What are GMOs?

Genetically Modified Organisms are foods that have had genes artificially inserted into their DNA, possibly using genes from bacteria, viruses, insects, animals, or even humans.  Most Americans say they wouldn’t eat GMOs if they were labeled, but unlike most other industrialized countries, the U.S. does not label GMOs.

How can you avoid GMOs?

1. Buy organic – Certified organic products cannot contain any GMOs.  Even products only labeled “made with organic ingredients” (which means 70% of the ingredients must be organic) have to contain 100% non-GMO foods.
2. Buy foods labeled non-GMO.
3. Avoid at risk ingredients – Foods likely to be genetically modified include corn (flour, meal, starch, gluten, and syrup), sweeteners such as fructose, dextrose, and glucose, modified food starch, soy, soy lecithin, vegetable oil (which is usually soy), canola oil, cottonseed oil, and sugar (only 100% cane sugar is GMO free.  Otherwise, it could be GM beet sugar).

What fruits and vegetables are typically GM?

Very few fresh fruits and vegetables for sale in the U.S. are GM.  Small amounts of zucchini, yellow crookneck squash, and sweet corn may be GM.  Papaya from Hawaii is the only GM fruit.

What about meat, fish, and eggs?

Animals may be fed GM feed, such as grains.  Look for wild rather than farmed fish and 100% grass-fed animals.  Organic meat comes from animals fed an organic, and therefore GMO-free, diet.

1.  Why isn’t the U.S. government forcing more studies to be done regarding GM foods before allowing them to become a regular part of the American diet?

2.  Why are we trusting a corporation that does not release important data such as these to conduct safety testing on its GM foods and to feed us?

For more, see the full article.

Dr. Greene also talks about some new interesting research that suggests that a baby in utero can taste the foods its mother is eating through the amniotic fluid.  I have heard that baby can taste flavors in mother’s breast milk depending on what she ate.  But I didn’t know that baby actually drank amniotic fluid for nutrition (it contains protein!) and that the amniotic fluid can be flavored by what mom recently ate.  A study gave mothers carrot juice for 4 weeks during the pregnancy (total of 3.5 liters of carrot juice), while a control group drank water, and found that the baby’s whose mother had drank carrot juice much preferred carrots at 6 months of age to the control group.  Amazing!  That certainly suggests that mom can have a powerful influence over baby’s food preferences by what she eats when she’s pregnant.

A few other great pieces of information from the book:

