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The New Crisis: Food, Not Oil

Sunday, January 6th, 2008

Health Freedom Requires Healthy Food

The Natural Solutions Foundation is concerned with the quality and health-promoting impact of food, thus our strong opposition to the continuing degradation of the global food supply through Codex and the use of unlabeled and dangerous food components and treatments such as genetically modified foods, pesticides, growth hormones and irradiation. We are also aware that if we are to support a sustainable world and its health needs through healthy and abundant food, we must reclaim food production. For that reason, we have initiated the International Decade of Nutrition (IDN). The premise upon which IDN is based is that we already have enough information, technology and capacity to eliminate world hunger and most world disease. Of course, we do not know everything we will know, but what we know now is sufficient to make these goals an attainable reality using simple, effective and high-impact/low-tech procedures to grow and reclaim food production and help local farmers sustain themselves, their families and their communities with clean, inexpensive and healthy food.

We are currently in discussion with a leading-edge company to provide one of those technologies to a number of pilot projects in the desert, the jungle, temperate climates, etc., to field test a safe, sustainable, and effective method to increase crop yield by as much as 6 times, nutrient density by the same amount, reduce water usage substantially and virtually eliminate crop loss post harvest.

These means will allow subsistence and community-based farmers to stay on their land, feed their communities with the clean, chemical free food they grow, support their families and resist the forces of the industrialization of the world’s food supply: Codex, genetically modified crops and animals, chemical farming and their combined pressure to take away the land and livelihood.

In February of 2008 General Stubblebine and Dr. Laibow will visit African countries to initiate agricultural projects using these high tech options and are in discussion with a Thai NGO for similar pruposes.

Here is what the Financial Post has to say about the new shortage of food caused by the use of farmland for bio fuels:

Forget oil, the new global crisis is food

BMO strategist Donald Coxe warns credit crunch and soaring oil prices will pale in comparison to looming catastrophe

Alia McMullen, Financial Post Published: Friday, January 04, 2008

Corn grows in a farm field near Seneca, Illinois. Rising demand for grain to make fuel, food and livestock feed has helped push the prices of corn and soybeans.Scott Olson/Getty ImagesCorn grows in a farm field near Seneca, Illinois. Rising demand for grain to make fuel, food and livestock feed has helped push the prices of corn and soybeans.

A new crisis is emerging, a global food catastrophe that will reach further and be more crippling than anything the world has ever seen. The credit crunch and the reverberations of soaring oil prices around the world will pale in comparison to what is about to transpire, Donald Coxe, global portfolio strategist at BMO Financial Group said at the Empire Club’s 14th annual investment outlook in Toronto on Thursday.

“It’s not a matter of if, but when,” he warned investors. “It’s going to hit this year hard.”

Mr. Coxe said the sharp rise in raw food prices in the past year will intensify in the next few years amid increased demand for meat and dairy products from the growing middle classes of countries such as China and India as well as heavy demand from the biofuels industry.

“The greatest challenge to the world is not US$100 oil; it’s getting enough food so that the new middle class can eat the way our middle class does, and that means we’ve got to expand food output dramatically,” he said.

The impact of tighter food supply is already evident in raw food prices, which have risen 22% in the past year.

Mr. Coxe said in an interview that this surge would begin to show in the prices of consumer foods in the next six months. Consumers already paid 6.5% more for food in the past year.

Wheat prices alone have risen 92% in the past year, and yesterday closed at US$9.45 a bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade.

At the centre of the imminent food catastrophe is corn – the main staple of the ethanol industry. The price of corn has risen about 44% over the past 15 months, closing at US$4.66 a bushel on the CBOT yesterday – its best finish since June 1996.

This not only impacts the price of food products made using grains, but also the price of meat, with feed prices for livestock also increasing.

“You’re going to have real problems in countries that are food short, because we’re already getting embargoes on food exports from countries, who were trying desperately to sell their stuff before, but now they’re embargoing exports,” he said, citing Russia and India as examples.

“Those who have food are going to have a big edge.”

With 54% of the world’s corn supply grown in America’s mid-west, the U.S. is one of those countries with an edge.

But Mr. Coxe warned U.S. corn exports were in danger of seizing up in about three years if the country continues to subsidize ethanol production. Biofuels are expected to eat up about a third of America’s grain harvest in 2007.

The amount of U.S. grain currently stored for following seasons was the lowest on record, relative to consumption, he said.

“You should be there for it fully-hedged by having access to those stocks that benefit from rising food prices.”

He said there are about two dozen stocks in the world that are going to redefine the world’s food supplies, and “those stocks will have a precious value as we move forward.”

Mr. Coxe said crop yields around the world need to increase to something close to what is achieved in the state of Illinois, which produces over 200 corn bushes an acre compared with an average 30 bushes an acre in the rest of the world.

“That will be done with more fertilizer, with genetically modified seeds, and with advanced machinery and technology,” he said.

