Buckle your seatbelts… we’re going there! Today we talk in-depth about genetically modified organisms, better known as GMOs. This is not exactly my field of study and certainly a very controversial issue, so I’ve asked Jeffrey Smith, man behind the compelling new documentary Secret Ingredients, to shed some light on the topic for us.
For more than two decades, Jeffrey’s research has exposed how biotech companies misled policymakers and the public to further the cause of GMO crops, putting the health of society and the environment at risk. You may know of him through his feature-length documentary Genetic Roulette: The Gamble of Our Lives, which was seen by millions worldwide and received many awards. His new film also links genetically engineered food to toxic and allergic reactions, infertility, digestive disorders, and many other chronic problems that have been on the rise in the U.S.
Episode Highlights: Secret Ingredients
- How Jeffrey learned what the biotech industry hides about GMOs
- The process for genetic engineering of crops and how it works
- Why so many claim that GMOs are completely safe
- What the science is saying about Roundup or glyphosate
- Whether it’s true that we need GMO crop to keep from going hungry
- The truth about politics behind food policy in the U.S. today
- Why Europe isn’t on board with consuming genetically modified crops
- Possible effects of pesticides like Roundup and BT on hormones, neurotransmitters, allergies and more
- Which grains and legumes contain the most glyphosate
- And some good news about GMOs as well!
Resources We Mention
- Watch Secret Ingredients (free from May 15th-May 22nd!)
- PetsandGMOs.com
- RoundupRisks.com
Also by Jeffrey Smith:
More From Wellness Mama
- 475: Jeffrey Smith on the Existential Threat of Gene-Edited Microbes
- 441: METABOLICAL: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine With Dr. Robert Lustig
- 449: Randy Newberg on Seasonal Eating, Sustainable Food Sourcing, and Learning From the Outdoors
- 299: How Serenity Kids Is Revolutionizing the Baby Food Industry
- 205: Everything You Need to Know About GMOs, Glyphosate, and Gut Health With Dr. Zach Bush
- 133: GMOs, Glyphosate, Organic Food & What’s Making Our Children Sick
- 35: GMOs & How to Test for Glyphosate
- 25: Autoimmunity, GMOs & Food as Medicine
- The Real Problem with Grains
- Are Sprouted, Soaked, & Fermented Grains Healthy?
- Backyard Farming: How to Homestead in the City
- Organic Pest Control for Gardens (Natural Options)
- Organic Gardening 101: How to Start Your Own Backyard Garden
What’s your take on GMOs? Do you have more questions I can pass on to Jeffrey? Please drop a comment below or leave a review on iTunes to let us know. We value knowing what you think and this helps other moms find the podcast as well.
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Katie: Hello, and welcome to “The Wellness Mama Podcast.” I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com, and you guys, buckle your seatbelts because today we’re going there. We are talking about GMOs, and I am here with the leading consumer advocate who’s promoting healthier non-GMO choices and one of the most educated people in the world on this topic, Jeffrey Smith. For more than two decades, his research has exposed how biotech companies misled policymakers and the public and put the health of society and the environment at risk. You may know of him through his feature-length documentary, “Genetic Roulette: The Gamble of our Lives,” which was seen by millions worldwide and received many awards, and it links genetically engineered food to toxic and allergic reactions, infertility, digestive disorders, and many other problems that have been on the rise in the U.S. since GMOs were introduced. He also has his new movie, “Secret Ingredients,” which we will talk about in depth today, as well as the books, “Seeds of Deception” and “Genetic Roulette” that all work to expertly demonstrate why the safety assessments by the FDA and regulators worldwide are based on outdated science and false assumptions, and why genetically engineered foods must become a top priority for all of us.
So, Jeffrey, welcome, and thank you so much for being here.
Jeffrey: Thank you, Katie.
Katie: Well, I think like I said, that this is a definitely probably very controversial topic, and I’m sure one that you have seen much of that controversy being on the front lines with. I know it’s also a very important topic for moms. So to start off, I’d like to kind of establish just some of the basics. First of all, how did you get into this area of research?
Jeffrey: Well, 23 years ago, I went to a lecture by a genetic engineer, and he was doing cancer research. And he actually was astounded and shocked that companies like Monsanto were about to put the products of genetic engineering into food. He said there is no way that they or anyone on the planet at that time could predictably manipulate the DNA and know what outcomes they would be creating accidentally. That the most common result of genetic engineering is surprise side effects, and yet, they were about to plant GMO seeds throughout the Midwest where I was living, feeding it to the entire population and releasing it into the environment where it could cross-pollinate and contaminate the gene pool forever. Now, he was a scientist speaking in scientific terms. I have a background in education, communications, marketing, and strategy, and I’m thinking, “My goodness, this information needs to be translated into proper English with what the threat is, and it needs to be delivered to the right people.” So I decided to pitch in a little and translate the science into English. And I later actually worked at a GMO detection laboratory as the VP of Marketing Communications for a couple of years.
And then I decided that we needed to get the health dangers out to the planet. No one was talking about the health dangers which were substantial, even back in the 90s, and it was being referred to in basically three or four sentences by the nonprofit groups that were trying to stop, but they were focused more on the environment. And I realized, “My goodness, we need to get this to moms who got to protect their kids, and we need to let them know the truth.” And so I’ve written two books and made four movies and given a thousand lectures in 45 countries, and have been more than full time on this, and it looks like we have both great news and some serious threats on the horizon. And what’s really interesting is that when people are not aware of this topic, and they become aware, they realize it’s actually one of the most serious things not just on the planet, but in their lives because they realize, “Oh my God, this chronic condition for me and my children, this may be related to the GMOs, or the Roundup and other toxic chemicals sprayed on our food.” So what we’re finding now is a confirmation of all the fears that were there 23 years ago.
Katie: Wow. And I know that you address this in depth in “Genetic Roulette” and also in “Secret Ingredients.” And of course, those will be linked in the show notes. I highly encourage you guys to watch them, and to read Jeffrey’s books. But the number one objection that I see in here online when it comes to GMOs largely across the board is just that they’re completely safe. GMOs are completely safe, and that there’s no evidence to indicate that they’re not. And so I’m going to give you the hardball first. Let’s start there because that’s the number one thing I hear. When anyone starts talking about the dangers of GMOs, I see that reaction all the time online.
Jeffrey: Well, that’s a very well paid reaction. That is a reaction that has been paid for by the biotech industry with hundreds of millions of dollars, giving that impression. And we know from the lawsuits where Monsanto has lost and been found guilty not only of their Roundup causing cancer but of a massive cover-up and fraud, ways to keep the public uninformed about the dangers. That’s the company that’s designing this public relations answer to the question, “Are GMOs safe?” If you believe them, then you believe that Roundup is safe, you believe that their PCBs were safe. You believe that their DDT was safe, and it turns out none of that was safe.
