abolished. The government And also the 10 years, I mean, is it just as simple as like the listeners— for the listeners, food, a lot of food, particular dairy— I say this in the chapter that I'm writing at the moment on industrialized dairy— there are some foods that unfortunately you can't buy all the time depending on where you live. Because— and there are other foods, for example, milk, that actually should be expensive. And if it is too cheap when you go to the store, you know, that dollar cheap food always has a cost. The cost is either in taxation, subsidies, ripping off the farmer, the cost of the land, cost to, you know, minimum wages or unfair labor examples. So is it— I mean, in my head, from what you're saying, the summary is encouraging organic food as much as possible. But again, I suppose the question, which is not really a question, more a discussion, Why aren't government officials or politicians lobbying for local organic food when there is such a push, I suppose, culturally on climate change?

Because we're run by people who will carry a lump of coal into the parliament and say how great it is as well. We've got governments like the Queensland government that allows the chopping down of whole forests for land clearing. It hasn't stopped, it hasn't slowed, that we know that trees and the environment are essential to reversing global climate change, to moderating those fires and flooding and storm events that are now becoming much more common. We're just on the wrong track, but governments are driven by the corporations that are going to benefit from not only business as usual but business on steroids, like the $100 billion target for Australian agriculture. Mine the land and water. We've got a continent that's very dry, so what do we do? We back genetically manipulated cotton, we back rice growing. Both of these in industries are extremely demanding of water out of the Murray-Darling. We end up with water shortages for the towns along the river. We pollute the water, millions of fish die, etc., etc. The impacts are immense and tragic, and the government is simply on the wrong track. The research and development resources, what do they spend their money on? The Grains Research and Development Corporation and CSIRO are embarked on trying to figure out ways, including genetic engineering, bigger machinery, drones, artificial intelligence, to try to prop up the existing destructive industrial processes that produce our food and not put any research and development or other support behind organics, regenerative farming systems, and the things that would actually nurture our environment. And of course, as I mentioned before, we've got people like Gina Rinehart and Twiggy Forrest, the two richest people in Australia, incidentally. Rinehart's way ahead of the pack, is a mega multi-billionaire, and Forrest is a billionaire as well, doing things that simply are in the wrong direction. They mine Australia and export it without value-adding. They maximize their profits by driving down prices locally, as you've said, with the duopoly, uh, in tow, etc. And it's just all in the wrong direction because these are the people that call the shots. Reinhardt was the leader of Abbott's campaign against the Gillard government's attempt, for instance, to impose a proper tax on minerals, the minerals that are exported It's like the— we get virtually no royalties from these irreplaceable resources which are dug up and shipped en masse overseas. Gas, iron ore, forests from Tasmania that are wood-chipped, that are hundreds of years old, that are lungs of our planet, wood-chipped and sent to Japan to make paper. That we then import back into Australia. Um, it's just madness, really. Well, the value, the value add there would be both Labor and the, and the Liberals are on the wrong track.

So, so in terms of that, the value add there, the obvious value add is to encourage industry in Australia of making our own paper so we're not shipping as much, or we don't need as much as well. But That's also a good example of how corporations like the mining industry, for example, are affecting government policy. And I always have people say, oh, it's conspiracy this, it's conspiracy that. And it's like, well, if you kind of look who controls the government, a lot of the time it's big, big billion-dollar, trillion-dollar corporations who— and in Australia, certainly, the mining industry is our biggest export. Has a lot of pull, or at least has a lot of influence in terms of how much money gets thrown around or thrown at different parties, whether it's Liberal or Labor, in favor. And both parties, you know, obviously have their problems in terms of who they align with. And, you know, there is no party I think that is without its influence from where they're getting their funding from, from the left.

Well, we can say that that the Greens don't accept corporate money from such people. But I mean, we have a prime example.

The Greens also have their problems as well with some of their policies.

Oh sure, of course, the Liberal Party's all right. As far as handouts are concerned, we have on the public record the big bags of money that were paid to Labor and the National Party to get the chemicals reassessment and re-registration scheme overturned. And every year Bayer, CropLife Australia, which is the mouthpiece for the agrochemical industry— CropLife Australia is part of a network, a global network operating in 91 countries, of organizations run out of Belgium which is CropLife International.

Say that again. Bayer-run CropLife, which run out of 91 countries. So what's CropLife?

CropLife is this organization run out of Belgium, which is the propaganda arm of the agrochemical industry. So for instance, in Australia, CropLife Australia, which is based in Canberra, is headed up by a former official of the Labor Party, both in their national secretariat and the parliament, who is obviously well connected with Labor and gives them bags of money as well. CropLife not only pays but also sets policy. This is the this is the thing really, on genetically manipulated seed and on chemicals. The seed that's sold to farmers, the members, the corporate members, which is Bayer, BASF, Corteva, and all the other agrochemical companies, and there are about 20 of them that are members of CropLife, these CropLife is lobbying all the time for its, for the policies of these companies that monopolize agrochemicals and seed sales in Australia. So for instance, the companies that are members of CropLife sell 95% of the agrochemicals, or 85% of the agrochemicals and 95% of the GM biotechnology crop seeds that are sold to farmers in Australia. Really, for all intents and purposes, virtually 100%. And these are transnational companies based in Germany and the USA, principally.

So that's very similar to the example with what happened in the US with Michael Taylor, who I think, believe was the— let me get this right— he was the CEO of Monsanto essentially stepped down, went over to the FDA, became, you know, quite high up in the rank, then stepped down again, then went back to Monsanto. I don't think— well, I think he went as CEO again, if I'm not mistaken. I, I've got to fact-check this. But then basically, long story short, is he went, he went from, uh, essentially corporation to governing body, helped— well, from my understanding of what happened, helped pass a bill on gene manipulation and GM crops and all the rest of it, and then went back to his position. Is that accurate? Do you know about this story?

