YES on 37!!

Hello everyone,

A few people I know who are really into organic and healthy eating have told me they're confused about prop 37 because of the confusing anti-37 propaganda.

Right now there is NOTHING, no requirements, no labeling requirements, no requirement to let consumers know when they're buying and eating genetically engineered foods. 

GE = Genetically Engineered

GMO = Genetically Modified Organisms

But if you think you have the right to know if your food have been genetically modified to explode in the digestive tract and reduce the ability to reproduce in the bug-pests, please vote yes on 37.

Did you know anyone with Crohn's disease or gluten intolerance 15 years ago? These things all seem to have increased as GE foods started. Other countries have done studies that link degenerative, gastro-intestinal and reproductive disorders to GE foods, but so far the United States has been big agro-businesses bitch for far too long and the public has remained large in the dark.

The amount of health issues that have increased corresponding with the introduction of GE foods cannot be ignored (please see the movie - free through this link: Genetic Roulette).

Also, agro-business and big corporations have spent 45 million on opposition ads for 37. But the ads say it's poorly written with arbitrary language, and that it might cost families $400 a year and put independent farmers out of business... Think about it - when has agro-business cared about saving families money or independent farmers? Aren't these the same companies that have put countless farmers out of business with bullshit lawsuits involving seed patenting? They're spending 45 million to keep profits up by frankensteining our food and adversely affecting our health. 

Do you think you have a right to know when foods have been genetically engineered?

I think you do.

Also, you don't have to take my word for it. See Genetic Roulette or look at the articles and links below.

Get out and vote. YES on 37!

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/336242

Agribusiness, food corps. spend $45M in effort to defeat Prop 37

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Brett

By Brett Wilkins

Nov 5, 2012 - 11 hours ago in Food

1 comment

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Sacramento - As election days draws near, a collection of agribusiness and food corporations have spent more than $45 million in an effort to defeat a California ballot measure that would require the labeling of genetically modified (GM) foods.

Proposition 37, the 'California Right to Know Act,' would require labeling of many-- but not all-- foods containing genetically modified components and would prohibit marketing such foods as "natural."

Supporters of Prop 37 assert that Californians have a right to know what's in the food they eat, just like consumers in 61 countries already do. Organic farmers, environmentalist groups, health industry groups, labor unions and the state Democratic party are among those who back the initiative.

Opponents argue that Prop 37 is deceptive, deeply flawed, full of special interest exemptions and would cost farmers and consumers billions of additional dollars.

According to MapLight, a "non-partisan research organization that reveals money's influence on politics," the top 10 contributors to the 'No on Prop 37' campaign have given more than $29 million towards defeating the measure.

These are: Monsanto ($8.1 million), E.I. DuPont De Nemours & Co. ($5.4 million), Pepsico ($2.1 million), Grocery Manufacturers Association ($2.0 million), Syngenta ($2.0 million), Bayer Cropscience ($2.0 million), Dow Agrosciences ($2.0 million), BASF Plant Science ($2.0 million), Kraft Foods Global ($1.95 million) and Coca-Cola ($1.7 million).

Of the top 10 contributors to the 'Yes on Prop 37' campaign, only two-- Mercola.com Health Resources and seed-saving guru Kent Whealy-- have spent a million dollars or more.

The agribusiness and food companies opposed to the measure have outspent the 'Yes on 37' side by about 5-1.

"I think it's a David and Goliath story with the companies that manufacture or benefit from genetically modified food being Goliath," MapLight President David Newman told the Guardian.

"When you see this lopsided spending it indicates that the measure is popular with voters and opponents think they need to spend a lot to defeat it. There is a lot at stake here not just in California but how it will trend in the rest of the country," Newman added.

Indeed, an poll conducted by Zogby earlier this year found that 87 percent of Americans believe that GM foods should be labeled. A separate poll by San Francisco, California TV station KCBS found that 91 percent of Californians backed GM labeling, although recent polls showed greatly diminished supportfor the measure-- currently just below 50 percent. The constant bombardment of 'No on 37' ads, many of them containing deceptive or outright false statements, has helped to erode support for the initiative.