Now, you mentioned the film “Secret Ingredients,” and I lay out the thesis in that film, and the good news is that it is available for free for a free showing week on May 15th, and people can sign up and watch it for free online. And I want to warn you, you said buckle your seatbelts at the beginning of the interview. For that film, there is an incredible magic period after watching it where people realize, “Oh my God, I need to change my diet because my entire life may change,” because in the film, there’s more than a dozen people who switched to organic food, got rid of the GMOs, got rid of the Roundup sprayed on GMOs and other foods, and transformed. Kids with serious cognitive disorders, infertile parents, infertile couples got kids, boys are no longer on the spectrum. People who had allergies, gastrointestinal disorders, cancer, etc., reversed.
Now, if you think about it, these are incredible claims but they come from a mount of evidence, which I think is really overwhelming. See, it turns out, I had been going around the world speaking about the dangers of GMOs and talking about damage to rats that occurred just within 10 days. I mean, massive severe damage to rats in just 10 days on a GMO diet. And people were coming up to me and saying, “You know, I can tell the difference if I eat a GMO or not,” and I didn’t believe them, which is I’m kind of embarrassed about it now because I was the leading spokesperson on the health dangers of GMOs, but I expected it to be some kind of subtle change in the epidemiological statistics of certain diseases, but not really blatant that people could tell the difference.
But in 2006, I started being invited to more and more doctors’ conferences, presenting the medical evidence, and they started prescribing non-GMO diets to their patients. And when I returned to the same conferences to give follow-up lectures linking GMOs to different diseases, I brought a video camera and started interviewing the doctors. And what I heard was shocking. They were saying that when they put people on a non-GMO diet, there was a predictable and dramatic change that they…and it’s different with different conditions. One person was saying that, you know, for anxiety and depression, it’s these many days. For allergies and food sensitivities, it’s these many. For gastrointestinal, it may take a little longer. One allergist said that his patients have higher allergic reactions to GMOs. Another doctor told me that it causes inflammation in her patients.
So I actually went to doctors’ offices, again, with video cameras and started interviewing them. So I can interview the patients. And sure enough, what the doctor said was happening in their patients and then it went to farms, interviewed the farmers who had taken pigs and cows off of GMOs, and they were experiencing, the cows and the pigs, the same symptomatic improvements. So on a pig farm, they stopped having diarrhea. In the doctor’s office, they stopped having symptoms of irritable bowel and Crohn’s disease. And I finally got…I think I got…gave myself permission to ask audiences in 2012 and since then, about 150 lectures, I started asking audiences, “What did you notice when you switched to non-GMO or organic?” And they would raise their hand and describe symptoms that went away, sometimes within days. I had one woman at MIT in the audience say, “My six-and-a-half-year-old was violent and out of control, and they wanted to kick him out of school, and I saw your film.” This was the earlier film, “Genetic Roulette.” “I changed his diet and all the problems went away.” I said, “How long did it take?” She said, “One week.” And then she paused and said, “Within a month, I had a new son.”
Now, this is not a one-off. I was hearing these over and over again at 150 lectures, and I was asking the audiences, okay, how many people noticed an improvement in digestion? That was always the number one improvement. How many people noticed increased energy and reduced brain fog? That was always number two. Then there was weight problems and allergies and chronic pain and whatnot. Twenty-eight different conditions after these 150 lectures, we surveyed 3,256 people on our list at the Institute for Responsible Technology and what came back was exactly the same picture that we saw at these lectures. Eighty five percent showed improvements in digestive problems. The next was increased energy. The next was reduction of weight. The next was reduced brain fog, and it went all the way down, including very serious chronic diseases from diabetes, and high blood pressure, and cancer.
And when you look at these things, you may think, “Katie, well, how is it possible that GMOs and Roundup might lead to these things?” Well, in the film, “Secret Ingredients,” we describe exactly what these things can do, how they can just damage the microbiome, cause the lack of absorption of minerals, cause leaky gut, linked to problems with the production of serotonin, melatonin, and dopamine, hormonal disruptions. Roundup is a class 2A carcinogen. It also can cause birth defects. It’s linked to miscarriages. It’s linked to problems, reproductive issues.
So we lay out what we call the plausible causative pathways. We don’t speak that way in the film, we speak English. But we also show that more than 30 diseases in the United States are rising in parallel with the increased use of GMOs and Roundup, and it’s the same improvements that are happening in humans, are happening not only in livestock, but also pets, dogs and cats, that are switched to non-GMO. We have petsandgmos.com with lots of doctors’ testimonials, veterinarians’ testimonials, as well as pet owners. And it’s also linked to the animal feeding studies, when they force-feed these animals GMOs or Roundup, they suffer from these type of conditions or their precursors. So it is really an overwhelming level of evidence, but we don’t have to rely on that. If you watch the movie, you can just see what happens to people when they switch to organic food, and then try it yourself, which is really the main point here, that so many people’s lives are completely turned around when they switch to organic that it certainly makes sense to try.
Katie: Absolutely. And it’s no secret that we’ve seen a lot of changes in the health landscape in the U.S. in the last even just two generations alone. I know there’s a meme circulating that says, “Eat organic food, or as your grandparents called it, food.”
Jeffrey: I love that.
Katie: You know, this huge change in a very short amount of time. And again, I think it’s really helpful to see the movies because you can…it’s so much easier when you have all the visuals, but kind of a twostep question. The first, like, walk us through…when something’s genetically modified, what does that actually mean for the plant, and what has happened to the plant? And then the second would be, what’s actually happening in our bodies when we ingest those foods?
Jeffrey: Excellent. I love that. Do we have a couple of hours? No, just kidding. So the process of genetic engineering is different than sexual reproduction where the male and female of the species produce offspring which combine the genes, and they’re sorted in a certain way. But with genetic engineering, you go in a laboratory and you change the genetic makeup. Either you insert genes typically from other species altogether. So viral genes or bacterial genes are put into plants like soybeans and corn, or you go in and you rearrange the genes artificially, called gene editing. And these are not natural processes, and they’re done in order to derive a certain outcome.
Now, Monsanto has most of the GMOs or they actually…Monsanto was purchased by Bayer, the aspirin maker. So we can call them Monsanto/Bayer. They have most of the seeds that are genetically engineered and the reason they created the seeds is because they were selling Roundup herbicide and it was going off patent in 2000. So they created Roundup Ready genetically engineered seeds, Roundup Ready soy, corn, cotton, canola, sugar beets, and alfalfa. And these crops allow the spray of Roundup right on the field and the crops don’t die. Normally the crops will die if you sprayed Roundup, it’s a weed killer, it’s a plant killer. But they’re engineered not to die when sprayed with Roundup, and that’s the main reason for genetic engineering to allow chemical companies to sell more chemicals so that the farmers can spray over the tops of the plants and make weeding easier.