Yes, that's the so-called revolving door. But of course, in the political classes, the revolving door is commonplace. We don't talk much about it in Australia, except when you get people like Christopher Pyne, for instance, who was the Minister for Defence in South Australia, then he and many other former ministers leave the Parliament and go and work for the industries that they were regulating only months before, taking their expertise, becoming lobbyists basically, into the Parliament, into the political parties for the companies that they were regulating. It's a scandal and yet there's not much talked about in Australia about this happening quite routinely.

No, I haven't heard anything about it happening in Australia.

People promise jobs after they get out of politics.

I haven't heard anything about that happening in Australia at all. I've never seen it as a headline page. So that's happening in Australia right now, the revolving door between corporations and politics.

The revolving door is very alive and well in Australia. It is written up in certain places. You know, people do write about it. Michael West Weekly is online, which is a very good read, which is always talking about the—

Michael West, did you say?

Michael West Independent Media.

Yes, yeah, just so the listeners know, is it— are you saying— is it W-E-S-T like West, like Wild Wild West? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You can do it, you can subscribe for free to get their weekly posts of the all the stuff that's happening behind the scenes, uh, who's paying who, who's doing what to whom. Uh, it's, it's a shocker.

Have you heard about it?

Michael's a very good investigative journalist and he's got very good, a very good team. Um, several of his people used to work for The Age, but of course the newspapers are in trouble, so they become independent investigative journalists. Great.

What's Michael's website?

It'll be Michael West Media.

Michaelwestmedia.com.au, I guess. So I've got to have Michael on the show, speak to Michael, check out, um, his website, and I'll see. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And his main editor, um, was the op editor at The Age, um, recently joined them, Elizabeth Minter, who's very good as well.

Have you heard of a chemical called Dryacide?

No, not offhand. That would be a brand name, that wouldn't be the name of the chemical itself.

Maybe I'll save that question when I reach out to the National Toxic Network and see what they talk about toxic. So we'll move on from there. So one of the things that we can come back to, I mean, this has been, we've unpacked so much in the hour that we've been speaking. So I mean, this has been sensational. But one of the things, if we can get back to the original thing about genetically modified foods, um, one thing that I didn't know from, from just our email exchange that you pointed out, and you've said it, you kind of touched on it in the first part of this call, was Brazil. Brazil have been cutting down their rainforests, uh, a size as big as New South Wales, which is gigantic really in terms cut down that much rainforest. It's unbelievable how much rainforest, you know, that they've cut down to put a monocrop in. And now, if I'm not mistaken, they're the biggest exporters of soy.

Yes, well, as I was saying before, they chopped down the rainforest to grow the soybeans and corn, most of which went into North America for biofuels and animal feed. But we are complicit as well. A couple of years ago, for instance, we imported roughly 750 million tonnes of soybean, mostly from Latin America, that went into animal feed here as well. And it's routinely been half a million tonnes to supplement feeding of animals in Australia as well.

Did they export to Brazil because of the laws or just because of the sheer size of farming and landmass that they have?

Well, in 1996, Monsanto launched its 4 main broadacre crops: soybean, corn, canola, and cotton. But by 2010, they'd really flooded those markets. Most of the seed that was being sold was genetically manipulated. So farmers were spraying more often and at higher doses with Roundup. Incidentally, of course, that created super weeds, weeds that couldn't be controlled by Roundup. They acquired the resistance as well, and that's created huge problems in American agriculture. But in any event, of course, Monsanto was only going to make a profit if it could continue to increase the amount of seed that it sold. So the obvious thing was we'll sell in South America as well. Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina, and Brazil was the big— was the place that took it up most noticeably. As the soy was available, they ripped down their forests in order to, to grow the soybean. Soybean was not for human consumption directly. As I mentioned, it was sent back to the USA for, um, for biofuel production and for industrial purposes and to go into feedlots to feed animals because the Americans have a lot of animals in feedlots. In Australia, we have feedlotting, but it's generally done— excuse me— very close to the time that an animal is going to be slaughtered. Uh, in America, they may spend their whole life in a feedlot.

Yeah.

And of course, you've got to feed them just the same as in agriculture. Uh, you've got to artificially feed those animals. And, uh, Brazil went for it big time. And now, of course, the industry is collapsing because of the environmental collapse that's been created. And it's simply going back to regrowth forest, not the original forests that were there.

So something that is always brought up with genetically modified food, it has the power to feed the world. One of the things that, um, always, you know, astounds me is that 2% of genetically modified crops, or soy I think is the exact stat, actually gets fed to humans. The rest of it, as you've already identified, like I said, it goes into oil production, exporting fuels. Fuel, like, I didn't know that until recently after reading Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, about how they turn corn into ethanol, essentially, and it becomes part of the fuel. But also so much of it, like, the broad majority is fed to animals as animal feed to turn it into meat, essentially. But you were going to tell me at the start of this call, and I said let's save it to the conversation about a debate that you had at Melbourne Uni, I believe that was Melbourne Uni, about world hunger. Can we get into some of that?

