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Michael Olson’s Food Chain Radio Show #1332
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GUEST: Zen Honneycutt Founder & Executive Director of Moms Across America, Author of Unstoppable: Transforming Sickness and Struggle Into Triumph, Empowerment and a Celebration of Community
Michael Olson Food Chain Radio – What is Hidden in the School Lunch?
School meals are the only meals many of the nation’s children get to eat. As those meals are purchased, prepared and presented by institutions, they are most likely made up of the least expensive ingredients, including genetically modified corn and soy that have been processed with genetically modified oils from canola and soybeans.
Most genetically modified food crops have been re-engineered to withstand weed-killing chemicals like glyphosate and dicamba, or to be infused with pest-killing bacterium like bacillus thuringiensis.
Additionally, most of the grain ingredients in school meals– the wheat, peas, beans, oats found in breads, buns and crumbs– have been derived from crops that were desiccated at harvest with the weedkiller glyphosate.
Glyphosate was originally patented as a chelator of minerals, and as such, traps essential mineral nutrients in the soil, making them unavailable to food crops. Furthermore, glyphosate has been shown to kill the microorganisms in the soil that make essential nutrients available to food crops. Consequently, GMO crops require the use of more synthetically-derived fertilizers, some of which contain toxic heavy metals such as arsenic, barium and cadmium. These heavy metals leach into the soil and are then taken up into the food crops, and are now found in wheat, corn, soy and other food crops.
The re-engineering of food crops has made it possible for one farmer to grow thousands of acres of crops without weeds or pests, and so the technology has been welcomed as money-making miracle by those in industrial agriculture. However, the technology has left school children to eat lunches derived from crops drenched in weed-killers and infused with pest-killers. That so many of the nation’s school children now eat these foods every day leads us to ask Moms Across America:
Leave a comment below: Are school lunches destroying our nation’s future?
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2 Comments
As I’m listening I am typing. As a scientist and farmer I have been listening to this, and it bothers me that such false information is given such credence. It is critical that we get this right, and your show has little to match the scientific consensus. Here are a few thoughts as I listen.
1. The crops are not “drenched” in weed killer. Glyphosate active ingredient is applied at 750 ml/acre, about 2 soda cans.
2. Crops are not “infused” with insecticide that harms people. It contains a gene encoding a protein that is toxic to specific insect larvae, not to humans, animals, and non-target insects.
3. Glyphosate is not used on a lot of grains, occasionally depending on weather.
4. If you look at the statements made by Zen Honeycutt over the years you find a record of being wrong about almost everything.
5. how does her son get enteric bacteria in his urine?
6. There is no evidence that glyphosate affects bacteria in the digestive system, it is not present at high enough levels.
7. The testing depends on the kit that is used and the standardization– in most matricies it cannot be accurately detected.
8. Sugar? What is in sucrose from a GE sugar beet that makes it different from non-GE sugar beet? It is sucrose. That’s it. Sucrose.
9. Stephanie Seneff is not a reliable source. Even the anti-GMO movement says she’s out there.
10. Gives a plant AIDS? C’mon. Don Huber wrote to Tom Vilsack in 2011 and claimed a secret organism that was in GE foods. It was total fabrication.
11. Glyphosate is not a great chelator. Although patented that way, patents are broad. Compared to actual chelators like EDTA/EGTA it is not very good. Plus, it is present in parts per billion, whereas most minerals to be chelated (divalent cations) are present at levels several orders of magnitude higher, so they can’t have much effect.
12. Honeycutt has posted and promoted false information before “Stunning Corn Comparison” where the data were absolutely fudged. They were so badly fabricated, and when I inquired she blocked me from the website.
13. Glyphosate has never been shown to be carcinogenic. The data for liver damage and endocrine disruption are thin. Most show no effect. At micro-residue levels present.
14 The experiments that suggest feminization or masculinization use high doses to see these subtle effects.
15 Don Huber—“It will make DDT look like mouthwash” When? It has been used safely for 40 years, with no effect.
16. The Swanson article is a correlation. Purely a correlation. It also overlays with organic food sales. There is no causal effect, and her claim is anecdotal. There are no clinical data to support such claims. If that was true, it would be everywhere. Autism is not a new thing. If you could reverse it with organic food, or avoiding glyphosate, it would be easy to demonstrate clinically.
17. Contained pesticides— how much is there? The dose makes the poison. They can detect a tiny amount and it is far below pharmacological levels but thousands, millions of times.
18. The regulatory bodies like the EPA are extremely rigorous barriers. They rely on independent and company generated data. The IARC mentioned is the one that only accepts published data, and they ignored the largest, best study that shows zero association with glyphosate and cancers. The other examples mentioned in IARC are not statistically significant differences, they are trends at best. That’s in the IARC monograph, and you can compare to the original research.
19. Heavy metals? No idea.
20. Yes, we have traces of herbicides, insecticides, fungicides. These are in tiny levels. Glyphosate is found at parts per trillion—minutes in 32,000 years, parts per billion, seconds in 32 years. The rest of the stuff, who knows. I just don’t trust activists that have lied before. And there is not a lot of hormone in milk and meat. This is what the animals naturally produce, maybe a tiny chip in one ear on some cattle that provide far less hormone than a birth control pill.
21. I completely disagree with gender identity claims. It is not diet related. It is natural variation in humans that is due to how we develop sex organs, and brain development. It is normal and acceptable. Kleinfelter syndrome is a chromosomal segregation disorder, it is rare and not due to “endocrine disruptors”
22. Glyphosate is sprayed on plants, not on soil. Anything sprayed on soil is a waste, and farmers don’t do that. It is a foliar herbicide, it must be sprayed on leaves. Farmers spray the leaves, a little reaches the soil.
23. If you test military food you’ll detect a few parts per billion glyphosate. No question. It goes through the body and shows up in the urine. The levels detected are safe.
The sad part of this is that Honeycutt and her organization are making a sense of risk where none exists. This means parents that believe her will have their kids not eat school lunches. In many cities the school lunches are the best meals they get all day. The artificial risk implied, where none exists, drives parents to push their kids away from school lunches. Then they get nothing, or some alternative that is not as good as the school lunch.
It is so disappointing that you listen to a known generator of false information and don’t interview actual scientists or regulators. Then again, they don’t have sensational claims, so the non-alarmist message is not as compelling as, “The sky is falling, kids are being poisoned, and we’re all doomed.” Thanks.
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