Now, unfortunately, the Roundup penetrates the plant and its chief poisoned, glyphosate, ends up in the food that we eat. And glyphosate was declared by the World Health Organization as a class 2A carcinogen. They said it’s probably carcinogenic to humans. We don’t have quite enough studies to say it definitely is, but there are enough studies to determine that it’s carcinogenic to animals. And so that’s one of the problems, is that we’re eating food with a carcinogen. Now, the other main trait of GMOs is that corn and cotton, and in the South America, soybeans, are engineered to produce a toxin to kill insects. It’s called Bt toxin, it pokes holes on the walls of the guts of insects to kill them. And it turns out that they assumed without testing that it had no effect on human cells. But now we know that it pokes holes, the same size holes, the same type of holes in human cells in high concentrations in laboratory conditions, and it might be causing holes in the walls of our intestines.
Now, Roundup, when you put Roundup or its main poison glyphosate on human cells in a petri dish, the tight junctions between the cells separate, and that’s called leaky gut or hyper permeable gut. And if you put the Bt toxin on cells, it causes holes within the cells, which is another form of leaky gut. Now, leaky gut is linked to many different diseases. Because normally, if you’re eating food, it’s supposed to be broken down to itsy-bitsy pieces, that’s the technical term, and then absorbed through the walls of the intestines into the food supply as nutrients. However, when there’s holes or gaps, then big, lumbering, undigested proteins wander into the bloodstream, and the immune system attacks it as an intruder. And then it takes out its iPhones and posts the picture of the intruder on the body’s Facebook and says, “Attack anything that looks like this,” but it gets it wrong because it may be pixelated or something. And so the immune system actually starts attacking anything that looks like that protein, which might be the thyroid, or the pancreas, and that’s what autoimmune disease is about. It’s the immune system attacking the body because it’s been trained to attack things that look like it, which is typically from leaky gut and undigested proteins.
This leaky gut is also linked to cancer and high blood pressure, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, autism, inflammation in general, and inflammation is the basis of most disease. So you ask, what happens in the body when you take in these products? Well, that’s two things so far, the leaky gut, and also the fact that Roundup is a class 2A carcinogen, but it doesn’t stop there. Roundup or its active ingredient glyphosate was originally patented to clean industrial boilers and pipes of the mineral buildup, because it chelates or grabs on to the minerals, doesn’t let it go, and strips the inside of these industrial boilers and pipes.
Now that quality means that when it’s sprayed on plants, the plants actually have less minerals available to it. And when the animals eat the Roundup Ready crops, which is their primary meal in the United States, they end up minerally deficient. When we eat the GMO crops or the animals that have eaten the crops or their products, we end up eating mineral-deficient products, but in addition, we eat Roundup residues on the crops, and that grabs on to minerals in our bodies, making them unavailable and that can block the ability of the body to accomplish certain tasks.
For example, one of the tasks is to produce serotonin, melatonin, and dopamine, and there’s a pathway that does that is blocked by glyphosate. It’s usually produced by the gut bacteria but not in the presence of glyphosate. So if there’s problems with serotonin, dopamine, or melatonin, we might have anxiety, depression, pain, obesity, insomnia, other sleep disorders. And these are some of the diseases and disorders that are in fact associated with consuming GMOs: the cancer, the ones that are associated with these neurotransmitters, all the ones associated with leaky gut. And it doesn’t stop there because glyphosate was not just patented as a descaler for industrial pipes, it was also patented as an antibiotic. It is a potent antibiotic, and it’s sprayed on our food supply. And when it gets in touch with the bacteria inside our gut, it more easily kills the beneficial bacteria. The pathogens like salmonella botulism and E. coli, they actually are quite resistant, but the lactobacillus, the bifida bacteria, the stuff that we want, the stuff that we buy in probiotics, the stuff that we want in yogurt, that can be wiped out by the glyphosate residues in our food.
Now, that can cause an imbalance between the positive and negative gut bacteria, and that is, according to experts now, linked to most diseases that we’re facing. Most diseases have a component of imbalance of bacteria in our gut. And it’s very interesting. The role of the gut bacteria and detoxification and as an immune system component, as part of digestion, but it’s really actually carries intelligence. If you take the gut bacteria of one animal with a particular disease or whether they’re skinny or fat and put it into another, let’s say mouse or rat or a human, they actually can get that disease or start exhibiting the weight gain or the weight loss, because there’s a lot of information coded into the microbiome which can get messed up when we eat products that are sprayed with an antibiotic like Roundup or its active ingredient, glyphosate.
And I’m just getting started because there’s also the damage to the mitochondria, which is the energy centers which can lead to the brain fog and the fatigue. There’s damage to the hormones, especially the balance between estrogen and testosterone can be shifted because of glyphosate’s ability to mess up something called aromatase. It can suppress digestion and damage the gut walls. There’s so many different things that it does. It’s as if it was designed to undermine the most foundational aspects of our health. And what’s really interesting, Katie, is it’s not just GMOs that get sprayed with Roundup. Roundup or the glyphosate-based herbicides are now sprayed on the grains and beans around the United States just before harvest to dry down and kill the crops. They’re also sprayed on potato fields and sweet potato fields and in vineyards and in citrus orchards. So it’s actually found on many crops. And so it used to be, and I would say it’s important that everyone should eat non-GMO, and if you can, eat organic because you also avoid the other toxic chemicals. Now I say eat organic and only if you can’t, then at least buy non-GMO.
Katie: Wow. And so just to clarify because another objection I often hear is that people have been modifying plants for a really long time and creating hybrids and all of these things. But like you explained, this is not the same thing that we’re talking about. We’re not talking about you cross-pollinated some plants or you even like grafted on part of a plant to create like a new version of a tomato, for instance. We’re talking about on a cellular level, they actually modify these plants, and then now they’re genetically different than any type of tomato plant has never looked before. Is that right?
Jeffrey: That’s exactly right, and I’ll tell you that the reason why there’s confusion, I mentioned earlier, that the confusion is bought and paid for. We have a term, genetically modified and also genetically engineered, and for years, they were considered the same thing. But the public relations arm of the biotech industry decided to create confusion. So they redefined genetic modification as changing the genes in any way, including selective breeding, including just choosing a hearty ear of corn with another one that has high yield to try and create that or, you know, how they create beer and stuff. So they purposely confused it by saying that we’ve been genetically modifying things for hundreds of years.
Now, obviously, we’ve been changing the genetic makeup through selective breeding for hundreds of years, but we haven’t gone in a laboratory and isolated the individual genes, multiplied them by the millions, coated them into little particles of tungsten or gold, put them in a gun and shoot that gun into a plate of corn cells, or soybean cells, and then clone those cells into a plant. That’s the process of genetic engineering, either using a gene gun, or bacterial infection, and then cloning, and that’s not something we’ve been doing for hundreds of years. But they tried to give that impression, and then they say that GMOs are just an extension of natural breeding. And they even go so far as to say it’s more precise and more predictable even though they do not acknowledge that the process of genetic engineering creates massive collateral damage. That genes are turned on accidentally, genes are switched off. Proteins are changed in the levels of expression throughout the DNA.