Yes, well, I did raise the Brazil example in the context of that discussion with the students in the Science and Society, which is the history and philosophy of science course at Melbourne Uni. And, uh, a molecular biologist from the university was arguing, yes, that genetic manipulation of crop plants is necessary to, um, help feed future, uh, generations of people because the human population in the world is growing still. Um, however, the United Nations Rapporteur on the Right to Food and many other authorities like the Food and Agriculture Organization are very clear that even at the moment, if we actually put what is produced into the human food supply, we could feed 10 billion people easily, probably 12 billion, and they could all have a good diet. But because of these industrial demands, like the biofuels and the feeding animals, which is extremely inefficient, the calories that you get out of an animal product, far, far lower than you get if you take the soybean and you feed it to the animal. You know, if you eat the soybean directly, you get a huge number of calories, which are good food. Corn, canola, and then cotton. People say it's not a food, but in fact, most or a very substantial part of the fast food, the junk food, the hamburgers and the rest of it that are fried in Australia, actually fried in cottonseed oil, most of which is genetically engineered. And people don't realize that, well, I think very involved in the food supply.

I think, I think the other thing though as well, when we look at like calories of the land, it's, it's also about removing from the monocrop, uh, you know, the monoculture kind of the system that we have, or at least divorcing from it in a sense of encouraging. Because I mean, the thing with animals, feeding animals soy and corn, yeah, I mean, look, it's tragic because cows, for example, they're not meant to eat corn or they're not meant to eat soy. That's why essentially they get fatter, sicker. But then we prize things like Wagyu meat, which is really, I mean, Wagyu meat is a sick animal. It's not a healthy animal at all. I mean, cows, they're meant to eat grass. And normally what would happen in a— I think Joel Salatin is the celebrity of this and really does a good example and a good job of exemplifying what a good farm should look like with these polyface farms, is that it really should look like a cyclical nature of the sun giving life to the grass life, the grass giving life to the animals. Animals and the humans essentially keeping that process of nitrogen balance of the land and, you know, basically circulating around the land and using the land. And in Joel Salatin's words, you know, you say, what type of farmer are you? He says, I'm a grass farmer because everything comes from the grass. I mean, that's a very far, far away when we look at, say, for example, the monocrops, which is, you know, we're using fossil fuels, NPK, which is a derivative of fossil fuels and petrochemicals. To basic— and but first we have to destroy the land, that, that's firstly. So when we have the rainforests example, like we're destroying rainforests or destroying whatever, you know, whatever habitat there was, which, um, I believe in some parts of the US it caused a number of species to go extinct. Uh, and then people will say, you know, it's better for animals, but then there is that trade-off of you are wiping out habitats, and there is certainly billions of insect life and billions of rodents and all the rest of it, as well as then the chemicals that get path into the waterways. So I think, you know, for the most part, it's not that we're ever going to get rid of a global food supply or ever could get rid of a global food supply. We need that. But I think as consumers, there needs to be a— you know, I don't think this issue is ever going to be black and white in the sense it's— I think it needs to be that happy medium of where you can buy local food. But then the other, the other astounding stat, and in terms of, you know, world hunger as well, is even just in Australia. If you look at Australia, we throw out 30% of our food, which is, you know, billions, billions of liters of water every year get wasted on growing food that is perfectly fine. For the only reason that we throw it out is because it doesn't look like the way we think food should look like. And this is, you know, due to the supermarkets like Coles, Woolies. And I suppose at the end of the day, consumer wanting this picture-perfect apple when, you know, leave me the spots on my apple, just give me the birds and the bees, right? So apples are supposed to have dirt. They're not supposed to be this, you know, they're supposed to be different sizes. And I think, I think it's Sweden. Sweden have been the best at reclaiming or reeducating the consumer market on foods that essentially it's kind of— I think they have in the supermarkets a not quite right section Essentially, it's obviously translated to Sweden, but they were very successful at doing a campaign around humans look different, humans come in different shapes and sizes, so should your food, I think was basically the summary of their campaign. And that was hugely successful at reuptaking food that wasn't looking exactly right. So, from what I can tell is that the world hunger, I suppose, feeding the world issue isn't just about there's not enough food. In actual fact, there is enough food. It's more about people can't afford the food, and it's about affordable and sustainable foods. And also, to that point, I think it was in Pakistan, I was speaking to Lierre Keith, who wrote the book The Vegetarian Myth— this was years ago— and also Dr. Arthur Vaney, who wrote the book The Primal Diet. Um, uh, years ago as well, uh, both of them pointed out that— I think it's in Pakistan— one of the big problems with US grain and US soy is that they, they do agricultural dumps, and they dump the food, uh, in these third world countries, and they, they bring down the price, and they basically— local markets can't compete. So instead of those local economies, um, being able to prosper and develop their own food and sell to their own people and give people responsibility, accountability, work ethic, and all these kind of things, and create their own internal economy. Um, the US is coming in, or wherever it is, is exporting this grain, and essentially local farmers can't compete with that, and it's causing or helping attribute to collapses of sustainable farms. Um, so that was, that was another thing.