• A 2008 analysis has shown that by choosing organic produce across the board, you can slash pesticide exposure from food by 97%.  You can also greatly reduce pesticide exposure by choosing domestic produce in season.
• A 2008 study of pregnant and nursing animals gave half of the mothers a balanced selection of healthy foods during pregnancy and nursing.  The other half had some healthy food, plus access to high-fat, high-sugar, high-salt treats such as candy, cheese, chocolate, cookies, crackers, donuts, and potato chips.  These mothers ate a lot of the junk food.  Once their offspring were born and weaned, they all had free access to both the healthy and the junk food.  The offspring were followed into adulthood.  It was found that as young adults, those whose mothers had the healthy diet during pregnancy and nursing were significantly more likely to have normal weight, blood sugar, insulin, triglycerides and cholesterol than the other children–even though all the offspring were offered the same diets after weaning.  The researchers hypothesized that the mother’s diet during pregnancy and nursing had the ability to turn on or off at least ten different genes that change metabolism, appetite, weight, and health.  Part of the effect could also be explained by variations in the offspring’s food preferences.  The conclusion is that the mothers’ healthy diet, during the very early stages of development, had programmed the offspring for health.
• Babies have more taste buds before birth than at any time in their life, perhaps so that they can form an imprint of Mom’s food culture even before birth.  Babies drink and digest the equivalent of up to three 8-oz bottles each day of amniotic fluid.  The fluid is flavored by what Mom has been eating and drinking.
• The American Academy of Pediatrics made this statement in 2006:  “Both amniotic fluid and breast milk provide flavor exposure to the fetus and infant.  These exposures influence taste preference and food choices after weaning.  Thus, exposure to healthier foods through maternal food consumption during pregnancy and lactation may improve acceptance of healthy foods after weaning.  Because infant responses to taste are different from mature taste, these early exposures may be critical to determining food preference later in life.”
• The Italian government’s National Institute of Research on Food and Nutrition published a study in 2008 comparing mice fed corn with and without genetic modification.  The two types of corn were grown at the same time in two neighboring fields in Italy.  Everything about the two sets of mice was the same, expect that one set was fed genetically modified (GM) corn (a variety common in the U.S.) starting as pups.  The GMO-fed mice had altered levels of immune T and B cells in their guts, spleens, and blood.  They have elevated inflammation triggers (cytokines) in their blood.  Their allergy and inflammatory systems were revved up.  This effect was significant.  It was also seen in a group of mice that were fed GM foods when they were older, although the effect was more pronounced in mice that had started GM foods as pups.  At the time this report was published, the Austrian government showed that this same GM corn reduces fertility in the offspring of those who eat it.
• Most Americans believe they have never eaten GM foods, but most eat them every day.  Thirty percent of American crops are now genetically modified.  Most soy, corn, conola, cottonseed oil, and papaya in the U.S. have been genetically modified.  Much of our livestock are fed these GM foods.  The best way to avoid GM foods is to eat organic and to cut down on consumption of foods containing corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, corn meal, dextrose, maltodextrin, corn oil, cottonseed oil, canola oil, unspecified vegetable oil, soybean oil, soy protein, soy lecithin, or textured vegetable protein.
• In Europe, Mars, Kraft, Kellogg’s, and McDonalds have removed artificial dyes from M&M’s, Skittles, Starbursts, Lunchables, cereal, Pop-Tarts, and milkshakes.  But not in the U.S.  Here they use artificial dyes.
• Babies under the age of two have can BPA levels in their blood eleven times higher than that of adults who were exposed to the same amount.

The book is written by John Robbins, the son of the founder of Baskin Robbins ice cream.  While he grew up eating ice cream daily, he now believes that better health can be achieved by avoiding animal products.  The Food Revolution (2001) is his updated argument for a vegan diet, following his popular book A Diet for a New America (1987).

The book is broken down into four parts:

1. Food and Healing – the role of animal products in human health.
2. Our Food, Our Fellow Creatures – an examination of the treatment of the animals we eat.
3. Our Food, Our World – how our diet affects the planet.
4. Genetic Engineering – an alarming account of genetic engineering, written before it became as pervasive as it is now.

Here are some interesting facts and excerpts from the Food and Healing section:

• Average cholesterol in the U.S.:  210.  Average cholesterol of U.S. vegetarians: 161.  Average cholesterol of U.S. vegans:  133.
• Incidence of high blood pressure in meat eaters compared to vegetarians:  nearly triple.
• Patients with high blood pressure who are able to completely discontinue use of medications after adopting a low-sodium, low-fat, high-fiber vegetarian diet:  58%.
• According to the National Cattlemen’s Association “The basic reason why heart disease and cancer have become the number one and number two causes of death in the U.S. and other affluent counties is that people are living longer.  What has allowed us to live long enough to run these risks?  Meat, among other things.”
• William Castelli, M.D. (the director of the Framingham Heart Study at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute), says that “some people scoff at vegetarians, but they have only 40% of our cancer rate.  They outlive us.  On average, they outlive other men by about six years now.”
• U.S. children who eat the recommended levels of fruits, vegetables, and grains:  1%.  U.S. vegan children who eat the recommended levels of fruits, vegetables, and grains: 50%.
• Protein in human breast milk: 5% of total calories.  Minimum human protein requirement according to the World Health Organization: 5% of total calories.  U.S. Recommended Dietary Allowance for adult protein intake: 10% of total calories.
• The meat industry claims that children must eat meat in order to have proper brain development.  According to research published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, the average IQ of U.S. children is 99, while the average IQ of vegetarian U.S. children is 116.
• The more animal protein people consume (which makes the blood more acidic), the more calcium is lost by our bones (which the bones leach to try to balance the pH of the more acidic blood).  The National Dairy Council funded a study in which post-menopausal women drank three additional 8-oz glasses of skim milk compared to a control group (providing 1500 mg of calcium daily).  The results, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, found that the women who drank more milk actually lost more calcium from their bones than the control group.
• A study of diet and hip fractures in 33 countries found “an absolutely phenomenal correlation” between the consumption of animal products and weaker bones/hip fractures.  The more fruits and vegetables eaten and the less animal foods consumed, the stronger the bones and the fewer the fractures.
• The countries with the highest consumption of dairy products are also the countries with the highest rates of osteoporosis: Finland, Sweden, United States, and England.
• Amount of calcium lost in the urine of a woman after eating a hamburger: 28 mg.
• Daily calcium intake for African Americans is more than 1000 mg.  Daily calcium intake for black South Africans is only 196 mg, yet African Americans experience a hip fracture rate 9 times greater than black South Africans.
• 80 different antibiotics are allowed in U.S. cow’s milk.
• 65% of adults worldwide do not drink milk.
• Cow’s milk provides 9 times more saturated fat than soy beverages.  Soy beverages provide 10 times more essential fatty acids than cow’s milk.
• The amount of antibiotics used in U.S. hospitals in 2001 was 100 times greater than 35 years previously.  Despite this, the Union of Concerned Scientists declares that antibiotic use in factory farms account for the overwhelming majority of antibiotic use in the country.
• In 1998, the journal Science called the meat industry “the driving force behind the development of antibiotic resistance in certain species of bacteria that cause human disease.”
• 3 million pounds of antibiotics are administered to people in the U.S. annually, while 24.6 million pounds are administered to livestock.
• The European Union has prohibited treating any farm animal with sex hormones to promote growth (since many of these hormones are known to cause human cancers and reproductive dysfunction) since 1995.  After the EU banned the sale of hormone-treated meat within the EU, the U.S. complained to the World Trade Organization about the lost profit.  The EU had to pay the U.S. $150 million per year as compensation, but they are willing to do this to prevent U.S. beef from being sold in their countries.
• In 1999, the EU tested meat samples from the U.S. Hormone Free Cattle program and found that 12% had in fact been treated with sex hormones.

Facts from the Our Food, Our Fellow Creatures section:

• Traditionally, it took a broiler chicken 21 weeks to reach 4-pound market weight.  But today, with the birds having been systematically bred for obesity, it takes only 7 weeks.  1/3 the time!  If a 7 pound human baby grew at the same rate that today’s turkeys and broiler chickens grow, when the baby reached 18 weeks of age, it would weight 1500 pounds.
• Broiler chickens now grow so rapidly that the heart and lungs are not developed well enough to support the remainder of the body, resulting in congestive heart failure and tremendous death losses.  As the birds become rapidly obese, severe vitamin and mineral deficiencies are common, leading to blindness, kidney damage, bone and muscle weakness, brain damage, internal bleeding, anemia, deformed beaks and joints, etc.
• 90% of broiler chickens are so obese by 6 weeks of age that they can no longer walk.
• Turkeys today grow so fast that it is impossible for them to mate naturally.  They simply can’t get close enough to physically manage.  All 300 million turkeys born annually in the U.S. are the result of artificial insemination.
• The natural lifespan for a dairy cow is 20 – 25 years.  Under modern conditions, they are lucky to live 4 years.
• In a natural situation, cows produce enough milk to feed one or two calves.   In today’s dairy factories, they actually produce 20 times that amount.  As a result, half of dairy cows in the U.S. have a painful udder infection called mastitis.
• According to Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation (2001), “Current FDA regulations allow dead pigs and horses to be rendered into cattle feed, along with dead poultry.  The regulations not only allow cattle to be fed dead poultry, they allow poultry to be fed dead cattle.”
• Recycled chicken manure is routinely incorporated into the diets of U.S. chickens.
• 90% of U.S. chickens are now infected with leukosis–chicken cancer–at the time of slaughter.