Posted in CODEX Consequences, International Decade of Nutrition | No Comments »

And the Babies Die – Codex Blog No. 5, November 14, 2007

Thursday, November 15th, 2007

November 14, 2007

Today was the final day of deliberations for the Codex Committee on Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Uses (CCNFSDU). Tomorrow is a day off for the delegates who get to slog around in the cold, gray and wet German November (it snowed a bit today, mixing in with the rain for a fun walk back to the meeting hall after lunch!). While the delegates slosh around (or take the guided tour of German underground bunker cities designed for residence during a nuclear war – I kid you not!) the CCNFSDU Secretariat will take the discussion and turn it into a final report. Then delegates get 1.5 hours to examine it and the final session of the meeting is held where there is usually blood on the floor by the time the session is finished as delegates fight to have their positions included in the report if the CCNFSDU power elite does not want them there or fight to correct what their contributions have been altered into.

At the Codex Alimentarius Commission (CAC) in Rome this past July, in fact, the Swiss delegation was so peeved about the report and its abuse of their position that they fought comma by comma, word by word, for several hours (overtime, of course) to get things the way they wanted them. So these final sessions are always fraught with numbing tedium interspersed with food fights. The whole thing would be pretty interesting (and occasionally entertaining from an anthropological or political science point of view) if the matter were not so serious and of such consequence to so many people on the global stage. If you have been reading the Natural Solutions Foundation email Health Freedom Alerts (which you can sign up for at www.HealthFreedomUSA.org) or have read, for example, the Codex 7 Point Summary (https://www.staging.healthfreedomusa.com/index.php?page_id=157) you know that Codex is the international Food Code and that it serves not the needs of the needy or even the average consumer, but the multinational interests which profit from industrialization and globalization of the world’s food supply: Big Pharma, Big Chema, Big Biotech, Big Agribiz and Big Medica. Countries, especially the developing ones, mistakenly look to it for a level of safety and technical guidance on which they can base their own food laws and codes, erroneously believing the propaganda it puts out repeating endlessly that the purpose and impact of the Codex is protective and will enhance health and food safety through international trade and domestic regulation.

In fact, of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Codex is dangerous, deceptive and the very unequal playing field of the very rich countries and the multinational corporations whose interests they represent at Codex and elsewhere on the global stage.

Consider India: India is the world’s second largest country with a population of 1.2 billion people. She has a huge land mass and, like many developing countries, has a vast gulf between the affluent and the poor. The affluent include the burgeoning middle class, the obscenely wealthy. ” India’s middle class constituted less than 10% of the population in 1984 and 1985, according to the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER). Since then, it has more than tripled, but is [as of 2001 it was]still less than 20%. [It was projected in 2001 that] India’s individual purchasing power will climb from $2,149 in 1999 to $5,653 per person in 2020 — and to $16,500 in 2040. (Global Currents, http://www.theglobalist.com/DBWeb/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=2195)
But the number of people living in slums in India, Asia’s fourth largest economy, has more than doubled in the past two decades. According to the Indian Junior Minister for Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, Kumari Selja, urban slum dwellers rose from 27.9 million in 1981 to 61.8 million in 2001 – the latest census data available.

India regularly asks for help from Codex, and particularly the CCNFSDU, which deals with food for special dietary uses, on setting standards for cereal based foods for children who are starving and seriously underweight. India, supported by many African and Asian countries, including, for example, Benin and Thailand, repeatedly states that the problem there is not reducing calories for children’s food (which occupies CCNFSDU’s focus when it deals with items like how to implement the World Health Organization’s much neglected Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health (http://www.who.int/gb/ebwha/pdf_files/WHA57/A57_R17-en.pdf)
but finding internationally acceptable ways to increase the calories, protein and other nutrients available to save the lives of their millions of starving children.

Year after year this concern is raised by India when the Codex Alimentarius Commission (CAC), Codex Committee on Food Labeling (CCFL) and CCNFSDU deal with calorie and sugar restriction in foods for infants and children (and decide, year after year, not to do the right thing. Sugar is left in baby food and weaning foods despite its health risks (including habituation for its young consumers), dangerous additives are permitted (like dangerous artificial colors, preservatives, artificial sweeteners which cause brain cancer, for example, and mono sodium glutamate). And year after year, nothing happens to help India set international standards to protect its starving children from supposedly calorie and protein enhanced foods which are, in fact, neither or which do not provide necessary nutrients, calories, protein, etc.