So anyway, I thought I would add that, but you've covered a huge number of issues there, um, all of which I agree with, but It's very interesting what you conclude by saying, and that's about the influence that not only corporations but others have on markets in developing countries. There is a group called the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, which is funded and fronted by Bill Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, which is seeking to transfer those failing industrial systems of agricultural production from the USA into Africa, and they haven't been very effective. They've been formed since 2006, and there's been very concerted opposition from local people. As a result, you get this competition. What we should be doing is supporting the current production systems where people are employed, the food is local, not traded. So the situation at the moment is that as a result of this obsession with trade, particularly into Europe from Africa, you end up with people who are producing food not being able to feed their own families. A lot of the rural poor in Africa and in fact the rural poor in Australia too. People who should be able to feed their own families are bent out of shape and not prioritizing their own existence because we've got these trade obsessions of the kind that Australia has as well. Yes, most of the world actually produces and wastes something like 30% of food. And in places like Africa, it's infrastructure, things like refrigeration and good storage of food that costs them about 30 or 40% of their production as well. We could do something about that. We don't need to be so market-oriented, so trade-oriented. We need to be thinking about feeding people. This trappings of saying, oh, we need these technologies to feed the world is not about feeding the world at all. It's about enriching corporations that own the technologies. And I think Australia is well placed to actually help continents, and there are 52 countries, remember, in Africa, that we could help many of those countries to actually get their own infrastructure right, to start focusing on feeding their own people, particularly in drought and floods. Rescuing a lot of that food that's saved. But we see even there that government policies use food as a weapon against people as well, to keep them under control in wars, civil strife, in impoverished situations where the ruling elites are actually on the wrong track and misallocating community resources. And that's again the reason that we have 1.5 million Australians in dire situation as well. Australia should be guaranteeing that everybody here can have a balanced diet. We all have the right to food. We shouldn't be dependent on food charities or food rescued from those supermarkets and other places that are throwing it out. in order to actually put food for their families on the table. We need social equity, we need justice, social justice. That's what's needed. And there shouldn't be any need to be hungry, to be impoverished. Those are the issues that really need to be dealt with.

So I, I, I read a stat that it's something like, uh, 22% that the organic market needs to penetrate. I, I believe this stat was an American stat. I'm I'm not sure what it is in Australia, but essentially I think the organic market, I don't know, 11% when I read this article is what they were referring to, and it grew by I think 3%, so it was at 14%. But they were arguing that for industrial farming or industrial conglomerates, agricultural conglomerates, to change their tune, and essentially because obviously like governments, I mean governments corporations always want to make money, right? That's their mode of operating, is they always just want to make money, and that's the corporate interest. But if there is enough shift from the consumer to go out and buy organic and, you know, basically vote with their dollar and say, I don't want to support this food system anymore, I want local food, they will be forced to adapt and create more, I suppose, farms and products. Have you seen anything that would give, I suppose, the consumer a hope? And also the other thing is in terms of affordability for organics, I think at 22%, that'd also be a breakthrough in terms of price, of supply and demand chain. If the demand becomes higher, then that would also drive the cost down because more people want it, the cost gets shared. Have you seen anything around this that would essentially give hope to the consumer that if enough Australians start requesting food that's locally grown, there could be a shift that would be quite favorable in terms of locally organic food?

Yes, the organic sector from quite a low base is actually the fastest growing sector of food production in Australia. And the evidence that Australian Certified Organics has got is that It's now a very sizable industry. I mean, we're talking billions of dollars, not small change. And that it can grow with support. But as we've noted, the cost to shoppers is higher, but you're actually paying the right price for food. You get what you pay for. So if you buy junk food, if you buy a hamburger for $2, then you're getting crap, actually. And this is, this is going to cost you in terms of your long-term health and well-being. So people think usually they buy food for some reason on the basis of price, but cheap is often nasty as well. And we just need to change our thinking about food as the thing that nurtures and nourishes us and gives us good health and keeps us in good shape throughout our lives, not as an additional extra that we just can pay the lowest price for. I know that, of course, affording food is an issue for many people, along with paying the rent and switching on the lights as well. But food needs to have a high priority in households, I think, if we're going to think about the health and welfare of our families and think about what it costs us if we have to go to the doctor instead of eating well. And that is the trade-off that people make.

Agreed. And the other thing I would add to the consumer listening to this is that if you do go to your local a farmer, or if you go to a farmer's market, you know, I buy meat from— I used to buy meat from a, from a local farmer. Um, you know, I invested in a beast, you know, we would split it 4 ways between me and friends and would order it, bulk order it. It was all grass-fed, pasture-raised. Um, same as fruits and vegetables go. And, and the thing is, going to these local farms, and sure, you might have to make a few relationships, and it is a little bit not as convenient, and then you have the storage stuff, and obviously with your fresh fruit and vegetables there is that, you know, drive out and all that kind of stuff, but it's not that much more expensive. A lot of the time, some things are actually cheaper, is what I've found. But, you know, above all, if you can support the local market, I think that is, that is huge. So you might actually— the point of what I'm saying is though, you might actually be in for a bargain if you, if you reach out to your local farmer, because I what I've found in my experience is that they're all too willing to do business. And if they can have a repeat customer, um, you know, it's, it's really nice. My local farmer, uh, comes once a week and she delivers to me. And, um, it's not, it's not as like— it is a bit more, it's a bit more, I'm not going to deny it. But, um, I think it's definitely worth it having that fresh produce in our house. Um, and, you know, it, it certainly I feel like it's not as much as— like, people think have this thing on organic, it's going to be $5 to $10 more. And if you're buying from Coles and Woolies, yeah, it is probably going to be a considerable amount more. But if you make those contacts and networks with your farmer, again, it's not as much as you would think. It's probably a couple of bucks, if that, and sometimes cheaper. So that's what I find.

I think we need to think too about the, what we really get at the supermarket. When you buy a package of food, you're buying for the packaging, the transport, the factories that produced it, right back to the original source, and every step has got additional charges and profits. And when you think about what's actually in the packet, often the packaging and all those transports and handling and stuff actually add up to more than the value of the thing that you buy, that you actually get to use in the end. I think processed foods are to be kept to a minimum, and the number of ingredients, of course, as— I've forgotten his name. Said, you know, buy things with less than 6 ingredients if you're buying— if you must buy a packaged food. Yes, you start getting those numbers.

Yeah.