While agribusiness corporations and the US government claim that genetically modified foods are perfectly safe, there have been nearly no long-term scientific studies to determine whether or not they are indeed safe. One recently reported long-term study of rats fed a lifetime diet of Monsanto GM corn found that they suffered from much higher than normal rates of cancer and died significantly earlier than control rats.

There is also compelling evidence that GM foods may cause severe health and environmental problems, and the American Academy of Environmental Medicine has warned the public to avoid GM foods, claiming "there is more than a casual association between GM foods and adverse health effects, there is causation."

Around 90 percent of the corn and soybean crop grown in the United States is genetically modified.

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/336242#ixzz2BQYcDVAu

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/09/27/genetically-engineered-foods-labeling.aspx

Story at-a-glance

• The California ballot initiative – officially known as Proposition 37 – is coming up for vote on November 6. Proposition 37 will require labeling of genetically engineered foods, and end the routine industry practice of labeling and marketing such foods as "natural"
• Polls show Proposition 37 is overwhelmingly popular; about 65 percent for, compared to 20 percent against, with 15 percent still undecided. Nationally, over 90 percent of those polled say they want the FDA to require labeling of genetically engineered foods and ingredients
• Nearly 50 other nations around the world require labeling for genetically engineered foods, yet the US has persistently denied its citizens the right to know whether or not a food is genetically engineered. The industry, led by Monsanto, has even threatened states with costly lawsuits, should they decide to label GE foods
• Besides potential health effects courtesy of the genetic alterations to the crop itself, genetically engineered crops also use more agricultural chemicals, which in turn leads to increased resistance and rapid destruction of soil quality. In this way, GE crops spur the vicious cycle of resistance followed by increasing amounts of chemicals, as well as the use of increasingly toxic chemicals, such as 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid – a main ingredient of Agent Orange
• (For full story, please go to: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/09/27/genetically-engineered-foods-labeling.aspx)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10402134

Everything you HAVE TO KNOW about Dangerous Genetically Modified Foods

Dr. Mercola had this video and article on his website recently about how dangerous genetically modified foods really are.

In a recent study done in Russia (I suspect a study like this in the U.S. would be buried by pharmaceutical-agricultural companies like Monsanto), they found that the 3rd generation of genetically modified soy eating hamsters was sterile. STERILE! Think about the implications of that!

Another study found that given choice, rats won't even eat genetically modified tomatoes. Rats will eat almost anything! Soap, leather, furs, candy, snails and other rodents! They are true omnivores. But, rats avoid genetically modified foods! 


Think about it. If rats avoid genetically modified foods, we should too.


So, watch the video and read Mercola's article below.

Scary? Yes. Horrifying? Definitely.

But I'm choosing to see it differently - partly for my sanity, and partly because...well I'm realizing more and more the benefit of seeing the positive in seemingly dire circumstances.

I see this as people, strangers even, looking out for their human brothers and sisters. As long as we do that, I truly, perhaps naively, believe we're going to be all right. The key beyond looking out for each other is to pay attention and make conscious and compassionate choices for yourself, your loved ones and your fellow humans. You have a voice and it starts with your pocketbook. Vote with what you purchase. Organic, and if you can't find a particular thing organic, make sure it's not genetically modified. Avoid soy, corn, cottonseed oil, canola oil and sugar unless it is organic, as these are the most common GM crops. Reference ResponsibleTechnology.org for shopping smart. They have  an application, called Shop No GMO, that you can download for your iphone or ipod touch (and possibly ipad).

All the best to all of you!

Everything You HAVE TO KNOW about Dangerous Genetically Modified Foods from Jeffrey Smith* on Vimeo.

Jeffrey Smith is the author of Seeds of Deception and Genetic Roulette.

