“We should have labeling so people can decide for themselves if they want to be a guinea pig.”JOE MENDELSON OF THE CENTER FOR FOOD SAFETY
You are an unwitting lab rat in the biggest scientific experiment ever.
Every day you are eating unlabeled genetically modified foods and ingesting proteins that have never before been in the human food supply.
And nobody knows if they’re making you sick.
“It’s ludicrous that the agencies in our government responsible for food safety are allowing us to be experimented on,” said Joe Mendelson, legal director of the Center for Food Safety.
“The jury is still out scientifically so, at a minimum, we should have labeling so people can decide for themselves if they want to be a guinea pig.”
Religious leaders, scientists and some health experts are demanding stricter labeling and further research on the increasingly widespread practice of injecting genes from bacteria and viruses into fruits and vegetables.
Among the widely distributed genetically modified foods are corn, potatoes, tomatoes, sugar beets, yellow squash, papaya and radicchio.
Most are unlabeled, since companies are required to label modified foods only if they have a different nutritional content than the original or contain new toxins, antibiotic-resistant genes or known food allergens such as nuts, shellfish, eggs or milk.
No product with known allergens is on the market, but food companies hope to fortify vegetables with genes from a wide variety of animals, fish and insects.
Researchers have put flounder genes into tomatoes and moth genes into potatoes, but these hybrids have yet to hit supermarket shelves.
The biggest genetically altered crop in the country by far is the soybean, which is in almost every processed food from ice cream to baby formula.
While an estimated 55 percent of this year’s crop has been altered with DNA from bacteria and viruses, the percentage of foods containing the modified soybeans is actually higher because they are routinely mixed with unaltered beans before being sold to processors.
“Virtually all processed food in this country that isn’t organic probably contains at least a little bit of genetically modified food,” said Rebecca Goldburg, a senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund.
An FDA spokesman said the agency’s studies show that all transgenic crops on the market are safe.
“All of the proteins introduced to date by genetic engineering have been shown not to have any similarities to known allergens, to be very rapidly digestible, and to be present in very low amounts,” said Dr. Jim Maryanski, biotechnology coordinator for the FDA.
Maryanski admitted that companies producing new genetically modified foods don’t have to show their safety tests to the agency or even test them at all.
But most do, Maryanski said, because the companies are liable if somebody gets sick or dies from their products.
A University of Nebraska study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1996 showed that if you are allergic to a certain food and its genes are put into another species, you can have an allergic reaction to the new hybrid.
That’s why transgenic foods have some allergy sufferers eating in fear.
One of them is Sheila Slade, a grandmother from Marlboro, N.J. who is extremely allergic to potatoes, beets, carrots and cinnamon and could die if she ate them.
Under present law, a grower would not have to label a tomato that contains potato genes since potatoes are not considered a “known allergen.”
“I eat with a lot of trepidation these days,” she said. “I read everything I buy to know what’s inside it, but if it’s genetically altered and not labeled, I can’t do that.”
Then there’s the possibility of an allergic reaction to things people don’t usually consume, such as proteins from bacteria and viruses inserted into plants to make them resistant to insects or pesticides.
About 25 percent of the current corn crop has genes from a bacteria called BT inserted into its DNA to make it resistant to pests.
A study published in the magazine Nature this week showed that pollen from BT corn kills or seriously stunts the development of Monarch butterfly caterpillars.
The study does not suggest that BT corn is toxic to humans but this kind of unintended consequence from genetic manipulation is what has some scientists worried.
“We’re eating large quantities of chemicals that come from a species we don’t normally eat and we could have an allergic response to that,” said Dr. Philip Regal, professor of biological science at the University of Minnesota.
“Have we already seen effects? There’s no real way of knowing. It’s going to be a matter of luck whether we catch some of these allergies,” he said.
Regal said combining DNA from different species can result in toxic byproducts.
He and many other scientists believe byproducts in a genetically engineered food supplement called L-Tryptophan killed 37 people and made thousands sick in the late 1980s.
He has joined in a lawsuit with the Center for Food Safety that demands the FDA classify genes used to alter food as additives and test them more rigorously.
Seven Christian clergymen, three rabbis, a Hindu group and a Buddhist group have also joined the federal court suit.
They claim their religious freedom has been trampled because they have no way of knowing if they are eating foods banned by their faiths.
One of the plaintiffs, Lubavitcher Rabbi Yossi Serebryanski of Crown Heights, said he has stopped eating tomatoes and only eats potatoes he knows are organic.
The rabbi said he fears that genes from non-kosher foods – such as pigs or insects – could be implanted in vegetables and Jews may unwittingly break kosher laws by eating them.
Serebryanski said putting genes from one species into another is “destructive to nature, to the world, to health, to the balance of energy in the people who eat it.”