And you get all that, that other garbage in there. Michael Palin, it was in one of his books, Omnivore Dilemma, wrote about— yeah, keep, keep the number of, of things low. I mean, food additives and processing aids, colorings and flavorings, and in particular, many of them genetically manipulated these days. They're produced using genetically manipulated microorganisms in factories, and there are hundreds of them approved by our food regulator. So those are things to watch out for as well, along with, you know, things that keep the product looking okay even though it might be months or years old because it's just part of that mix of international trade in food ingredients and food commodities that we talked about earlier.

Yeah, if we can recap, because I know our time's coming to a close, if we can recap as it relates to Australia, the big crops that are genetically modified in Australia are soy, canola, the cottonseed plant— No, no, no, no, hang on, hang on.

No, cotton and canola. And safflower. That's all.

That's it.

We don't, we don't have, we don't have soybean, we don't have corn genetically manipulated in Australia, but they do come in as ingredients, right? Like the high fructose corn syrup that goes into Coca-Cola and Pepsi and the rest of them.

In Australia though, I believe it's glucose corn syrup that we sweeten with. It's only in America they sweeten with the high fructose corn syrup, I believe. Um, from last time I looked, in any event, they don't need—

none of them need to be labeled because they're refined. Food standards says, uh, there's no, um, evidence of, uh, problems, safety problems. And, uh, because they're refined, there's no foreign DNA or protein in them, and therefore we don't need to label any of them. So genetically manipulated ingredients can be in all sorts of things. Completely unlabeled.

So how can the consumer— so the consumer goes out, they've listened to this podcast, they're like, yep, you guys have totally sold me, I don't— I want to eliminate all genetically modified— we haven't really spoken about the health ramifications of genetically modified food, um, potentially we can do that at another time, but, um, from listening to this, they've got enough, they want to avoid genetically modified food. You said it's not labeled. So are we just not buying things from the US? Are we just not buying things with soy in them? Are we just not buying things unless they're specifically labeled organic and genetically modified or free? Is that the best way to go about it at this point?

No, no. Look at it from the other side. Look at what you should do. And what you should do is buy organic. So organic doesn't use irradiation, doesn't use genetic manipulation. It doesn't use synthetic chemicals. Those are the products that you should buy. Do look on the label. Many organic and conventional products are now labeled GM-free or non-GM. That means no genetic manipulation. The, the label is a pretty good guide to what is good to buy and eat, and I think We need to make much better use of the labels that are there. Those irradiated fresh fruit, so-called fresh fruits and vegetables, the irradiated ones will have to be labeled. Do take notice of the labels. Do ask your supermarket or your fruit and veggie store, are you selling irradiated fruits and vegetables? Do you know that they have to be labeled? Are you labeling? These are the— this is where the rubber hits the road, is where the shopper demands good quality food and is willing to pay for it. That's what makes the difference. That's supposed to be the relationship. Well-informed shoppers put the supermarket or the food store on the spot This is what we want. That's how we make the difference. The regulations, look, the government is never going to do the right thing in the current system. It's always going to, when the food or the agrochemical industry says jump, they jump. They say, how high? You know, what do you want us to do? But as a shopper, with the dollar in your hand, deciding how you're going to be a responsible person who looks after the environment, looks after your own health, says yes or no to what corporations are doing to the food supply, then that dollar is how you send the message. What you buy does matter. It does count. It does make a difference. Because, as you said, They're profit-driven, and if you deny them that profit, then they have to change their behaviour.

Yep, exactly. How can people support or learn more about GeneEthics?

Well, they can ring us up, or they can go to our Facebook page, or look at our cranky old website if they want, GeneEthics.org. It's very easy to find. Give me a bell, 0449 769066. Always happy to hear from anybody.

Awesome. Well, happy to talk to you today. It's been quite the conversation, and yeah, it's been a pleasure, and thanks for stopping by and chatting.

A pleasure. Thank you, Mark.

So that's the podcast, but we kept rolling after we, we wrapped up, and I thought that we had a, we had a great conversation after the conversation. So what you're about to hear is just us going back and forth talking about a few different issues, from, uh, genetically modified humans and what's happening with IVF in Australia pretty recently, and in Oregon in the US with some research there. We talk about farmers markets and a few other topics. Excuse the audio here, there is a little bit of sharp edits that we just had to do. I think there was a knock at the door for Bob, which he had to get up. So we've done our best to set it up to make it sound really nice, but I thought the conversation that we had after the conversation was, was so valuable that I wanted to include it here as well. So enjoy the post-show conversation here.

Basically, that's what I've done in my chapter, because I've written a chapter on soy, um, at the moment. And, um, basically it was like I was going to do a separate chapter on genetically modified food, and then I thought, no, I can actually just do it all on soy. And in the chapter on soy, talking about more about genetically modified and the chemicals as an example of, um, these things, because I'm not, I'm not an advocate of soy in terms of a a body composition diet at all. Um, yeah, to be honest, um, you know, the soy plant is naturally high in phytoestrogens, um, which is, which is just naturally there, right? Um, then the other one—

I don't know if you're talking about canola.