 Warning: 

This Common Food CausesDevastating Offspring Defects inNew Research Study  by Dr. Mercola
Russian Scientists Find Third Generation of Hamsters Sterilized by GM Soy

• The no-soy control group had 52 pups

• The non-GM soy had 78

• The GM soy had only 40, of which 25 percent died 

Nearly All of the Third-Generation GMO Babies Were Sterile!
Rampant Conflicts of Interest Put You and Your Family at Great Risk

• damage to beneficial microbes in the soil increasing the likelihood of infection of a crop by soil pathogens

• interference with nutrient uptake by the plant

• reduced efficiency of symbiotic nitrogen fixation

• overall lower-than-expected plant productivity

More Evidence of Reproductive Problems from Eating GM Foods
It’s Time to Save Yourself and Your Famiy Because White Knights Don’t Exist in Government
How to Sniff Out GMOs and Vote with Your Pocketbook

1. Soy
2. Corn
3. Cottonseed (used in vegetable cooking oils)
4. Canola (canola oil)
5. Sugar from sugar beets
6. Hawaiian papaya
7. Some varieties of zucchini
8. Crookneck squash

Tipping Point… If Europe Did it, the U.S. Can Too!
More Educational Material

I strongly believe that one of the most obvious clues about the danger of GMO foods are that just about EVERY species of animal that is offered a GMO food versus a non-GMO food will avoid the GMO one. Many times they will do this to the point of starvation, as they have an intuitive sense of the danger of this food.
Please listen to the interview as Jeffery expands on this point in great detail. It’s one you can use to effectively share with your friends and family who are not yet convinced of the dangers of GMO foods.
If you have more time with them you can bring up the sterility argument that is expanded upon with these new research findings. You might have read this before that genetically modified foods may cause sterility in future generations but now the latest research from Russia provides shocking confirmation of this potential.
This study, which was conducted by the Russian equivalent of the US National Association for Gene Security, has not yet been published, but its findings were recently announced. It’s anticipated that the details will be published later this summer.

The release of this new information provides yet another health risk, and confirmation on earlier problems related to fertility, birth weight of offspring, and infant mortality.
In this feeding study they used hamsters, an animal which has not been previously featured in GM safety studies.
One group of hamsters was fed a normal diet without any soy whatsoever, a second group was fed non-GMO soy, a third ate GM soy, and a fourth group ate an even higher amount of GM soy than the third.
Using the same genetically modified (GM) soy that is produced on over 90 percent of the soy acreage in the US, the hamsters and their offspring were fed their respective diets over a period of two years, during which time the researchers evaluated three generations of hamsters.
First they took five pairs of hamsters from each group, each of which produced about seven to eight litters each, totaling about 140 animals.
At first all went well, but serious problems became apparent when they selected new pairs from the offspring.
The first problem was that this second generation had a slower growth rate and reached their sexual maturity later than normal.
However, this second generation eventually generated another 39 litters:

So these second-generation GM soy-fed hamsters had a five-fold higher infant mortality rate, compared to the 5 percent normal death rate that was happening in the controls.

But then an even bigger problem became apparent, because nearly all of the third generation hamsters lost the ability to have babies altogether.
Only a single third-generation female hamster gave birth to 16 pups, and of those, one fifth died.
In short, nearly the entire third generation of GM soy eaters were sterile!
But it doesn’t end there.
In the GM soy-fed groups they also found an unusually high prevalence of an otherwise extremely rare phenomenon – hair growing inside the animals’ mouths. (You can see the images here.)
Says Smith:

“… it’s a very rare phenomenon but he [study author, Dr. Surov] had never in his life seen more hair in mouths of hamsters than with these GM soy-fed, third generation hamsters.”