Consider: There are 146 million children in the developing world under the age of 5 who are underweight and more than half of them live in South Asia. Out of these 146 million babies, toddlers and preschoolers (assuming that they might some day go to school), 106 million of these dangerously underweight children live in 10 countries and 57 million of these starving children live in India Undernutition, according to the World Health Organization Report (2002) if the underlying cause of 60% of all deaths in children under 5 years of age (this figure was endorsed by Lancet in 2003). And, of course, the UNICEF publication “Progress for Children, a Report Card on Nutrition, No. 4, May 2006” says definitively that “the world must alter its priorities in order to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of reducing child under nutrition by half in 2015”. By the way, I believe firmly that the international organizations like UNICEF, WHO, FAO organizations are deeply flawed and, at some upper stratum, may be directly involved in highly dangerous social culling policies. But, like Codex, they are composed primarily of armies of good men and women doing good work, or trying to, while, unlike Codex, they often produce highly useful and informative documentation of the problems which the world faces.

One of the tricks that Codex uses is to create meaningless standards on the basis that they pertain “to the general population”, not to any single group in order to make sure that the apparent underlying goal of mandating under nutrition for the global population (while proclaiming just the opposite, of course) is achieved. If you recall that Codex functions as, in essence, a pharmaceutical and chemical marketing strategy, and that healthy people do not buy many drugs, this makes good sense. That is why, in our opinion, nutrients are restricted as if they were toxins (through phony science like “Risk Assessment” and the types and levels of available nutrients (such as the European-banned boron and vanadium which Dr. Grossklaus, who lives in Europe, admitted that he is taking to help heal his bone injury) to levels so low that they cannot aid anyone’s health very much but do make sure that people are good customers for Big Pharma and Industrialized Illness Care (IIC).

There has been an ongoing struggle in CCNFSDU to introduce meaningful nutritional levels through the adoption of Nutrient Reference Values (NRVs) which would tell consumers all over the world how much of each nutrient, micro or macro nutrient, they should aim for. At least that was the intent of South Africa’s years long work on the topic. You may remember that in 2005, at the CCNFSDU meeting in Bonn, Germany, when the South African Delegate attempted to present the results of a several-year long Working Group to establish these NRVs “to promote optimum health” she was rudely and stunningly cut off by Dr. Grossklaus with these memorable words: “Codex is not about health. Codex is about trade. It would be nice if Codex could provide nutrient levels for health, but it is about trade, not health!” He then refused to allow her to proceed with her report (on which she and the other members of the Working Group had been working for years and instructed her to go back and redo the NRVs and bring them back next year! South Africa declined and Korea took over. During the presentation and discussion of the NRVs this year, Korea did not rouse the ire of the Chairman since it dutifully presented the principles, not the content, of the NRV standard. BUT the NRVs were declared to be “for the general population” and “for labeling purposes only, not for health or intake guidance”.

Here’s what that means:

NRVs will be listed on every package of food in international trade (and in domestically compliant countries). Consumers will see that this food provides x percent of their daily requirement of a particular nutrient and will, quite naturally, assume that this requirement applies to them. What they will not know is that the amount of the nutrient has nothing at all to do with their needs as a healthy man or woman, a pregnant woman, a man with HIV, a post menopausal woman, a 4 year old child, etc. They will not know that the NRV is derived from a process which took assumptions about a mythical ‘average expectable global diet’ without any reference to genetic, gender, environmental, health status or other specifics and set those values so low that, through the process of Risk Assessment, the nutrient in question might keep an average expectable global body alive, but certainly will not support health under any stress at all, let alone “optimal health”.

In the ladies room, while washing our hands side by side I spoke to the African delegate who invited me to mail her my comments before each meeting so that she could speak them since I cannot and the only “Health Freedom” observer group admitted by Codex does not do so either. I took the opportunity of clean hands and a quite room to say the following to her:
“Could you please explain to me”, I said, how it works that health claims for foods are strongly discouraged because, as stated earlier today in the meeting, ‘health claims on foods give the consumer the false impression that those foods confer a nutritional benefit'” [False? that’s why the claim is there: to tell the consumer that the food confers a nutritional benefit – REL] “but NRVs, which every consumer in the world will assume pertains to them when they read the food label, are to be derived from an amalgam of population statistics, where they exist, or from ‘probabalistic statistics’ [I swear: that is the term of art here in Codex for making up data! -REL] and ‘corrected’ by Risk Assessment to make sure that the nutrient levels do not exceed some mythical ‘Upper Safe Level’ which does not promote health?” She looked at me for a long time and then slowly said, “It doesn’t work. That makes no sense at all. I had never thought about it before!” Then we got into a long discussion about the real game of Codex and I handed her our updated Nutricide DVD (https://www.staging.healthfreedomusa.com/index.php?page_id=156) with the added section on how the “Codex Two Step Process” works to allow countries to protect themselves from the deadly and irrational standards and guidelines of Codex and from the World Trade Organization’s trade sanctions. I also gave her a hard copy of the Codex eBook (https://www.staging.healthfreedomusa.com/index.php?page_id=220)which shows how the Codex Two Step Process can be applied, in this case to the deadly Vitamin and Mineral Guideline (ratified by Codex July 4, 2005, Rome). So Codex is about trade, health claims would give people the idea that certain foods were good for them so must not be allowed without significant scientific agreement, (a standard which foods, which are safe, cannot meet and which the US FDA does not require drugs, which are dangerous, to meet) and NRVs are for labeling only and are derived from somebody’s guess about what the global average expectable person might need without any intent to provide health information or guidance.