Yeah, yeah, that's the other— that's so, so the ones I tell people to basically avoid for body composition purposes and health, um, is soy, canola oil, um, vegetable oils, broad wood brush, vegetable oils, um, well, sorry, specifically I should say partially hydrogenated and hydrogenated oils, um, soy, industrial, industrial grain-fed dairy with a push to replace to pasture, uh, and locally grown, and soy, and gluten is, is the fourth one. So in each of those I talk about it, but, um, I tried to talk about it, but with soy it matter of, um, when I looked at the genetically modified stuff and the health, I kind of left the health implications alone completely because I thought, like, this is, this is, this is Pandora's box, um, you know, with some of it. So interesting. But the, the other 4, like, people say, what about sugar? Sugar's, sugar's pretty obvious. And if you calorie control And this has been founded in numerous studies. It's not a problem if you calorie control. Obviously, if you're a diabetic, insulin resistant, you'd be much better off not having it. I'm not gonna dispute that. In terms of body composition purposes as well, you do wanna adjust for fixed amount of proteins. And essentially, if you look at the studies that are done, when you equate the protein, regardless of whether you put them on a high fat or high carb diet, you do see the same changes in weight loss. And it was Kevin Hall's study who basically showed this. He equated for calories, he equated for protein, put one group on a high-fat diet, the other group on a high-carb diet, um, and the ones on the high-carb diet lost a little bit more fat than the ones on a low-carb diet. Um, so it's like sugar isn't one of those things that I get into too much because it's, it's presupposed the outcome in what I'm saying anyway. Like, it's like I'm not telling you to eat huge amounts of sugar. I'm telling you to eat wholesome natural foods that are locally grown. It's like, well, if you want to have a little bit of sugar, you still got to calorie control for it and attribute it to your carbohydrate intake. And if you're doing that, it's probably okay. It's not the smartest thing because it's obviously devoid of nutrients. But if you want to do it, let's say replace your post-workout carbs with a bag full of jelly beans that have been equated, you know, from your white potato or sweet potato that you want to eat, and you eat jelly beans, okay, do it. But should you do that every day of the week? No, because you're not getting the fiber and the essential minerals and all the other rest of it and the vitamins that go along with it. But from a body composition point of view, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna say a whole bunch more about that because I think, you know, for the most part it's been done and people know, like, sugar isn't good for me. And why, why am I eating sugar? Like, What's in sugar? You know, it's not—

just to get the taste, that's all.

Yeah, yeah, exactly right. We love sweet foods, and I think that's just it. It's not any more than that.

So we've got a couple of topics that we didn't really do. One of the things to talk about in the genetic manipulation thing is that in 2012, CRISPR was invented. Do you know about CRISPR? That's the so-called gene editing.

No.

So what we talked about today was actually historical. All of those crops were developed using the old-style 20th century genetic manipulation techniques, but there are now a whole new crop of new genetic manipulation techniques, some of which are not regulated at all. The regulators said we're not going to regulate those as of 2019, that are going to create a whole new suite of animals, plants, and microorganisms. They haven't done— they haven't stormed the marketplace yet, but there are things coming like this genetically manipulated salmon, for instance, that grows twice as fast. AquaBounty, yeah, that's it. Which we didn't talk about. So that's, uh, and there are non-browning apples, and there's, you know, it's, it's small-scale stuff at the moment, but for the future, if anything's going to happen at all, that's where it's going to happen. And that's where the human CRISPR genetic engineering comes in as well. And we didn't talk about the humans because the humans are now in the firing line for being genetically manipulated as well.

Well, what's the problem with genetically modifying humans? Like, I mean, let's say for example, a kid is going to be born, they have a disease, you can wipe that disease out, why not do it?

Well, that's what the argument about mitochondrial, the mitochondrial bill is about. And I sent you the reasons. Germline gene manipulation, which is what it is, is the children and their descendants are all going to be, have those, whatever they do to the genome, is going to be in those kids as well. Now at the moment that's illegal in most countries in the world, including Australia, but Australia is talking about overturning the ban on fooling about with the germ germline, which is the sperm and eggs of human beings, so that an inheritable change is made. So it's okay to fix up somebody who's got a disease, that's fine, but if you're talking about affecting the gene pool of future generations, then there are some big questions about human rights, intergenerational equity, And just what are the results going to be? We don't know, and neither do the scientists.

Or also, then that bleeds into— I don't know if you've seen the movie Gattaca.

Um, oh yes, yes, yeah.

I mean, like, yeah, that's how it always starts, right? Let's, let's start genetically modified by wiping out, like, making the, the crop resistant, and then all of a sudden it goes to let's make the fish bigger so we can eat more, and let's make the apple not brown, and let's— like, things that kind of like, you know, let's make the human taller and more handsome and stronger and smarter. And then all of a sudden you create this black market of people paying to have their babies genetically modified to have all these attributes. Like the movie Gattaca, um, yeah, where basically that guy has to work his— you know, he, he shows, you know, that, that quote, um, 12 fingers or one, it's how Play, when the guy has the piano and the guy has 6 fingers, he was genetically bred to play the piano and he's an amazing piano player. And you know, they bred him with 6 fingers. And you know, that's, that line from that movie always sticks out to me when we talk about genetically modified anything really, like, you know, in terms of people.

But I suppose that ethically is probably what it opens up to, which that It remains illegal for the moment, but it moves us very much in the direction of enhancing human beings, which is what you just described. Yeah, and of course we can't even predict what the, what the effects of those sorts of enhancements will be. You know, what does it mean to make everybody taller? You know, the world is not designed— it's, it's, it's, um, it's designed for average people. Not tall people.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, etc. Yeah, yeah, the ethical implications, uh, you're playing with Pandora's box. Once it's opened, it's, um, it's never going back in the box. It's never gone back in the box.

Well, that's right. The, uh, the technique that's— that is, um would be used with this mitochondrial manipulation is also being experimented in Eastern Europe, um, to try to renovate old eggs. So eggs from older women that won't, uh, can't be fertilized at the moment, they're trying to make them into a new product. The IVF— we're talking about corporate corporatization. The IVF industry is worth around $7 billion, I think, at the moment and is expected to go to 30 or 40 within the next decade. It's a huge industry and this bill, the MITO bill, is part of its lobbying to extend its saleable services basically. So it's like your new genetically engineered crop. That's what this whole thing is about, unfortunately.