This book was the final nail in coffin for my decision that my family would eat a mostly vegetarian diet from this point forward.  My journey began with the book The China Study and seeing the film Food, Inc. It continued with a trial summer of eating as vegan as possible and getting most of our food from a local, organic CSA.  In the past 6 months, the only meat we have consumed has been grass-fed, organic, free range, and often local (and we eat it less than once a month).  We have cut back significantly on dairy and eggs and eat more vegetables and fruit than ever before.  We haven’t eliminated meat entirely (we had turkey for Thanksgiving), but it is consumed rarely and mainly for special occasions (as recommended in the book The Blue Zones).  Most importantly, we only consume meat/poultry when the animal’s life and death is satisfactory to us.  I actually find this way of eating very enjoyable and not nearly as limiting as I was worried it’d be.  We subscribe to Vegetarian Times and love cooking recipes from the cookbook Vegan Planet.

But what about my children and their health?  Even my own mother, who understands much of the reasoning behind our decisions, still believes it’s good for her grandsons to eat meat  (and will often feed it to them when they visit her).  Why is it so hard for Americans to believe that good health can be achieved without meat and dairy?  The true testament to our family’s new diet is in the health and weight of my 2-year old.  Starting in June, he drank only water (no cow’s milk, soy milk, or juice) daily.  All his calories came from food.  I started giving him nuts (except peanuts) for fat, along with lots of avocados.  Unlike most American children that get their fat from dairy products (which means mostly saturated fats), my son was eating only unsaturated fats.  My children ate mostly beans, grains, vegetables, fruit, and olive oil.  They each had probably 2-3 eggs per week.  We ate very little soy (mostly in the form of soy milk splashed on our oatmeal).  We hardly ever ate processed foods and even made our own bread.  Five months after this began, my 2-year old has his annual check-up with his pediatrician.  And he had actually gone up from 20th percentile to 30th percentile on the weight chart.  This from a child that drinks only water and eats veggies, fruits, nuts, and beans!  His blood iron levels were also well within the healthy range.  I am confident that eating fewer animal products means my family is getting better nutrition than we were before.  Even the pediatrician was impressed!

You don’t have to go completely vegetarian or vegan.  In fact, I think it’s best to make major lifestyle changes slowly.  Try finding a few vegetarian recipes you like and replacing meat dinners with them a couple nights a week.  Try using less cheese in your dishes.  Try eating more nuts, seeds, and nut butters.  You might be pleasantly surprised, as I was, at how satisfying meat-less food can be.

For more, visit John Robbins’ website foodrevolution.org.

• 97% of the vegetables grown at the beginning of the 20th century are now extinct.  Very few varieties of fruits and vegetables are grown today.
• Companies don’t want genetically modified (GM) foods labeled because they don’t want consumers to know about it, but also perhaps more importantly, because we can’t trace the health effects of GM foods if they’re not labeled.
• 75% of Europeans don’t want GM foods in their stores.
• More than 80% of Americans polled want GM foods labeled in the U.S.
• Japan is distrusting of GM foods.  A Japanese trade representative concerned about GM foods said “we’ll watch the children in the U.S. for the next 10 years.”  This is chilling to me–that other countries acknowledge that American children are essentially lab rats on which we test GM foods and other ingredients.
• Some GM modified crops contain a “terminator gene,” which is patented by the U.S. government.  This terminator gene is designed to allow crops to grow for one season only and then terminate.  This seems like an especially dangerous gene to be releasing into our environment and food supply.
• In the U.S., corn, wheat, cotton, and soy is subsidized by our government.  In Europe,  farmers are subsidized instead.
• Thanks to GM seeds, farmers are now seeing “superweeds,” which are resistant to standard herbicides.  So we are actually having to spray the crops with more chemicals, not less.
• In 1992, the FDA said that GM food can be toxic, create new allergens, lower nutrition, and impair research animal immune systems.  Despite this, the Bush administration advised that there be no regulations on biotech companies.
• In 2003, 100 million acres in the U.S. grew GM corn, canola, soy, and cotton.