Whew! What did the CCNFSDU body do? It fought over whether these NRVs should be produced for vitamins and minerals including global average expectable children from 6 to 36 months or just for global average expectable adults. The compromise was to produce a request for New Work that would go to the CAC and then the new NRVs, the ones that do not promote health but trade, would be produced for adults, following which, years and years down the road, they would also be produced for global average expectable children from 6 to 36 months. Consumers can rest assured that trade, if not their health, will someday be
enhanced by having meaningless information on the labels of their prepared food. What a way to go, Codex. Protecting the health of consumers, as mandated by your mandate:

The main purposes of this Programme are protecting health of the consumers and ensuring fair trade practices in the food trade, and promoting coordination of all food standards work undertaken by international governmental and non-governmental organizations.

http://www.codexalimentarius.net/web/index_en.jsp

Maybe tomorrow we can talk about the proud announcement of the Chair of the Codex Committee on Food Labeling (CCFL), Dr. Ann McKenzie, that the CCFL’s contribution to the implementation of the WHO Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health (which CCFL and CCNFSDU have been mandated to implement) was to set up a committee to standardize the names of foods internationally! Now that should certainly make a difference to the folks in the world dying from a contaminated food supply rich in sugar and saturated fats, artificial flavors, colors and pesticides, veterinary drugs and so forth, don’t you think?

We could also talk about the fact that, not to be outdone, despite lots of what seemed to me like snide and contemptuous references to the Global Strategy during the meeting (and at last night’s pleasant social event for delegates) by the Dr. Grossklaus, the CCNFSDU decided that it had already fulfilled its requirement to implement the Global Strategy since they had sent a letter on the topic last year!

What support for the needs of the developing world! But, then, most of them are pretty poor and have no money to buy drugs. Do you think…….? You don’t suppose……?

Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima

Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org

Posted in CODEX Consequences, CODEX Industries | No Comments »

Tilling the Fields of Codex: Field Report No. 1 November 10, 2007

Saturday, November 10th, 2007

November 10, 2007

I am writing this at 7:15 AM in my room at the Steigenberger Hotel, Bad Neuenahr, Germany. General Stubblebine and I were in San Francisco three days ago in a week-long meeting with our film makers for the new DVD on Health Freedom and the Codex Agenda. We have worked out a powerful and dynamic way of telling the story which is accurate, comprehensive, action-oriented and compelling film and we are all really excited. Stay tuned for more about that in another post, but you can be sure that it will be well worth seeing and sharing! Of course, we are asking for your support to make this film. Instead of getting investors involved, this is a film by popular demand created with popular support – yours! Your donation will help us reach the $150,000 goal. (https://www.staging.healthfreedomusa.com/index.php?page_id=189)Donations to allow us to make this video (and all donations are tax deductible, by the way) of $100 or more will be acknowledged in the final version of the film.

The Natural Solutions Foundation is attending the Codex Committee on Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Uses (CCNFSDU) this week. There are two initial workshops which we will also attend. The first, a Working Group on Gluten – Free Foods will take place today (in just a few hours) and the second will take place tomorrow on “Risk Analysis”. Every day the US has a meeting for Americans attending Codex and we will be attending those, too.

The meeting itself has a fixed agenda which is sometimes adhered to and sometimes not. In our observations, it is rigidly adhered to when that serves the intent of the Codex Committee and, most especially, the rather astonishingly dictatorial Chair of CCNFSDU, Dr. Rolf Grossklaus, MD, the man who declared in 2003 that “Nutrients are not relevant to human health!”. That is, I believe, a rather astonishing position for a physician with a specialty in Nutritional Medicine! Even more astonishing, of course, is his insistence that Codex treat nutrients like dangerous industrial toxins and subject them to “Risk Assessment”, a technique taken directly from toxicology in which the maximum doses of poisons to which humans can be exposed without discernible change is determined, cut by a “safety margin” (usually by dividing the highest dose that produced no changes by 100) and then declared to be a safe Maximum Permissible Upper Limit or MPUL for human exposure. Perhaps the fact that Dr. Grossklaus is the Chairman of the Board of a German company called bFR (which specializes in Risk Assessment of toxins, or, in this case, supposed toxins) and that he just might have a vested financial interest in making every known nutrient into something which must be tested, perhaps by his own company, just might have some impact on his insistence, with potentially deadly consequences, that nutrients are toxins. Hmmm. What do you think? Just perhaps?