So for example, in Monsanto’s Roundup Ready corn, they found over 200 proteins and metabolites were different compared to the exact same corn that hadn’t been genetically engineered. Now, is this a problem? Well, two of those compounds that were different are called, and I think by the name, it sort of tells you a little bit about them, putrescine and cadaverine. I love those names. Putrescine and cadaverine are largely responsible for the foul odor of rotting dead bodies, and also bad breath and they’re in higher amounts in Monsanto’s corn. Now that’s disgusting, but it’s also linked to higher amounts of histamine meaning it can make allergic reactions worse and it also, when combined with other aspects of our food, it is linked to cancer.
Now, there’s another Bt toxin, the insecticide creating corn from Monsanto, there’s a gene in there that’s normally silent, it never expresses in corn. It was accidentally switched on from the process of genetic engineering, and it produces something called Gamazine which is a known allergen. So if your child has allergic reactions, you have no idea if the corn you’re eating is genetically modified or not, and whether your child is allergic to Gamazine. And it may be that the eruption of certain allergies in the United States is related to that, but it also could be related to the fact that in genetically modified soy, there’s a known allergen there that’s as much as six times higher compared to non-GMO soy. And we also know that even the Bt toxin, which is the insect killer inside the corn, that provokes allergic reactions, not just to itself, but sensitizes the body to be sensitive to other formerly harmless compounds. So the allergies could be going up because of those things or the leaky gut. There’s so many things that could tie back to the GMOs and the Roundup.
And yes, to answer your question ultimately, it’s entirely different. In fact, the FDA scientists in their memos that were made public due to a lawsuit, they actually had a committee that was supposed to inform the policy that the FDA was going to create on GMOs and they said GMOs were different and dangerous, and that they could create allergens or toxins or new diseases or nutritional problems. And they needed to have in-depth testing, including human toxicological testing. This was the scientist at the FDA in 1991 when they were asked to create the policy, but Monsanto had convinced the White House that GMOs were going to promote U.S. exports, and that they were all sorts of greatness. And so the White House instructed the FDA to promote GMOs, and then the FDA created a new position for Monsanto’s attorney, Michael Taylor, to be in charge of the policies of the FDA. So he was in charge of the GMO policy, and the policy falsely claimed that the agency wasn’t aware of any information showing that GMOs were different or dangerous, therefore, not a single safety study was needed by the FDA. In fact, companies like Monsanto could determine on their own if their GMOs were safe and put them on the market without even informing the FDA.
And after making that policy, Michael Taylor then returned, becoming an employee of Monsanto. And then later, under the Obama administration, came back to the FDA as the U.S. Foods are. So people credit him with possibly creating more danger and damage in the food supply than anyone in human history.
Katie: Wow. And we’re not talking about an insignificant amount of exposure either, because you mentioned specifically corn, wheat, and soybeans and I also used to live in the Midwest and I saw how much these foods were sprayed with Roundup. But statistically, those three foods make up a large part of the diet for a lot of Americans. So we’re not talking about occasional or small amounts of exposure. These are things that a lot of people are probably being exposed to every single day in significant amounts. And with everything you mentioned on the biological side and how it might impact the body, it seems logical to me that this would be especially dangerous. The smaller the person, the more dangerous it could be, especially children who are still…their genes are multiplying rapidly and their guts are still developing. But what does the data say as far as is this actually more dangerous for children?
Jeffrey: Well, first of all, the good news and bad news of what you said is the good news is that wheat is not genetically engineered. It’s been selectively bred to have, in the United States, higher gluten content, things like that. But the bad news is that wheat is typically sprayed with Roundup before harvest, and three to five days before harvest. And so it’s one of the higher foods in terms of glyphosate residues. In other words, the amount of residues from being sprayed is very high in wheat. It’s also even higher in oats and higher sometimes in beans like navy beans and it’s high in hummus. So these are some of the things you need to look out for, but the soy and the corn are in fact genetically engineered and they are omnipresent in our food supply. The average American eats more than their body weight in GMOs each year.
Now, as far as the younger of us, the children, they are definitely more susceptible. In my book, “Genetic Roulette,” I have a whole section explaining why children are more susceptible. First of all, children have allergies more. And so the allergic potential of GMOs is very serious for them. Toxins affect children more, and they’re certainly the toxins, the Bt toxin, the Roundup toxin, the toxins that might be created from the process of genetic engineering. Children use food differently. They use it to build the system. So if there’s a nutrient problem with the food, then it gets structured into the system and there’s things called anti-nutrients, so like the soy, for example. Monsanto soy has the doubling of what’s called the soy lecithin which blocks the absorption of certain nutrients. And so the nutritional deficiencies also are pretty serious. I know one agronomist walked the fields, there were two fields next to each other, GM and non-GM corn and he walked in a certain number of rows, a certain number of columns of rows and pulled corn samples and had them tested and found that the difference in the nutrients was dramatic, sometimes 10 times or 20 times less in the GM side. There was also a very high level of formaldehyde in the corn that was genetically engineered, and that could be in part because Roundup breaks down to formaldehyde and also the process of genetic engineering might create formaldehyde also according to some work out of MIT.
So the impact on children is far greater. Furthermore, the blood/brain barrier is not well developed, so things can get into the brain. In fact, in Canada, they found Bt toxin, that insecticidal toxin that pokes holes in human cells, they found it in the blood of 93% of pregnant women tested and in 80% of their unborn fetuses. Now, that means that this whole poking toxin might end up in the brains of the unborn in this generation and that might relate to cognitive problems. We don’t know, no one has done the research. We also know that when the mother is eating products with Roundup, it affects her microbiome, and the child gets inoculated with the mother’s microbiome in the birth canal. So even at that point, there’s some issue from what the mother has already eaten. And then of course, the breast milk may have residues from the GMOs and then there’s the building up of the microbiome, you want that in an antibiotic free environment. And if there’s glyphosate residues in the food, etc., then you’re exposing the child at a very delicate formative time to elements that shouldn’t be in there. And Roundup is one of the two major herbicides sprayed on Roundup Ready crops, the other one’s called glufosinate. So there’s glyphosate and glufosinate. And the glufosinate is produced by Bayer which bought Monsanto, both are linked to birth defects. That during the time that the child is in the womb and developing, that the fetus is in the womb, there are certain windows where if certain toxins come in, it can affect different systems.