• Our food supply has changed more in the last 50 years than in the previous 10,000.
• In 1996, 2% of soybeans grown in the U.S. were genetically modified.  In 2008, 90% were.
• One corporation, Monsanto, owns the patent to all those genetically modified seeds.  Farmers are not allowed to save seeds for the next season (which farmers have done for thousands of years) and must purchase them new each year.  If one of Monsanto’s 75 investigators finds farmers saving seeds, or finds Monsanto’s patented seeds growing on their land, the farmer is prosecuted.
• 70% of processed foods contain genetically modified ingredients.  They do not have to be labeled to tell you so, out of the industry’s fear that this would alarm consumers before industry has had a chance to demonstrate their safety.  Before!
• The CDC estimates that 75 million Americans are sickened, 325,000 are hospitalized, and 5,000 die each year from foodborne illnesses.
• Pastured cattle (grass-fed) do not contain E. Coli bacteria in their guts.  This is a product of feeding them corn, something cows were not designed to tolerate.  The corn diet produces E. Coli bacteria in the cow’s rumen, which then contaminates the cattle feces.  In factory farms, cattle stand several inches deep in their own manure.  It’s nearly impossible to keep any E. Coli contamination–if it exists– in the manure off their fur, off their carcases, and out of our food supply.
• Our judicial system has decided that the USDA does not have the authority to close down meat processing plants that repeatedly produce contaminated food, such as hamburger meat containing E. Coli.
• The industry’s solution to tainted meat is a new technical process–an ammonia bath.  That’s right, your ground beef now undergoes a bath in the toxic chemical ammonia to kill potentially dangerous bacteria.
• The average food product travels 1500 miles to reach you.  This means that food transportation produces more than 30,000 tons of greenhouse gases every year.
• In Jan 2008, the FDA approved the sale of meat and milk from cloned livestock, despite the fact that Congress voted twice in 2007 to delay the FDA’s decision on cloned animals until additional safety and economic studies could be completed.
• It used to take 3 months to raise a chicken.  Now we do it in 49 days, thanks to growth hormones in the chickens’ feed.  Some chickens grow to such unnatural sizes that they can’t walk more than a few steps at a time.
• Approximately 10 billion animals (chickens, cattle, hogs, ducks, turkeys, lamb, sheep) are raised and killed in the US annually.  Nearly all of them are raised on factory farms under inhumane conditions.

Several books describe factory farming practices in painful detail, but there’s something different about seeing it in a film.  What the U.S. does for the sake of cheap meat, dairy, and eggs is appalling.  And what the industry does to keep Americans in the dark about what’s really going on their food is unacceptable.  See this film.  Become informed.  And vote with your money each time you’re at the grocery store.  If Walmart decided to stop selling dairy from cows treated with rBGH (synthetic growth hormones) in response to consumer demand, than what you buy does matter.  Industry will respond to consumer desires.  Change is possible.  If you want it, then don’t support the companies that sell you factory farmed meat or genetically modified foods.  I hope this film can do for food what The Inconvenient Truth did for global warming.