This, a wildly inappropriate system for nutrient doses, is the very system that Dr. Grossklaus has been so very enthusiastic in driving Codex to in its determination of upper limits for nutrients. Upper limits for nutrients? Oh, yes, that violates US law since nutrients are, in our legal system, considered to be foods under the 1994 Dietary Supplements Health and Education Act (DSHEA). Under DSHEA, importantly, those very foods are generally considered to be safe since foods are generally considered to be safe and they ARE foods. Hmmm. What about the fact that the US FDA announced that it would ‘ “HARMonize” US food standards and regulation to International Standards even if not complete’ (which is bureaucratic talk for “Codex”)? Yes, indeed, what about it? We are asking people who have grave reservations about this illegal “HARMonization” to sign the Natural Solutions Foundation Citizens Petition, (https://www.staging.healthfreedomusa.com/index.php?page_id=184) a legal challenge to this illegal stand by the corporate-compromised FDA.

CCNFSDU has a number of other activities besides setting upper limits on nutrition (not legal in the US, remember, but enthusiastically endorsed and supported by the FDA here at the meetings and at home). It is interesting to note that at many Codex meetings people from the FDA serve as the Delegate representing the US. (There is only one Delegate per country but they are supported by advisers from their country). Often the US Delegate at this meeting and at a number of others is Dr. Barbara Schneeman, Head of the Office of Dietary Supplements of the FDA. She is a pleasant lady who acts against the interests of makers and takers of Dietary Supplements at every turn, as far as I can see. For example, by moving the deadly and restrictive Vitamin and Mineral Guideline (ratified July 4, 2005, Rome, Italy) forward in CCNFSDU, she is setting up a situation in which the US must have, I kid you not, a “Nutrient Risk Manager” (!) who will determine the maximum dose available for any nutrient permitted in the US (!) as long as that maximum dose is NOT more than 15% higher than the dose of the nutrient found in unprocessed food (of course, that includes food grown in demineralized soils). Hmmm. Where is that FDA bread buttered? Could it be by the Big Pharma through their impact on every aspect of FDA policy whether it is for food or drugs? Consider the wisdom of divesting the FDA of its responsibilities for the regulation of food, a policy which the Natural Solutions Foundation is presenting to Congress in our Congressional Education program.

CCNFSDU also sets standards for infant formula and foods for other special groups. It was at this same committee last November that the Natural Solutions Foundation played such a pivotal role in blocking the US’s determined efforts to include fluoride (which even the American Dental Association now admits babies under 1 year should NEVER be exposed to) as a permitted additive to infant formula for healthy babies. With the help of our African and Asian health-friendly allies we kept baby formula safe from this deadly additive – except for sick babies, of course, which Dr. Schneeman made sure would be exposed to fluoride by a last minute maneuver as the meeting was closing!

Now it is time for me to go get dressed to attend the Workshop on Gluten – Foods as your eyes and ears. More to come. Please let everyone on your list know the health freedom battle is raging both at home and internationally and that the Natural Solutions Foundation is in it protecting your health, your freedom and your right to make the health choices you want for yourself and your loved ones. Ask them to sign up for our Health Freedom Alerts (and help financially, too!) at www.HealthFreedomUSA.org.

Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org

Posted in Activism, Citizen's Petition, CODEX Consequences, Events | No Comments »

GM Files: Corrupt Science Corrupts Food – GM Dangers Know, Ignored

Saturday, November 3rd, 2007

Are Science and the Biotech Industry Sleeping in the Same Bed?

By Jeffrey M. Smith, author of Seeds of Deception

One day in April 1998, Professor Phillip James walked into the office of Arpad
Pusztai and placed a large stack of documents on his desk . The documents were
submissions from biotech companies seeking approval of their GM soy, corn, and
tomatoes. He called in Arpad’s wife Susan from the adjoining office. James was
the director of the Rowett Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland, Europe’s leading
nutritional research facility.

He told the Pusztais, both senior scientists there, that the British
agriculture minister was meeting with European ministers in Brussels to vote
on genetically modified (GM) foods, and he wanted a scientific opinion on
them.

Arpad Pusztai looked at the stack-nearly 700 pages-then back at James. He was
confident that his director and the other eleven scientists on the committee
that approves GM foods for the UK were far too busy to actually read these
studies.

The Pusztais, however, had worked for more than two years on a UK government
grant, leading a 20-member research team to design the ideal testing protocol
for evaluating GM foods. They also conducted safety tests on a new variety of
GM potatoes intended for commercialization.

The Pusztais were therefore among the most qualified scientists in the world
to evaluate the papers James had just given them. Arpad asked how much time
they had. “Two and a half hours,” said James. They quickly got to work,
focusing on the design and the data.

Arpad was shocked at what he discovered. The research was incredibly poor. He
described it as superficial, flimsy, and just plain bad science. Reading those
studies was a turning point in the life of this very pro-biotech scientist.

Arpad was the leading researcher in his field, with more than 300 articles and
12 books to his credit. Based on his reputation and experience, the government
had awarded him the GM research grant over 27 competing applicants.