And so in Argentina, they were spraying Roundup by plane over these vast fields of soybeans that were genetically engineered, and it was unfortunately landing on the people living in the villages adjacent to the field. And not only did the cancer rate go up 300%, but the birth defect rate skyrocketed. For the larger region, it was up 400%. But in some small regions, it was up over 70 times. And there was a guy named Andrés Carrasco, who was a scientist who was hearing about it from these peasant farmers in these communities of this disastrous rise in birth defects. And so he tested Roundup on chicken embryos and frog embryos and found the exact same birth defects and actually found how it works, exactly what it does, and why these things are related to birth defects. So I would say not just for children, but even in the gestation. So in our film, we have a pediatrician named Michelle Perro who saw all these changes in kids when GMOs were introduced and figured it out that GMOs and Roundup were a major driver and has seen dramatic turnarounds in the kids that she’s worked with, and even the whole family. When she puts the family on an organic diet because the kid is suffering, the entire family gets better. So even though she’s not treating the family, she’s not giving them any other treatments, but the father’s kidney condition gets better, the sister’s ADD gets better, the mother’s weight changes. And so she’s aware of these things, and she’s aware of…she says that parents should go completely organic at least two weeks before they even try and conceive because there’s evidence that shows it cleans out some of these chemicals in the body in just two weeks, and of course, remaining organic through the time of pregnancy is important.
Katie: Yeah, and on that note too, I know that like organic food is more expensive and there are ways to mitigate that but other than that, to me, this is like a very low risk proposition. We know that there’s a higher nutrient content, for instance, in organic food. There’s not really a risk to eating organic food.
Jeffrey: And the thing is we have a program. Again, I want to say that there’s…this happens to be a very well-timed podcast because “Secret Ingredients” is available for free for a week. I believe there’s a link on your site for that. And we have a program to help people figure out how to afford organic and in some cases, they will actually save money when they learn how to cook. I have a program where I interviewed someone, I think he has 11 kids. He finds that he spends…even when he just has seven at home, or just seven, they spend an average of $1.63 per person per meal eating organic because of the way they buy. In the film, Kathleen DiChiara who is a major person in our film “Secret Ingredients” say she can feed a family of five an all organic meal for under 20 bucks and her story is amazing. Her family had 21 chronic conditions between the five of them. She was paralyzed and had chronic pain and all sorts of issues with disability. Her oldest son was diagnosed with autism. Her middle son had respiratory issues and mood disorders and digestive problems. The youngest son was covered in eczema. Her husband had a breast tumor. She ended up learning about food and experimenting on the family and systematically taking things out. Gluten, processed dairy, commercial dairy, dyes, preservatives, and things were getting better but they were still managing 21 issues.
Once she switched to organic to get rid of the GMOs and the Roundup, basically, everything went away and the child is no longer diagnosed on the spectrum and the others…you know, she just went over the details. This was one of the different families that we talk about in the film. And the doctors, when they speak on the film, they basically concur that these are not one-offs. These are not special cases that were of exceptions. That in their practice, a significant percentage of their own patients have these type of results when they switch their diets. And I’m always asking doctors, “Well, what about when you just switch the diet…?” And sometimes it’s hard because when someone has a serious issue, you don’t just switch the diet. But I remember I was interviewing Barbara Royal, Oprah Winfrey’s veterinarian on a live Facebook on our page. And she discovered also quite slowly and skeptically that the food was driving all these new diseases that she hadn’t seen in her practice before GMOs were introduced. So she decided to change the diet of the dogs and cats before doing any other procedure, and that became her go-to. Someone would come in with one of numerous diseases. Sometimes the animal would have many of them and she’d say, “Okay, we’re going to change your diet and come back in a few weeks.” And she said, “At that point, 80% of the animals turned around, 40% or so maybe completely healed, and other 40% managed, and only the 20% needed…you know, were not responding like that.”
So that gives you an idea of the diet alone for the pets that eat the byproducts of the human food supply. And I was speaking to a veterinarian, Michael Fox, who writes “The Animal Doctor” syndicated column with 25 to 30 million readers for many decades. He’s written 40 books. And so when he was doing that, that the time when GMOs were introduced, all of a sudden, he got letter after letter from pet owners that’s saying, “My dog has now intractable diarrhea or itching or this thing,” and he’d send them all letters back and saying, “Get them off the GMOs.” He said he has a file drawer filled with letters saying, “Thank you, it worked.”
So with animals, it’s easy to do that test because they often have one brand and they get…if you change it, it’s an easy experiment. Now, unfortunately, at our Pets and GMOs site, you can see that a lot of dog brands and cat brands have high levels of Roundup. In fact, dog urine has 40 times the amount of glyphosate compared to human urine, and dogs have the highest cancer rate of any mammal. One out of every 1.6 dogs is the rate that we are told. And we believe and that’s only happened since the time when GMOs and Roundup were introduced, and we think that it’s related, and we think that the high amount of glyphosate in dogs’ urine and also in the pet food is one of the main drivers.
So, you know, when you put it all together, from where I sit, the cost of eating organic is way less than the cost of not eating organic. And I’ll tell you one fantastic statistic that I just heard. That since the 1940s, there was a 61% reduction of the amount of money per income that an American spends on food, but a 61% increase on the amount of healthcare. So it was swapped out. So when I think about spending money on food, I combine my health budget and I also combine my philanthropy budget because some people will give money at the end of the year to a particular cause. Here you’re contributing to a healthier world, to healthier farming, to biodiversity, to healthier planet every time you go shopping. And so I think of it, and then if you learn the tricks that we’re going to be teaching people about how to eat on a budget, then it’s a no brainer.
Katie: Yeah, absolutely.
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Katie: And I’m curious that the policies related to GMOs and organic foods are different in other countries because I’ve heard from countless people who said that they can’t tolerate certain foods in the U.S. but in Europe, for instance, they are totally fine with those foods or they have allergic symptoms here, but when they’ve traveled the world with their kids, all the eczema went away and the allergies went away. So are there different policies in other places that are contributing to that?
Jeffrey: Absolutely. In fact, Europe is the big testing ground for that. We’ve heard that over and over again for decades. What happened was in 1998, a scientist named Dr. Arpad Pusztai had discovered that the process of genetic engineering, the generic process, irrespective of what gene you insert, but the generic process of inserting the gene and cloning the crop resulted in massive damage to his rats, and they had multiple…they had potentially precancerous cell growth in the digestive tract, smaller brains, livers and testicles, partial atrophy of a liver, damaged immune system in just 10 days. And he was invited to speak on a TV show in the UK. He actually had been given $3 million by the UK government to figure out how to test for the safety of GMOs because his protocols were going to be adopted by the European regulations. He was the top scientist in the world in his field, working at the top research institute in the UK. And he discovered that GMOs were inherently dangerous. He went on TV, gave his two-and-a-half-minute interview, and there was a huge flurry of headlines because here was one of the top scientists in the world talking about GMOs as problems.
Well, we’re told that Monsanto called the White House and the Clinton White House called the Tony Blair, Prime Minister’s office. The Prime Minister’s office called the director of Arpad Pusztai’s institute, and the next day, Arpad Pusztai was fired after 35 years and silenced with threats of a lawsuit. There was a campaign to basically discredit him and his research. They lied about what he had discovered, and for seven months, he was unable to speak and the GMOs were protected. But after seven months, by an order of Parliament, he was invited to speak. His gag order was lifted. And I open this in my book, “Seeds of Deception,” about how his wife answered the door and there were 30 reporters in front of her, were running from their cars. They had just gotten through a press conference at his old Institute, and they said that his restrictions to speaking had been lifted and they just left in a second and ran to this guy’s house and filed into his living room and was finally able to hear what he had to say.