So they're trying to, they're trying to pass it based off mitochondria dysfunction. Once it gets passed, then they're going to push it forward into the IVF, basically, because that, that was the plan.

It would be done by the IVF industry.

Oh, would be done by the IVF?

Another one will be done who will do it. Yeah, yeah, the research and the clinical use.

So, so basically, if, um, you know, a man and a woman having a baby and they, they essentially suspect, you know, their baby will have a mitochondrial dysfunction, um, obviously they, they can't then be, be applied. They can't have the, the gene manipulation done to them. But what you're saying is in vitro, uh, when the, um, the egg is being implanted with the sperm, um, that's when they do the genetic manipulation at that level.

Yeah, well, they need a donor. They, they take a donor egg and they take out the nucleus, so it's supposedly got good mitochondria, which are in the, uh, material around the nucleus. And then they take the woman's— the parent, the, the woman with the mito disease— they take the nucleus and they put her nucleus into the donated egg. And it's on the assumption that the mitochondria only operate in that outer part of the, of the cell, whereas we know that the nucleus is very implicated in having a relationship with the mitochondria. So there are no guarantees at all, and in fact, the animal work that's been done on primates in Oregon since 2009 suggests that in fact future generations will redevelop the disease. So we're actually passing the disease on in a way that's not understood at the moment.

Right.

The whole thing is very shonky.

Not only is it questionable, it doesn't work. From, from animal studies, what you're saying?

It doesn't appear to work. And, uh, another indication of that is that something similar was approved in the UK in 2015, and at the moment they're refusing to release any data on what they've found out on the, uh, saying, oh, we can't for privacy reasons even tell the other experts anything. It, it's the whole thing is clouded in secrecy. And, you know, I don't know why the Prime Minister is backing it. He's the patron of the main lobby group in favour.

Well, isn't that interesting? Because he's a devout Christian who, you know, usually when the political views come into play, devout Christians are usually against playing God, which essentially this is what this is. It's playing God. So that surprises me that he would make that decision.

I don't know what's convinced him, whether he hasn't thought about it properly or not. But yeah, and Greg Hunt, the Health Minister, is very rah-rah for it as well.

Yeah, well, he makes a bit more sense, but Scott Morrison doesn't make as much sense being his background. You'd think that he would be definite anti, you know, playing God.

You would have hoped so. The other thing is that I didn't put it in there, but they've actually called it Maeve's Law. Now Maeve is a 5-year-old child who is suffering from the disease and will not benefit from this research and development at all because it's not aimed at cures or treatments for the disease, only at prevention. Right, so that's an indication that's window dressing, it's propaganda, and it's— the whole thing is in the same vein, unfortunately. Anyway, it would be good to talk to you further about that. What I might do is send you our submission to the recent Senate inquiry, which will put you a bit more in the picture about it if you want. So you do fitness and training, uh, what What, uh, what background is yours?

Yeah, so I've been, I've been a personal trainer since 2006.

Um, oh yes, so you don't seem old enough to be a personal trainer that long.

I'm 36, 36. Um, so I just keep keeping good shape, keeping good health. Um, so I've been, I've been a trainer since 2006, um, and then started training, getting really good results for clients. Um, trainers were interested in learning from me. I had more clients and I could train, um, started growing a business, got interested in business, grew my personal training studio. Now, you know, we're booked out. Obviously this is pre-COVID, we're still, still doing well. But, um, you know, then I, I've always had a real big interest in nutrition and fueling the human body and optimizing performance. So as I started getting into that I became obsessed with bodybuilding. As I became obsessed with bodybuilding, I developed eating disorders and I suppose disorders around, um, like health. I think I just came too obsessed. And then I started getting into different work and looking at things like Weston A. Price, um, you know, Paleo, stuff like this, right? So that kind of broke my, um— it stopped becoming about, um, just vanity and started to become about health. And then as I got onto the health stuff, I started looking at like, where's the best food? And I looked at, well, the best food is from local food. I was like, why is the best food from local food? And then it became, okay, then I speak to people like Leah Keith, um, who wrote the book The Vegetarian Myth, and she's like, well, local food is this, and if you do this to the environment— so then I started being aware of environmental implications. And I speak to different people like, uh, you know, uh, Devaney, and he would tell me other political and then, yeah, so I suppose then that just attributed to— so my, what I do at my core is body composition. I help people with their body composition. I help, I train champions. I've trained, you know, I don't know how many champions I can. At studio, I've trained over 270 first place winners in a variety of different sports and disciplines, mainly physique athletes. I've trained Commonwealth Games gold medalists, Olympians, all the rest of it. So the thing is, people have come to me, they want the optimal diet and What I do is I break down what the optimal diet is, but as a way of doing that, I also have an opinion, I suppose, on optimal food. And I don't think you can divorce optimal health and optimal food from, um, like getting it from a local food. Like, like if you say to me, what's the optimal diet? It's buy it from your farmer. Um, you know, like that is Now, if you say, look, I can't afford that, okay, that's a different conversation. Do the best with what you've got. Completely fine. Make the best choices. Just make a choice today. But ultimately, if you're asking me, and most people are asking me, what is the best thing I could be doing, I'll tell them, go buy it from the local farmer. It's more nutritious, it's organic, it's better for the environment. But from a health perspective, just the fact that it's more nutritious, um, there's different, uh, micro, um, microbes in the soil that's growing for the food, which then translates to the food. So yeah, I mean, look at a good example of that is like even like the difference between grass-fed meat, uh, grass-fed dairy versus pasture-fed dairy. Pasture-fed dairy is a 1:10 ratio of omega-6 to omega-3. Pasture-fed dairy, depending whether it's summer, could have a 1:1 ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 or a 1:4 ratio. So the vitamins minerals that are in pasture-fed dairy versus the vitamins and minerals that are in grain-fed dairy, it's a complete difference.

