Would You Eat Genetically Modified Food?

It’s most likely you do already, every day. Did you know when genetically engineering a food, scientists inject a bacteria to get the new gene into the food cells? Andrew Kimbrell, author of Your Right to Know and Director of The Center for Food Safety breaks it down:

The good news is that whole foods are still non-gmo (genetically modified organisms), that means your fruits and veggies, so eat more of them! The bad news is that four major crops, corn, soy, cotton and canola are mostly genetically engineered. This means most processed food since most processed food contains oils and (corn) syrup from these major crops. A recent study conducted by CBS and the New York Times found that :

Experts say that means if it comes in a can or a box and the label lists soybean oil or corn syrup as ingredients, odds are that it contains GMOs. Overall, 65 percent of all products in your local grocery store have DNA-altered ingredients…not that you’d know it by looking.

“The industry that makes genetically modified foods fought so hard to make sure that it wasn’t labeled,” nutritionist Marion Nestle tells Keteyian.

Nestle, a former FDA advisor, says this was a fight that boiled down to one basic fear.

“They didn’t want it labeled because they were terrified that if it were labeled, nobody would buy it.”

…87% of consumers would like GMO ingredients to be labeled, just as they are in Europe, Japan and Australia. Yet the U.S. Congress has never even held a vote on the issue, to give shoppers the opportunity to exercise their most basic right – to make a choice.

When I was first alerted to this study it was by an email forwarded to me from a colleague (click on the thumbnail to the left). The headline read, “More than half of Americans won’t buy GM foods.” When I found a copy of the article online the headline read, “Many Won’t Buy Genetically Modified Food.” Though article headlines are often changed by distributors, I’m curious which was the original title. To me, the emailed headline says much more and I see it as a disservice to the public that this wasn’t the massively distributed title. More than half of Americans?!? That’s a lot of us! That means we should, in theory, be able to get labeling legislation passed, no problem; but perhaps someone out there doesn’t want us to realize that. Maybe with more studies like this one, we will see more movement on the labeling front in the future.