Over 700 articles were written in the UK alone within a month. It was absolutely a firestorm of information that had resulted when the truth came out. And within 10 weeks, the tipping point of consumer rejection forced the food industry to respond. On April 27, 1999, Unilever said no more GMOs in their European brands. The next day, Nestlé’s, no more GMOs in the European brands. The next week, virtually everyone else said the same thing. But in the United States, none of this was being reported. Project Censored described this as one of the 10 most underreported events of the year, and the same companies that removed GMOs for the informed Europeans were feeding those GMOs to uninformed Americans.
So if you go to Europe, there’s very few direct GMOs in the food. They still use GMO animal feed, unfortunately, which carries serious risks, but that you won’t see genetically engineered soy, and the derivatives of soy or corn or the derivatives of corn. Their canola is different. So you don’t see that. So that’s one of the reasons why their food supply is quite different from ours. And I think it’s one of the reasons why some people will find that they can eat foods there and go symptom-free and the same foods in the United States will drive those symptoms back.
Katie: Wow. And when it comes to worldwide food supply, that’s another objection I hear quite often, is that we need GMOs in order to be able to feed everyone. Have you seen any data on this, and is that actually true? Do we need to be able to do like this GMO process in order to keep people from starving?
Jeffrey: I am so glad you asked that question, Katie. The biotech industry chipped in, in the late ’90s and early 2000s, $50 million a year for 5 years to convince skeptical Americans that GMOs would feed the world even though the world’s experts disagree. The United Nations and World Bank and others sponsored the most comprehensive evaluation of how to feed the world, engaging more than 400 scientists for several years. And their comprehensive report was looked at the whole world and every region concluded that GMOs have nothing to offer feeding the hungry world and eradicating poverty and creating sustainable agriculture. Nothing to offer.
It turns out that the average GMO does not even increase yield, although increasing yield alone is not the solution because we have more food per person than any time in human history, and yet a billion people go to bed hungry or malnourished. There’s a whole sociological and financial structure that is needed to feed the world, but GMOs do not even increase yield on average, whereas things like agroecology, which is like a Beyond Organic, that can double yields of staple foods in developing countries. There was a study of over 12 million farms that showed an increase using agroecology of 79% in the yield, but it’s more than that because the GMOs also destroy biodiversity. They tie up farmers so that they have to buy seeds each year and can’t save their own seeds. They introduce dangerous side effects into the population. I’ll give you one example that’s absolutely fearful and it’s illustrative of what we’re talking about.
It started with an interview I had with a former Monsanto scientist, and he acknowledged that his three colleagues who were doing tests on the genetically engineered bovine growth hormone drug from Monsanto, which is injected into cows to increase milk yield, that they tested the milk from those treated cows and they found so much of a cancer-promoting hormone in the milk that the three Monsanto scientists stopped drinking milk unless it was organic. One bought his own cow. The next thing he said was that another group of scientists discovered that rats had been damaged from eating Monsanto’s genetically engineered corn. Instead of withdrawing the corn, they redesigned and rewrote the study to hide the effects. Now, this was certainly not a surprise to me because I had caught them red-handed with the help of many scientists around the world rigging research and hiding effects, and more of that has come out in the recent lawsuits that are simply mind-boggling and outrageous that they can get away with things like that.
But the note from this particular scientist, it was kind of like a very serious warning. He said this, that the amount of corn being fed to the rats, which is typically up to 33% of the diet from Monsanto studies, was a fraction of what the corn being consumed by people in South Africa was, because in South Africa, corn is the staple just like rice in parts of Asia. Corn in South Africa is the staple, and three times a day or more. So it could be 70% of the caloric intake of a person. And in times of famine, it could be 90%. And the rats were being fed the corn at a lower level for just 90 days, but the people in Africa were doing it life-long.
So I was interviewing a veterinarian in the United States who happened to have a South African client and he had trouble with his cows, they were not producing milk well, and they were sick and had problems with their joints and the same problems with pigs and some acted like they had Alzheimer’s that were just completely like wandering around and they were aggressive and cannibalistic and biting the tails and ears of the others in their pens. And he was losing money. And the guy said, “Stop feeding them GMOs.” So he grew non-GMO corn, and then at a certain point, started feeding the animals non-GMO corn and all the problems went away. And then he ran out of the corn and switched it back to the corn that he bought from the marketplace, which was GM and the problems came back and then he grew enough corn for year-around feeding, and then the problems went away.
But here is the illustrative point. The people working on his farm ate the corn grown on the farm. So when he was growing the GM corn and the cows were sick and the pigs were sick, he had to hire 20% more workers because there was always 20% that were sick and couldn’t work. So instead of 50 workers, he had to hire 60. And there was severe flu and inflammatory symptoms and headaches. And he said, according to the veterinarian, once or twice a month, you’d be speaking to one employee, and he would notice that the eyes would not move together, but they would start to track separately. And invariably within one to two days, they would be dead. And he had no idea why. He had no idea what was killing his workers, or what was causing the sickness. But when he switched to non-GMO corn and started feeding it to the animals, miraculously, the workers stopped getting sick until he ran out and they had to get the corn from the marketplace. And again, when he got enough corn full time, it switched back. So these people were eating more GMO corn than anyone on the planet because they’re eating 100% GMO corn grown on the farm, not a mixture of GM and non-GM which they find in the marketplace. And they were eating it three times a day, and they were getting sick and dying.
Now we don’t have the scientific evidence that we’ve gone in there to conclude, but when you look at that, it should be caution enough to run away from this stuff and protect ourselves and protect our children. So no, I don’t think we want to use GMOs to feed the hungry world for many reasons. In fact, one is that, you know, in some countries, there’s not a safety net. So if the crop fails, then the farmer is in serious shape, and Monsanto blitzed India promising all sorts of riches for their genetically modified cotton. But it turns out that the cotton did not do well in rain fed areas. It often required irrigation and even then sometimes it would fail, fail to germinate because it would lead to root rot or leaf curl or milliard bug insect infestation, or poor quality. And all of these farmers that borrowed money from loan sharks, let’s just call them secondary vendors, where the interest rate was up to 7% a month, they’d borrow money for the more expensive seeds and the more expensive chemicals, and their yields were so bad in many cases they couldn’t even pay back their loans. And so these were people who were faced with giving up their land that had been in their family for generations. And the shame was so great that so many chose to commit suicide. And it is estimated that the numbers, and this is shocking, I’m going to warn you, the numbers associated with committing suicide after planting the genetically engineered cotton over the certain number of years, I think since about 2002 or 2003 was 250,000.
So no, we don’t want to feed GMOs into the developing countries, into the developed countries. We don’t want them anywhere right now. Maybe someday we can safely and predictably manipulate the DNA with good results that we can stand by, but right now, we’re babes in the woods and we’re feeding the products of this infant science to billions of people with tragic results.