The Unhealthy Truth is written by a mother of four.  Her youngest child had a severe allergic reaction to eggs and it started her on a search for answers that she documents in her book–why are so many children developing allergies these days, what has happened to our food supply in the last few decades, and why is American food not as safe as that found in other countries like Japan, Australia, and those in Europe?  At first, I was hesitant to read a book written by “just a mom.”  What were her qualifications?  I’d much rather read a book by a scientist, doctor, or some other highly educated, qualified person.  But I have to say that the author’s role as a mother made her book very accessible and easy to read.  It was also great to relate to her as a parent.  And in the end, I think more people will enjoy a book like this than books written by Ph.D.s and MDs, as I, a recovering scientist, do.  After all, this book is about as close to a page-turner as you can get while still delivering as much information as it does.  I honestly read the first half of it in about 24 hours.

Here are some startling statistics found in the book:

• The most recent statistic on the number of Americans affected by food allergies is from 2002, when an estimated 7 million Americans suffered from them.  The author, Robyn O’Brien, says that this is part of the problem.  Virtually no research is being done on how much food allergies are increasing in the U.S. or why or how we can prevent it.
• The prevalence of peanut allergies among children doubled between 1997 and 2002.  In that 5 year period, allergies increased 20% each year.  Wouldn’t it be nice to know what’s happened in the last seven years?!
• The only food allergy study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in the last eight years shows a 265% increase in the number of hospitalizations related to food allergies.
• Asthma is also on the rise in the U.S.  A 2005 report from the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology found that approximately 20 million Americans, or about 10% of the population, has asthma.  One in eight children in the U.S. suffer from asthma.
• According to author Joel Fuhrman, MD, about 80% of the calories in a typical American’s diet comes from white flour, sugar, and oil, while about 60% of calories come from processed foods.  Only 4% of the average American diet consists of “real food,” which includes vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds, beans, etc.

Robyn O’Brien believes there are four major reasons for why immunological disorders, like food allergies and asthma, are on the rise.  One, our environment has shifted from natural to more industrialized.  Two, we are exposed to excessive amounts of antibiotics, both from prescriptions and increased consumption of antibiotic-laden meat, dairy, poultry, and eggs.  Three, we have recently experienced a rise in pollutants and environmental toxins.  And lastly, our tendency to eat more processed foods filled with chemical additives and preservatives, while eating fewer natural whole foods.

After O’Brien elaborates on the rise in allergies and what may be contributing to it, she goes on to examine other problems in our food supply–specifically the prevalence of soy and the health problems it may cause, the abundance of recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) in our dairy and meat,  the problems with food corporations like Monsanto and the disturbing connections they have with regulatory agencies like the FDA, how common genetically modified (GM) foods are in our food supply (corn, soy, and potatoes, unless organic, are most likely genetically engineered), and probably most upsetting to me, how other industrialized nations are exposed to much fewer additives, preservatives, and GM foods than we are in the U.S.  It’s alarming to read that major corporations have taking food colors and aspartame out of European versions of their products, but left them in the ones sold in the U.S.  In Europe, any food containing more than 0.9% GM ingredients must be labeled so.  In the U.S., we only label organic foods and non-rBGH foods (to say that there’s no difference between rBGH treated cows and those without artificial growth hormones).  By the end of chapter 7, it’s evident that our food supply is unhealthy and that our regulatory agencies are failing the American people.  Why are foods deemed dangerous in other countries readily available in American grocery stores, and without proper labeling so that we can avoid them if we choose to?  As an American, I’m insulted and angry!

O’Brien points out that many of the countries with stronger regulations and more responsive corporations have government-provided health care.  This means that the government is more interested in keeping their people healthy as they will foot the bill for any illness that arises from poor quality food.  In the U.S., no one is really motivated to keep Americans healthy–not the food industry that wants to make food as quickly and cheaply as possible, no matter what the hidden costs, not the drug companies that benefit when more people need allergy medication or EpiPens, not the government that is so clearly entangled with the food and drug companies, and not the scientists and doctors whose research is often funded by the corporations who need certain results (O’Brien notes that 100% of industry funded studies on aspartame found it safe, while 92% of non-industry studies raised safety concerns.)  The American public has a hard time knowing which studies to be concerned about as funding isn’t often fully disclosed.  Our opinion on things like food colors, aspartame, and GM foods is more gray because the research seems inconclusive.  But if we knew who funded what studies, perhaps we’d see that the research without food industry ties was finding some of our food unsafe, and then we’d be able to react to it.  Then maybe the food corporations would listen and respond to us, as they have done in other countries.