As a man of integrity, accustomed to thorough and rigorous science, Arpad
expected the same from others. But he realized that the approach taken by
biotech industry scientists was diametrically opposed to his own. “I was doing
safety studies,” he said. “They were doing as little as possible to get their
products to market as quickly as possible.”

Abominable Scientific Methods Ignored

Pusztai called the minister and told him that although he wasn’t expecting to
have such a strong opinion after only two and a half hours, there was
definitely not enough information to declare the foods safe for humans.

But the minister responded, “I don’t know why you are telling me this,
Professor James has already accepted it.” It had already been on the market
for two years.

Months later, Arpad had another shock. Young rats fed a genetically engineered
potato developed extensive health problems. Some had smaller, less developed
brains, livers, and testicles, and also partial atrophy of the liver. Some
suffered damaged immune systems and organ damage. And there was excessive cell
growth in the stomach and intestines.

The potato was engineered to produce its own insecticide, but the insecticide
itself was not the cause of these problems. In fact, other rats that had eaten
natural potatoes that were spiked with the insecticide fared much better.

Thus, since the insecticide was not the cause of the poor health of the GM-fed
rats, it was almost certainly the process of genetically modifying the
potatoes that was the culprit.

Arpad realized that if his potatoes had been subjected to the same superficial
industry studies he had reviewed, the potatoes would have been approved. The
organ damage, cell growth, immune functions, and so on, would be undetected.

More worrisome was the fact that the soy, corn, and tomatoes that were
approved were not tested for these potential problems. And they were created
with the same process that Arpad used to engineer his potatoes.

The Cost of Speaking Out

With permission from his director, Arpad accepted an invitation to be
interviewed on television and express his concerns about GM food. For two days
he was a hero at his institute.

Then, on a Tuesday afternoon, two phone calls from the prime minister’s office
were allegedly forwarded through the institute’s receptionist to the director.
On Wednesday morning, Phillip James fired Arpad after 35 years and silenced
him with threats of a lawsuit. His 20-member research team was dismantled and
the UK government abandoned its plans for long-term safety study requirements
for GM foods. The Rowett Institute then issued several statements trashing
Arpad and his research in an apparent attempt to protect the biotech
industry.

Eventually Arpad was invited to speak before Parliament, his gag order lifted,
and his research published in the prestigious Lancet.

Despite his work being cut off in the middle, his rat study remains the most
in-depth animal feeding safety study ever published on GM foods. Tragically,
no similar studies have yet been applied to the GM foods on the market. No one
is monitoring to see if the organs, immune system, and cells of humans eating
GM foods are being similarly influenced.

Arpad has since been commissioned to review all published animal feeding
studies on GM foods. There are only about a dozen. In his paper, published as
a chapter in the book Food Safety, he reported consistent shortcomings in
industry-sponsored research. Their poor designs allow significant problems to
go unnoticed. When problems were identified, they were not followed up.

Arpad and his wife have made presentations on GM foods around the world. In
2001, they appeared before New Zealand’s Royal Commission of Inquiry on
Genetic Modification, where the sentiments and experience of several other
presenters echoed their own.

Are Science and Commerce ‘Sleeping in the Same Bed’?

Parliament member Sue Kedgley testified: “Personally I have been contacted by
telephone and e-mail by a number of scientists who have serious concerns about
aspects of the research that is taking place… and the increasingly close
ties that are developing between science and commerce, but who are convinced
that if they express these fears publicly, even at such a Commission… or
even if they asked the awkward and difficult questions, they will be eased out
of their institution.”

Mae-Wan Ho, a biophysicist and geneticist, told the Commission that the
scientific evidence on GM foods “simply did not support the claims… that the
technology is precise and safe.” Ho has endured numerous attacks for her
opinions, including being hounded out of her position at the UK’s Open
University.

Epidemiologist Judy Carman testified that the few animal feeding studies on GM
foods are too short to adequately test for cancer or for problems in
offspring. Further, they are not evaluating “biochemistry, immunology, tissue
pathology, gut function, liver function, and kidney function.” Carman, who has
investigated outbreaks of disease, said that health problems associated with
GM foods might be impossible to track in the human population, or take decades
to discover.

Carman is repeatedly attacked for her critical stance. One pro-GM scientist
threatened disciplinary action through her Vice-Chancellor. Another circulated
a defamatory letter to government and university officials in October 2004,
alleging that Carman was unethical and that her work was similar to
“inaccurate
anti-vaccine scaremongering [that] kills people.”

Geneticist Michael Antoniou, who works on human gene therapy, told the New
Zealand Commission, “genetic engineering technology, as it’s being applied in
agriculture now, [is] based on the understanding of genetics we had 15 years
ago, about genes being isolated little units that work independently of each
other.” He explained that genes actually “work as an integrated whole of
families.”