Katie: Yeah, exactly. And I think that’s important to note too, because, like you mentioned, there are people who are underfed and actually starving, but there’s also a lot of people, including and especially in the U.S. who are simply malnourished, who have plenty of access to food, and they’re not getting enough nutrients. And you explained so well why GMOs are not only not the solution, but they’re actually part of that problem. But one thing that I think is really important to highlight is that throughout all of your responses today, there is this hope. Like a lot of problems in our world don’t seem easily reversible, but from what you’ve said, a lot of these things do resolve when you simply just remove the GMOs from the diet. Is that accurate to say?
Jeffrey: Oh, this is wonderful news. I’m so glad. I mean, we have to deliver the good news at this point, Katie. You know, I’ve given a thousand lectures and I never say, “Okay, there’s death, disease destruction, and despair. Goodbye.” No, I have to end with the great news and there’s great news on two fronts. First of all, switching to a non-GMO and I would say more often an organic diet does have sometimes I would say miraculous results, just incredible results. One doctor said to me, she puts everyone on a non-GMO and organic diet, and everyone gets better. And I said, “Everyone? What percentage?” She goes, “I told you everyone, 100%. All right, 98%.” I said, “How many people have you put on the diet?” And she said, “About 5,000.” Now, did they get 100% better? No, but it appears that these toxins are really consistently damaging, and some people who are so sensitive…in the film, I love this part, you’ll love this one.
I’ve interviewed three doctors or several doctors there who put patients on a healthy organic diet, and they’re on a healthy organic diet and their symptoms go away and their problems are resolved. And then they cheat, they backslide. Either for some cases, it’s a single meal, for some cases, it’s a vacation. For some cases, it’s just like they just stop, and one described as dietary fatigue because it was just for their kid with PANDAS and he was doing okay, so they stopped paying attention and then the problems come back. So sometimes, it is so clear for certain people that the results or the symptoms happen immediately after a single meal. I was told by one grandmother who was volunteering at a booth that I was speaking at a conference, she said, “I saw your earlier film.” This was “Genetic Roulette.” This was years ago, not as powerful as “Secret Ingredients.” She said, “I saw your film and immediately thought of my grandson where every day, the school calls and complains about his behavior and he has trouble breathing. So I told my son if there’s anything you do in this lifetime because I ask you, please watch this film.” I mean, talk about a sales line. He did. He watched the film and he came back to her and said, “Okay, let’s change his diet.” So they put the son on a non-GMO organic diet, and she told me they never call from school anymore, except in the days after the grandson eats at the other grandparent’s house. So for that particular child, it was very quick, but he also has no problem with the breathing anymore.
So, yes, the reversal, it all depends on your situation. You know, some people are very sensitive to it, some people are not, but I think everyone will improve, even if people don’t have symptoms, the energy level, the ability to have concentration and memory. These are things that we’ve discovered improve when the people change their diet, brain fog, things like that. Now, in the bigger picture, we have the story of Dr. Arpad Pusztai. You see, when his gag order was lifted and 700 articles were launched in the UK that drove the tipping point, it was three weeks…the gag order was actually lifted three weeks after a meeting in San Francisco of the biotech industry where Monsanto’s consultant described how they had worked with their client about GMOs. They first asked the executives at Monsanto to describe their ideal future and the executives described a world in which 100% of all commercial seeds in the world are genetically engineered and patented. And the consulting company worked backwards from that goal to create the strategy and tactics to achieve it. So they were planning to replace all commercial seeds in the world. And another white paper circulated that afternoon predicting a 95% replacement within just five years. Well, they had not anticipated the consumer backlash that came with exposing the truth that occurred in Europe.
And so three weeks later, when the gag order was lifted, it destroyed their market in Europe. They continue to sell the United States, but it gave us the formula. So our Institute for Responsible Technology used that formula and exposed the health dangers. And we pioneered the messaging about GMOs to basically awake people up to say, “No, we can’t trust the FDA because it was Monsanto’s attorney, former attorney that gave the policy. We can’t trust Monsanto because they rigged their research. We have to avoid GMOs.” And so we were educating people for more than a decade. And lo and behold, now 46% of Americans say they’re seeking non-GMO food. This is enough, more than enough to inspire the food companies to systematically eliminate GMOs from the food supply.
Now, if that were the end of the story, I would almost be declaring victory, but there’s another threat on the horizon that we need to be aware of. The same rhetoric that was used in the 1990s to usher in the now precise and safe and predictable gene technology of transferring genes between species, that same rhetoric is now being used to unfurl gene editing, which, for those that know, is extremely dangerous. It can cause all sorts of side effects, all sorts of unpredicted changes in the DNA. It also uses some of the same basic structures and techniques as the regular traditional GMOs, so it creates the same massive collateral damage by the end of the day, but they’re saying, “Oh, no, it is completely predictable, completely safe. We shouldn’t call it a GMO, we should call it breeding.”
Now, it is so cheap and so easy now for a laboratory to gene-edit a crop or a bacteria, or a virus, or an animal, or a human, that if this is allowed to go unchecked, then the goal, which Monsanto had to replace all of the commercial seeds, is actually expanded to everything with DNA. The biotech industry could replace nature in this generation. Now, if you release something into the environment and it cross-pollinates, it contaminates the gene pool or an animal that breeds. You end up with a situation where what we give to future generations looks nothing like what we have inherited, and it is irreversible once it’s released into the gene pool, we can reduce the amount for crops, for example, by now creating just non-GMO corn so that the percentage goes down, but when you start releasing genetically engineered mosquitoes and other insects which have been released or salmon, or other fish or livestock or bacteria which can spread everywhere, or algae or fungus, then you’re talking about releasing a technology whose primary most consistent result is surprise side effects. You multiply that by all the different species that they’re doing and all the interactions and we’re facing a threat which is potentially greater than anything else on earth. Because what we’re doing is we’re creating something…the only thing that lasts longer than the self-propagating pollution of the gene pool is extinction. We’re talking about our folly being inherited by all future generations, dealing with all the living beings that we’ve manipulated using this infant technology.
So right now, we are in great shape on the one hand in that in the United States, we’re driving out GMOs because of our choices. On the other hand, we have to be extra vigilant not to allow the industry to come in with genetically engineered substitutes and pretend that they’re not dangerous. So Australia, their government which has been in bed with the biotech industry for years, I’ve spoken to many of their regulators and upper government people. They actually said, “Okay, we’re going to do no regulation whatsoever on gene editing, you can introduce gene-edited animals or crops without even telling the government.” It’s the Wild West. The U.S. is pretty much in the same boat. Japan has said the same thing. China and Europe, however, have said, “No way. We’re going to regulate this like GMOs.” So it is a big split now. So at the same time that Australia has deregulated it, there’s groups of scientists on the other side of the planet that are compiling all of the unpredicted side effects. So we’re talking about a planetary level situation that we have to be paying attention to.