As you may know, genetically modified crops weren’t released until 1996, starting with GM soy, corn and cotton. Modified canola came about a year later.
Please remember humans have MUCH longer life spans than rats and that GMO foods were only introduced in 1996.  This is LESS than one generation.
So we’re still nowhere near seeing the full effects of these potential ramifications in humans, as we’re only about 15 years into it. But if the effects are anything like the effects on numerous types of animals, we could be looking at sterility on a grand scale as our great-grandchildren grow up and begin to try to procreate...
The fact that the US is completely unwilling to implement the precautionary principle with regards to GM foods is incomprehensible in light of the findings we already have from animal studies.
Additionally, some 800 genetically engineered food applications have been submitted to the USDA, but not one single environmental impact statement has been prepared. So not only are human health ramifications ignored, but the entire eco system is being jeopardized.

Unfortunately, it’s clear that the US government is not in a position to make reasonable and responsible decisions related to GMOs at this point, when you consider the fact that the Obama administration has placed former Monsanto attorney and Vice President, Michael Taylor, in charge of US food safety, and serious conflicts of interest even reign supreme within the US Supreme Court!
That’s right. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is also a former Monsanto attorney, but refuses to acknowledge any conflict of interest as he’s hearing Monsanto’s third appeal for deregulation of genetically modified alfalfa seeds.
After corn, soy and wheat, alfalfa is the most widely grown crop in the US, so allowing GM alfalfa to be deregulated could spell disaster in several ways. It’s easily cross-pollinated by bees and wind, and it’s a perennial, meaning GM alfalfa could live on for years, spreading their genetically modified traits far and wide for a long period of time.
It remains to be seen how Justice Thomas rules in this case…
But in addition to conflicts of interest, we’re also dealing with government agencies that refuse to acknowledge the science produced by their own scientists.
Closely tied to the production of GM crops is the use of the herbicide Roundup, which contains glyphosate. Monsanto’s Roundup is the most widely used herbicide in the world, and contrary to the popular belief propagated by industry, pesticide use has significantly increased – DOUBLED since 2005 -- rather than decreased with the use of GM crops.
As it turns out, this is a serious problem for more reasons than one. Not only are GM food crops saturated with more pesticides than ever before, which naturally ends up in your body when you eat them, but glyphosate may also be killing the soil itself.
This startling conclusion comes straight from one of the USDA’s own scientists, Dr. Kremer. However, his employer has opted to more or less ignore his findings, which, according to this article in Grist, include evidence that glyphosate causes:

But let’s get back to the infertility caused in animals.
The evidence of third-generation sterility in hamsters is just one link in a chain of studies that show evidence of this tragic side effect.
For example, back in 2005, Dr. Irina Ermakova, one of the senior scientists with the Russian National Academy of Sciences, reported that more than 50 percent of the babies from mother rats that were fed GM soy died within three weeks, compared to a 10 percent death rate among the controls.
Again, that’s a death rate five times higher than normal – identical to the findings in the hamster study above.
Similarly, the rats were also growing more slowly, just like the hamsters, and their offspring also had lower birth weights. And again, when the rats’ offspring tried to reproduce, they too were found to be mostly sterile, but it happened sooner, with infertility striking the second generation of rats, as opposed to the third generation of hamsters.

Ermakova wanted to perform further studies to analyze the organs she’d collected from the study, but she never got the chance. Says Smith:
“She told me as we were sitting at the EU Parliament after giving a presentation there, that her boss had been pressured by his boss.
So, she was told to do no more GM food study on animals, her documents were burned on her desk, samples were stolen from her laboratory, and one of her colleagues tried to comfort her by saying, “Well maybe the GM soy will solve the overpopulation problem on earth.”
She wasn’t impressed.”

