Would You Feed Your Kid Foods Labeled as Genetically Modified?

Earlier this week I covered a lecture about genetically modified foods (GMOs) at Purchase College.

Lisa Weasel, a biology professor and author of Food Fray spoke about GMOs and the public's reaction (or non-reaction) to consuming them.

Her discussion got me thinking about how I've probably been eating GMOs since 1994 (when the GMO Flavr-Savr tomato was approved for sale by the USDA) without even knowing it. This led me to acknowledge that my 15-month-old son has been eating GMOs in one form or another for his entire life.

A frightening thought, indeed. But I should probably start by answering your natural question, "What is a GMO, anyway?"

A GMO is a transgenic plant that has been bioengineered to possess desirable traits, like a resistance to pesticides, in its genetic makeup. Usually the genes containing these qualities are found in bacteria and introduced to the genetic makeup of a crop plant, like corn.

In America, corn not only fuels our cars, it fuels our bodies. In fact, two-thirds of processed food products in the U.S. contain GMO corn and last year it made up 86 percent of all corn crops in this country.

A an ear of GMO corn, when processed, ends up labeled as corn syrup, maltodextrin, corn starch, Corn Flakes, sucrose, dextrose and tortilla chips...the list goes on.

For Americans, there's probably more of it in our bodies than any other country in the world. And for our kids, this is even more frightening because they've likely been eating GMO foods their whole lives.

And because all of those processed foods marketed in grocery stores contain hidden corn and soy, we Americans, our children included, are eating more foods containing GMOs than we'd ever imagined.

Though governmental policy doesn't reflect the potential dangers of eating foods containing GMOs, scientific studies have linked the ingestion of genetically modified foods to a myriad of health defects in lab rats, including infertility, cancer and organ failure.

Yet we eat GMOs by the ton, and they could be contributing to mutations in our own genes. And until now I, probably like most of you, didn't think twice about making some corn bread out of what should be labelled GMO corn meal or eating an "all-natural" cereal made with GMO corn flour and GMO dextrose derived from corn.

In America, we have GMO soybeans, corn, cotton and sugar beets growing on hundreds of millions of acres. Though the planting of GMO sugar beets, which produce 95 percent of our sugar, has been banned by a federal court, the production of processed products that are peddled to us in grocery stores relies on GMO corn and soy.

Weasel called American's reaction to GMOs as "passive acceptance" but said that in places like India, Zambia and the E.U., public rejection of GMOs has helped to sway government policy.

In the E.U. all foods containing GMOs must be labelled as such. Weasel noted that because people don't want to buy GMO foods, companies have largely stopped using them because it hurt sales.

Japan and the E.U. have banned the importation of rice from an American company called Bayer Rice after inspectors found that a shipment was contaminated with a GMO bacteria from LibertyLink.

In Zambia, U.S. food aid of GMO corn is a subject of controversy. Interestingly, the insecticidal quality of GMO corn that dissolves the digestive system of the catepillar has no use in a place where small-scale agriculture with a majority of the population working in it has the capacity to remove the catepillars by hand. In fact, farmers in Zambia eat the catepillars for protein.

Luckily for Americans, this distrust of GMO food that's been signalled in other parts of the world is hitting home.

The food revolution that's going on right now—a focus on locally-sourced, real food—has had a lot of momentum not only in the media's coverage of food issues, but because of the mass egg recall last month and the FDA's likely approval of genetically modified salmon from Aqua Bounty Technologies.

So naturally, America's food manufacturers are on the defensive. Case in point: The Corn Refiners Association, an industry trade group, is on a campaign to change the name of high fructose corn syrup to simply "corn sugar."

Kids love sugar but don't you think parents would think twice before giving their kids a can of Coca Cola if one of its primary ingredients was labelled "GMO corn sugar?"

We're bombarded with advertising every day here in America and marketers want us to only see the good side of their product. Thus, the Corn Refiners Association, in lock step with other trade groups, wants the average American consumer, whose diet is filled with high fructose corn syrup, to think of the stuff not as a processed, liquidy, sweet goop but, instead just "sugar."

It would be a wake-up call to all of us if the two-thirds of GMO-containing foods in the grocery store were labelled as such, right?

For the health of our kids and our environment, I think we Americans should join the rest of the world in resisting GMOs in our diets and by advocating for labeling of GMOs in processed foods and meats.