And so things like the impossible burger, which is this genetically engineered vegan substitute being touted and being tested by Burger King, that comes from genetically engineered process. There’s a soybean oil that comes from gene editing, and the company has the audacity to call it non-GMO because it uses gene editing instead of transferring genes to species. There’s so many things now that we have to stop because if we don’t, it tells the biotech industry, “Well, I guess consumer resistance is over and we can just introduce the gene-edited foods and fulfill not only Monsanto’s goals of replacing all of the seeds but the expanded goals of replacing nature.”
So the good news is we have tremendous power. The great news is that I’m talking to the most powerful people because the mothers are the most powerful to drive change. And the mothers have the most power to change the marketplace, and if we can change the marketplace, the demand level so that people are saying, “No, I don’t want GMOs. In fact, I want organic. I don’t want anything gene-edited,” the food industry does respond. We’ve seen it, it’s happening. We just need to be consistent and move it forward.
Katie: I absolutely echo your sentiment, I think, and I’ve said many times, I think parents are some of the most powerful people on the planet when it comes to these because not only are moms largely controlling the food budget in the U.S., but we’re also raising the next generation and we’re educating. And so, on that note, what can moms specifically do to help with this problem? And obviously, we have the most on the line. Our kids are the ones growing up in this world. And my kids have, for instance, watched your movies with me. And they’re part of growing a garden in our own yard and they understand and choose to eat organic without me even telling them to, but what can moms do? What can we do to actually stop this tide and reverse this shift like we’ve started doing, it sounds like already?
Jeffrey: You know, I could probably give a hundred different items and overwhelm. I want to give a simple one. It’s very easy, and it seems too easy, but I can explain why. I would say the number one thing to do is to watch the movie “Secret Ingredients.” And because that actually says it better than I have it, it actually is…it convinces nearly everyone to immediately change their diet. Now, what do you do after that? Well, obviously, you want to change the diet, but the second thing is share that. So during this free showing week, please watch it at the beginning. It will be available on May 15. Watch it immediately and then share that link with a thousand of your closest personal friends, post it on your social media accounts, share it by email, tell your friends, because what we want to do is to create an organic tidal wave based on informed consumers.
And people have tried boycotts in the past, doing things altruistically, but when you think about eating a genetically engineered corn chip that’s full of Roundup and Bt toxin and realize what it can do to yourself or to your children, it’s not a boycott, it’s self-preservation. So our message is that it is absolutely essential for our health to change our diet and to share it with others. Now, at the end of the film, people are invited to…we have a whole program to help people actually implement an organic diet over 90 days with all sorts of information and discounts on this and that so that actually becomes cheaper in that 90 days to eat organic and you learn how to cook and ferment and grow and sprout and you have deeper dives into everything we’ve talked about. And some people will want that and some people will find other ways to switch to organic, it’s fine, as long as people actually make that change.
And so my recommendation is watch the film, and then immediately afterwards, make the commitment and watch it with your family. I mean, I had a mom watch it with two teenagers. Now, for people in the audience that, say, have teenagers, there’s an interesting reaction to, “Oh, you can’t get teenagers to do anything.” Well, the two teenagers after watching the film got angry or upset at the mother for having allowed them to bring non-organic food in the house. They got upset at the mother and they all grabbed garbage bags and together emptied the cupboards of non-organic food. The family is in it together. I had one person watch one of my films and the 13-year old that watched it stopped drinking soda for years because it contains genetically engineered high fructose corn syrup. So watching it as a family would be my number one recommendation.
Now, there’s ways you can donate to the Institute for Responsible Technology so we can help get the word out. There’s ways that you can volunteer. We’re hoping to have people show the film in communities. You know, big showing events. We’d love to organize groups of people eating organic on a monthly basis. So we have now building community and network. We have people who like to write, we have ways to do that. We have separate programs for people who may want to stop the spraying of Roundup in their areas. We have a whole rounduprisks.com for that. We have a program for pet owners. Like I said, I could overwhelm people with a lot of choices, but for so many reasons. And this is why I put so much attention over four years creating the film with Amy Hart, who’s a brilliant filmmaker and then putting together this free showing event. This to me is the leverage point because if we do this right, if we can get enough views, my last film, when we had a free showing week, we had 1.2 million views in 7 days. I’d like this to be even more, and I’d like it to have repercussions and ripples so that millions of people rise up to be eating committed organic diets, committed organic for themselves and their families, and that’s where we have tremendous power.
Katie: And for you guys listening, everything that Jeffrey just mentioned, there will be links in the show notes at wellnessmama.fm. But for ease, I’m also going to create a short link which is wellnessmama.com/go/gmo, and that will take you to that free viewing period so you don’t miss out on that. But again, check out the show notes, wellnessmama.fm, for a full list and to find out about all those other resources. And my encouragement to all of you listening and especially for moms would be that this is something worth giving a try. Like I said, there’s very…there’s essentially no risk in eating organic food and making this switch, is something that unlike a lot of aspects of health, you don’t need a doctor or a specialist or any kind of crazy lab testing or expensive supplements, you can just make the switch and see what happens in your own family. And definitely, take the opportunity to watch this film while it’s free because that does not…this is a very short window and I want to make sure you guys don’t miss it, so we can get all of those links there. But Jeffrey, I know how busy you are. I know how much work you’re doing on this all the time. And I really appreciate you coming and speaking to us today and sharing so much wisdom.
Jeffrey: Thank you. And the thing is, you have been, you know, talking about health and wellness for so long and have so many devoted listeners. I’m really looking forward to hearing their comments to you when they switch to organic and what gets better. And of course, they can comment to us as well. It will be exciting. Perhaps we could revisit this at some time, just kind of like a victory lap, just sharing the stories of people and their kids, how dramatic the recoveries are. I think I’ve received more testimonials on this issue than perhaps anyone on the planet. So I’m loaded with a lot of pressure to get this out to a lot of people because I know how effective it is. But that’s something that I’m really hoping that if not us, then you can share with your listeners about the effectiveness on them that they’re sharing. And that way, it’ll encourage even more.
Katie: Absolutely. And even this week, as you guys watch and learn, tag me on social media and let me know what you think. I’m Wellness Mama on all the platforms. Tag me and let me know your experience. Let me know if you’re going to be on board. We can, you know, do this as a community as something…our family does eat organic, and I’d love to hear if you guys do as well. So reach out to me and tag me and I can retweet and reshare those things on Instagram, and help you guys spread the word of what you’re doing in your own lives. And like I said, Jeffrey, thank you so much for being here. I think we will have to do a round two one day. I anticipate many follow up questions that I know you can tackle but thank you for your time today so much.
Jeffrey: Thank you so much, Katie, and safe eating.
Katie: And thank you to all of you for listening and sharing your most valuable asset of your time with us today. We’re so grateful that you did and I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of “The Wellness Mama Podcast.”
If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.
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