Um, you know, microbiome is completely different, isn't it, in the animals?

I'm sure CLA content— I mean, there's so many things. So it's kind of this thing, like, people come to me for what's optimal, and by way of coming to me for what's optimal, so my interest in, um, I suppose the politics of food I didn't start— that wasn't my interest to start with, but yeah, I became more and more interested in the politics of food as I went on this journey and realized, well, actually, like, this is really kind of fucked up. There's no other way for me to say it, right? Like, it's, it's— this is really messed up, the way we're going about our food supply. And wouldn't it just be easy if we just— but like, I mean, my idols, you know, bodybuilding that, you know, like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Frank Columbo and all these guys, and you read about where they would get their food from. And, you know, what was it Randy Roach wrote about in his book that like some of those guys would, you know, go to abattoirs and get the meat fresh and they were obsessed about quality of meat and stuff like this. And it's like, well, you know, going to the farms and the thing that I found, I suppose the surprising thing that I found most rewarding is One of my friends, he owns a farm and he always sends me apples and this kind of thing. But I know the people who produce my food. I know them by name. There's something that is inherently satisfying about that. I know Julia is going to come today and deliver my vegetables and it feels good putting money in Julia's pocket rather than in Coles' pocket or Woolworths' pocket.

You seem to have done a very good lot of reading and got the evidence, so congratulations on that.

Yeah, functional medicine. So in my book, I will talk about functional medicine quite a bit, but the DNA testing I've always stayed away from because, like, there are some people that go— because it actually doesn't give you much usable data that you can— so for example, like, exactly, if if I'm working with a high-level client, I will get their bloods done. I will get maybe an organic acid test done, or if you want to see gut function, there's stool tests done. So, and I've done podcasts where we've spoken about genetics and, and looking at genetics, and usually like the only thing that from a DNA point of view we can tell is methylation. But at the same time, methylation is— you can look at a homocysteine report. If someone is, is high in homocysteine histamine. If their histamine is high, um, or low, that can be an indicator of methylation, um, generally speaking. So you can kind of infer things from, from blood reports as well with methylation. So, uh, it's not— apart from methylation, I haven't seen a real need to use genes, um, like with a methylator. We just want to know whether they're— but again, at the same time, like, what do you extrapolate from that? Do they need— do they need more B12? Or do they need more folic acid or do they need more B6? So the usable data, even if I know that you're a poor methylator or on the cusp of methylating, it doesn't necessarily go straight into the plan. So that's why DNA stuff— my wife's a naturopath— we tend to look clinically. Yeah, we look definitely more clinically at blood work, and the reference ranges we use are optimal reference ranges, not diagnosis of disease reference ranges, which the example I always give is with vitamin D. A diagnosed deficiency in vitamin D is below 50, but that's like me saying the average body fat for a female is 25% to 5%. It tells you nothing. Like 5%, you miss Australia. 25%, you're heading towards obese. So like the reference ranges need to be much more like this optimal. And then there's diagnosis of disease. What the doctor's giving you, or the lab, I should say, it's not even the doctor. What the lab infers is, do you have a disease? That's not how we look at the bloods. We're going to look at the bloods like you're going to put— we look at the bloods like you're going to give us money. As in, doctors look at the bloods because they know that you're not going to give them money because you want to bulk fill everything. Whereas our client, they're happy to spend. They want to know what's optimal. So if we say, look, this is your reference range, your reference range, look, below 50 is vitamin D. Let's say you're at 60. Really, we'd like you to be at 120. Around that number as an optimal, then the client's going to go, yeah, I'll take some vitamin D. Um, because it's not like— they're not, they're not asking us what the baseline is. It's a different conversation completely. We're not diagnosing, treating, or curing any disease. We're taking an athlete who wants to recover faster, get stronger, have mental clarity— not even an athlete, we train a lot of like CEOs, execs, high performance people, basically people who just want to be better all round. And, you know, nurses, wives, husbands, all the rest of them, you know, everyone basically. So who's seeking for what's best, and we use that as data. We use that as data to put together their training plan, put together a supplementation plan. If they need a treatment plan, they work with my wife. Basically, you know, we'll look at their gut health. If we're looking at gut health, we'll look at a stool test to ascertain what's going on with their microbiome. 'cause that's really the only way you can do it currently. I mean, bloods do tell you something that's going on about the person. You generally start with bloods, but energy system, energy pathways, we'll look at something like an organic acid test, which is hugely helpful there. But we're taking into factor a bunch of things. But DNA predominantly we haven't used. And I think the application right now, I mean, it's exciting. In the sense of that, what the future could hold. But I think we're still on the cusp of practical application of DNA. Um, again, it comes back to application. How do we apply this? Okay, you have this gene, yeah, but is it expressed? It might not be expressed, right?

So, so far too reductionist from our point of view.

Yeah, I think you're right. I think you're much better Yeah, it says you're a poor methylator, but your histamine levels are fine. They're actually, you know, quite low, which would then practically implicate that your methylation's fine. So if we give you, let's say, methyltetrahydrofolate, um, or 5-MTHF, right, it's actually going to push you past the cusp, which is then going to create an overmethylation problem, um, which is, which is the opposite of what we want. And if we, we just went alone on DNA testing and said you're a poor methylator and we didn't look at application, then there's a lot of, yeah, there's a lot of other things. So for us, it's all about like application. How do we apply?

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