Falling on (More) Deaf Ears in the UK and Around the World

In 2003, Antoniou represented non-governmental organizations on the UK’s
supposedly balanced GM Science Review Panel that was part of the nationwide
“GM Nation?” public debate. He was shocked to find scientists there still
supporting obsolete theories of gene independence. Some even claimed that the
order of genes in the DNA was entirely irrelevant. Antoniou was outnumbered by
eleven scientists representing either the biotech industry or appointed by the
pro-biotech UK government. His well-supported arguments fell on deaf ears.
Since the debate, new studies have further verified Antoniou’s position by
showing that genes are not randomly located along the DNA, but clustered into
groups with related functions.

Virologist Terje Traavik testified that GM crops “might be the basis for real
ecological and health catastrophes.” Three years later, in a February 2004
meeting with delegates to the UN biosafety protocol conference, Traavik
presented preliminary evidence from three studies which might fulfill his
earlier prediction.

a.. Philippinos living next to a GM cornfield developed serious symptoms
while the corn was pollinating.

b.. Promoters-genetic material routinely inserted into GM crops-were found
to transfer to rat organs after a single transgenic meal. Key safety
assumptions about genetically engineered viruses were overturned, calling into
question the safety of using these viruses as vaccines.

Traavik, naturally, was attacked.

Biologist Phil Regal told the Commission, “I think the people who boost
genetic engineering are going to have to do a mea culpa and ask for
forgiveness, like the Pope did on the inquisition; you know, ‘we made a
mistake, let’s start over.'”

Sue Kedgley had another idea. She said, “I would recommend that perhaps we
could set up human clinical trials using volunteers of genetically engineered
scientists and their families, because. they are so convinced of the safety of
the products that they are creating. they would very readily volunteer to
become part of a human clinical trial.”

(C) Jeffrey Smith, 2004

Not eager to eat GM foods? At least 70% of all prepared foods in the US have GM components. Organic foods, on the other hand, do not. Eat organic. It’s cheap compared to disease.

Posted in Buy-Cott, CODEX Consequences, GMOs, Hall of Shame, Medical Hazards | No Comments »

Codex Scorecard: Codex +1, Consumers -2

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007

PLEASE FORWARD WIDELY

Yesterday had some very hopeful moments at the Codex Committee on Food Labeling (CCFL) meeting here in Ottawa. The World Health Organization (WHO) gave CCFL a bunch of action steps that is wanted Codex (through this committee and the Codex Committee on Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Uses) to use to implement the WHO Global Strategy on Diet, Physical activity and Diet. These steps include informative labels on pre-packaged food about the caloric content (“energy”), saturated and trans fats, sodium, sugars and nutrients. The purpose of this is to allow consumers to reduce their risk for the non-communicable diseases (NCDs) of under nutrition, identified by the WHO as cancers, cardiovascular disease and stroke, diabetes and obesity and manage them via dietary strategies.

That’s right: there IS a connection, says the WHO, between what goes into your mouth and what becomes of your body! And it is up to the world’s food standard setting body, the WHO says, to do something positive about it. Who could argue with that? Well, Canada, the US, Australia, Brazil, Mexico and a host of other countries, that’s who. You see, if the world’s people knew how to reduce their risk factors for the major killers (aside from properly prescribed drugs, of course), they would not be buying the really bad foods that comprise so much of the Standard American Diet (so aptly called “SAD”, but now rapidly becoming the “SGD”, Standard Global Diet). They might choose veggies, not fried chicken wings, fruits, not dough nuts, and local foods, not Big Macs and fries.

If they understood how to prevent the highly profitable killer diseases they might not spend billions and billions of dollars on drug-based illness care because they would not have illnesses that needed treatment and if they did have those illnesses, they could manage their conditions with diet reducing or eliminating the need for drugs (an drugs to control the side effects of those drugs, of course!)

If consumers knew that giving their babies and children sweets would give them heart disease and diabetes, they might make different choices for them resulting in the loss of more billions of dollars in kiddie food porn.

And if labels contained helpful information about macro nutrients (protein, fiber, sugar, sodium) and micro nutrients (vitamins, minerals, amino acids and other big impact, small dose diet components), they might decide to regulate their health for preventive, as well as therapeutic purposes. Eating patterns would change, disease expenditures would change, corporate profits would change and consumers would be making a heap of bother for the multinational corporations and the countries that serve their interests and call it public policy.

Other countries, of course, expressed strong commitment to the implementation strategies brought forward by the WHO. But it turned into a bad day at black rock anyway for consumer health.