Neither am I.
However, she inadvertently stumbled upon further proof that GM soy wreaks havoc with reproductive health. She discovered that the rat chow being fed to all rats in the facility had been switched, so that all of it contained GM soy… Two months later she asked her colleagues whether or not they’d discovered any surprising changes in the infant mortality of their various studies, and yes indeed, they had!
Inexplicably, infant mortality in the animal studies performed at the National Academy of Scientific Laboratory in Moscow had skyrocketed to over 55 percent, sometimes higher.
There’s more evidence of reproductive health being harmed in various ways. Smith explains:

“[Ermakova] gave me a slide of a completely new study in which she fed male rats genetically modified soy, and it’s absolutely stunning.
On the left side of the slide is a pink testicle. On the right side of the slide, is a blue testicle.
She said that when the GM soy was fed to the male rats, it changed the color of their testicles from pink to blue, and you could see the cells on another slide, left to right, the structure of the cells in the testicle was different; a completely different blood flow.
And this reminded me of what they had studied in Italy, where they fed mice genetically modified soy and they also had changes in their testicles, including damage to the young sperm cells.
Now, if you’re damaging the young sperm cells, it could result in one of two things. They can result in infertility, or problems with the offspring.
Well, it appears that they may have had both.
In fact, with the mice, they looked at the offspring and they took the embryos out of the pregnant mothers and looked at how the DNA was functioning. And they compared the DNA of those who were born to GM soy-fed parents versus those who were fed non-GM soy and the DNA functioned differently.
So we’re seeing a fundamental change in the offspring of mice that were fed genetically modified soy, whose parents were also fed genetically modified soy.”

Other feeding studies using GM corn have also produced similar results. For example, mice fed GM corn had increasingly fewer and smaller babies the longer they stayed on the GM diet.
There are also plenty of reports about pigs, cows and other livestock having reproductive problems when fed genetically modified feed.

It’s important to realize that the key to ending the ongoing atrocity of GM foods lies not with government, but with you and me.
Consumers are going to have to drive GM foods out, and we CAN do it.
Through educating yourself, your family, friends and community about GMOs, and most importantly of all, through the food purchases you make, you can stop this unregulated science experiment.
Once we reach the tipping point, which is probably as little as five percent of the US population, the market WILL respond. They can’t afford not to!
Once enough people refuse to buy GM food products, it won’t be long before food manufacturers start switching their ingredients.

You CAN avoid GMOs, if you know what to look for.
First of all, remember there are eight genetically modified food crops:

Based on this list, anything containing soy or soy derivatives should be avoided, as well as anything containing corn, the most obvious ingredient being high fructose corn syrup.
The easiest way to avoid ending up with GM foods in your shopping cart is to do some pre-planning using this free non-GMO shopping guide.
The Institute for Responsible Technology has also created a free iPhone application that is available in the iTunes store. You can find it by searching for ShopNoGMO in the applications.
The shopping guide lists the various derivatives of each crop to be avoided, and even better, it lists hundreds of brand products in 22 food categories that are non-GMO, so if you’re still buying processed foods, at least you can easily select a brand that does not use genetically modified ingredients.

Getting into a shopping habit of continually avoiding GM food products will create pressure on the marketplace, without which there is little hope. So take this one step! Download the shopping guide, and make note of which brands to buy and which ones to avoid like the plague that they are.
Europe managed to reach their tipping point in April of 1999, ELEVEN YEARS AGO(!), within a single week of negative media which swayed the shopping habits of consumers enough for food companies to commit to stop using GM ingredients.
The idea that consumers have tremendous power is not wishful thinking. It’s an absolute fact.
Monsanto could probably be effectively bankrupted by the end of this year, if enough consumers were to take individual, proactive steps to avoid purchasing anything even remotely related to their business.
Another point that validates the effectiveness of this consumer-driven strategy is the progress we’re now seeing with high fructose corn syrup. Within the last few weeks, several major corporations have declared they’re taking HFCS out of their products due to consumer demand.

You can find loads of additional information about GMOs on the site www.ResponsibleTechnology.org.
There you can also order additional guides to hand out to friends, health care practitioners, and decision makers within your community, along with free online videos, pod casts, and articles that you can repost and republish.
Last but not least, I want to put out a call for a very special donation.
The iPhone application was created by someone who generously donated their time to make it, and if you or someone you know is a competent Android developer who is willing to assist in this cause, please contact info@ResponsibleTechnology.org.
You can also make financial donations on their website to help accelerate the tipping point against GMOs.