The section on GM foods is especially important for Americans to read.  We have a right to know what’s happening to our food supply and how a single corporation, Monsanto, is benefiting while we may be suffering.  I would like to include many of the startling facts from the book here, but I think you’re better off checking the book out yourself and reading it in its entirety.  O’Brien quotes a prominent European scientist, Arpad Pusztai, who researched GM foods as saying “the situation is like the tobacco industry.  They knew about it but they suppressed information.  They created misleading evidence that showed that the problem wasn’t so serious.  And all the time they knew how bad it was.  Tobacco is bad enough…. The size of genetic modification and problems it may cause us are tremendous.”  O’Brien also raises an important question for American parents to address:  “If Europeans are still hesitant to put GM seeds in their soil or feed GM crops to their cows, and if they continue to insist on labeling GM ingredients at levels of less than 1%, then what in the world are we doing here in the United States feeding unlabeled genetically engineered foods to our children?”

Unfortunately, the strength of the book dissipates by the final chapter, at least in my opinion.  In chapter 8, O’Brien discusses how parents can make changes in their children’s diet.  After all the alarming information she shares in the previous seven chapters, I was discouraged to see how weak her recommendations were.  I realize that she believes parents are too busy, or can’t afford, to make the changes necessary, but I wish she has set the bar a little higher.  For example, she recommends replacing Cheetos with Fritos, Diet soda with regular soda, strawberry ice cream with vanilla ice cream (apparently to avoid the food coloring, but what about the rBGH-laden milk and cream, or non-organic ingredients in vanilla ice cream?).  I find many of her recommendations don’t jive with the rest of her book and her repeated comments on how organic was just too expensive for her family was frustrating.  After all she had said about genetically engineered foods, I would have expected a full endorsement of organic products, since organic foods by law may not be genetically modified and since organic farmers do not represent or support the monstrous corporations that produce typical industrialized food.  In all fairness, she does offer an appendix on organic foods.  But it would have been nice if her convincing arguments in chapters 1-7 were followed by some advice for serious change, not minimally inconvenient, affordable, time-saving change.  It was as if she failed to realize that the American demand for fast, convenient, cheap food that our picky children would eat was exactly what got us into a place where corporations were genetically modifying our food, then adding preservatives, colors, and other synthetic additives to keep it fresher longer, cheaper, and more appealing.  Healthy, wholesome, and nutritious are not usually synonymous with quick, easy, and convenient.  Maybe that’s why Europeans have a safer, healthier food supply than we do.  Not just because their government is organized differently and they have less confusing research taking place, but because they have an innately different relationship to food than we do.

But I don’t want that final chapter to overshadow how wonderful the rest of the book is.  Americans have the right to know what’s happening to our food supply.  We have a right to know who is funding the research that shows these chemicals in our food are safe and muddles the true, unbiased results that beg to be heard.  We deserve to know that the corn and soy and potatoes we eat now contain pesticide genes in them, thanks to genetic engineering, and that one of the only human trials on GM foods found that this DNA never seen in food before may be transfering to our guts.  We deserve to know that our doctors, who may be downplaying the importance of information like that found in this book, have their research funded by the maker of EpiPens, or companies  that make pharmaceuticals for allergies, or companies that fund genetic engineering or biotech corporations.  Americans should get full disclosure!  We need to demand it.  And this book will do a great job of showing you how you are being lied to, how you are being manipulated, how corruption is prevalent in the agencies we trust to protect us, and how knowledge is power.  Read this book.  Ignorance is bliss, but at what ultimate cost?