A Bit of Necessary Background

The Codex Committee on Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Uses (CCNFSDU) has been headed for decades by the autocratic, anti-nutrition and very powerful Dr. Rolf Grossklaus, a physician with a specialization in nutritional medicine (which is an option in Germany). Aside from humiliating and dismissing any one at all who does not support his point of view during each and every one of the CCNFSDU meetings, Dr. G. maintains that nutrition has no place in medicine (2003) and that only super low dose nutrients, in doses so tiny that they have no impact on any human, should be permitted. Dr. Grossklaus is also the Chairman of the Board of bFR, a State owned German company that performs “Risk Assessment” on toxins of various sorts. Dr. G. has sold the Codex world a very rotten bill of goods by selling the concept of “risk assessment” for nutrients. The net result? Codex treats nutrients as if they were dangerous industrial chemicals. Of course, if it is true that Dr. G serves both as the Chairman of the Board of a company that does Risk Assessment on a contract basis for Codex and serves as the chair of the committee that requires these same risk assessments would be highly questionable ethically.

Dr. Grossklaus has applied the toxicology tool of risk assessment to nutrients. Here is a very abbreviated list of the “Maximum Permissible Levels” (MPL) which bFR proposes for everyone in the world thus assuring global under nutrition (followed by the amount that I take on a daily basis for comparison)

Nutrient MPL My Daily Dose
Vitamin C 225 mg /// 3.5 grams (3500 mg)
Vitamin D 5 IU /// 8000 IU
Vitamin E 15 IU /// 1200 IU
Vitamin B3 17 mg /// 1000 mg
Vitamin B6 5.4 mg /// 250 mg
Vitamin B12 5 mcg /// 5000 mcg
Fluoride 3.8 mg /// 0.00 mg: significant toxin

Read more about this dangerous “risk assessment”.

And Codex buys it. Right now, the CCNFSDU is engaged in setting Nutrient Reference Values (NRVs) at the dangerously low levels for vitamins and minerals.

Back to Today at CCFL

When the WHO proposal was brought forward to make labeling of both macro and micro nutrients part of the information available on pre packaged foods, some countries thought that would help their consumers and were strongly in favor of it. Others, however, including the usual gang of suspects (which always seems to include the United States), proposed that the determination of the values to be indicated on labels as necessary to prevent or manage the NCDs (caused by under nutrition, you will recall) on food labels should be left to CCNFSDU. Since they were already working on the NRVs for vitamins and minerals, the countries said, CCNFSDU would be the perfect part of Codex to refer this task to.

Of course, what this means is that Dr. G’s overt hostility to effective doses of nutrients is virtually certain to lead to values so low that the concept of reducing risk of disease or managing that disease through these doses will be meaningless. Winner” Big Pharma and the other components of the Illness Care industry. Looser? You and I, our loved ones and our friends and neighbors.

For Shame!

Round 2

Powdered infant formula is contaminated on a regular basis with at least two potentially deadly microbes. Only careful handling, short limits on use after mixing, and other strict precautions can keep babies from dying in significant numbers from contaminated formula, especially if there the baby already is weakened by malnutrition, parasites, etc. The International Breast Feeding Action Network (IBFAN), an NGO which speaks for the interests of pregnant women and babies, asked that a WHO report on the proper treatment and procedures of reconstituted powdered infant formula be referenced by the CCFL in its report. “Good idea” said the predictably pro-health countries. Bad, bad, bad idea said the “Pharma Phriends”: We do not need to tell mothers, care givers, hospitals, etc.

If there were logical reasons given for sentencing countless babies to serious illness and many of them to death, I missed them and I was listening pretty hard.

The good news today, however, is that we got invited to a special regional meeting set up to allow us to share our insights and opinions in an area ripe for action — they ARE mad as Hell and the ARE NOT going to take it any more.
I think you will have an easy time understanding why saying more is premature!

Remembering that World Trade Organization trade sanctions are the teeth of Codex, the Codex Working Group developed a strategy to make countries that choose not to follow Codex “Trade Sanction Proof”. You can imagine how veyr intersted health-friendly nations are!

We continue to build the “coalition of the willingly healthy” at Codex and in their own countries so that they can engage in real self determination through the application of our two step WTO Proofing Concept. One of the tools we provide is a hard copy of the Codex eBook. This is the identical book we offer to Codex Delegates, Ministers of Health and other decision makers. The Codex book provides the information necessary for any country to protect its people from any danger brought by Codex and still avoid World Trade Organization (WTO) trade sanctions by the application of a scientific and legislative template. We also make available our highly informative and startling Nutricide:the DVD, too.

As it happens, this Codex eBook is the application of the WTO-proof template has been applied to the dangerous and restrictive Vitamin and Mineral Guideline so it is exceptionally timely right now!

One final word: right now 180,623 people have submitted their comments on the destructive and deceptive FDA CAM (Complementary and Alternative Medicine/Modalities) Guidance. Please take a moment to do the same if you haven’t already told the FDA how important the practices and products you rely on in Natural Health options are to you.

Thanks!

Yours in health freedom,
Rima E. Laibow, MD

Medical Director

Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org

Posted in CODEX Consequences, CODEX Industries, Hall of Shame, Home Page | 2 Comments »

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